California Dreaming

When I was three my family left New York for Santa Barbara, California. That lovely city was our first stop on what proved to be the continuation of our highly mobile lifestyle.

On the plane I looked out the window of the prop jet and marveled at the fluffy white luminous clouds. But my pleasure was cut short with the discovery that Mommy gave Socko my sock monkey away. Moving a three year old without her transitional object was cruel, I thought (and think). It was one of the few times I became angry at my mother until my teen years.

Santa Barbara was not the sprawling place it later became. UCSB was just being built. We loved to explore the beautiful Spanish-style downtown and eat at a restaurant in a courtyard of a mall. Spanish music played and performers danced and sang in their colorful costumes.

We spent a lot of days on the wide white sand beaches and walking along the promenade lined with towering palm trees. In the 1950s and into the 1970s or 80s beaches were still havens for beachcombers and great for little kids. Long strips of slippery kelp littered the sand with their large bulbous brown floats. Sand dollars dotted the shore. We collected pocketsful of shells of all kinds. I especially loved the tiny coiled shells of hermit crabs, and the beautiful, wave-polished agate and other rocks, even glass no longer sharp, but rounded and smooth.

Our Santa Barbara home was a small cottage on the grounds of an old resort. The grounds, dotted with palm trees, spread out along the cliff over the beautiful Pacific.

Mom, who worked as a nurse, tried to enroll me in nursery school. Terrified, I screamed my head off, not my usual behavior, by any means. Instead, I was left in the care of my older sisters, Sylvia primarily. She was ten and had looked after me for a year already. Winnie at fourteen involved herself in other things.

My relationship with Sylvia was fraught with ambivalence on my part from the beginning. I resisted and resented her strictness, her insistence on afternoon naps, especially. Mom never raised her voice with me and rarely forced me to do things.

But Sylvia enjoyed taking care of me. She held school starting when I was three in the garage of a small house we lived in in Mountain View later in the year. She set up boxes for desks and wrote lessons on the chalkboard, and taught me the alphabet and numbers.

We lived in our first California cottage for only a short time before we moved to Solvang, a small and picturesque Danish town, with its windmills, streets of shops selling wooden shoes and other Danish souvenirs. The bakeries offered a wide array of yummy goods.

Sylvia and Winnie started school, only to be informed we were moving back to Santa Barbara after two weeks. Going back to their first school in Santa Barbara made for an embarrassing experience and once again the anguish of being the new girls.

Winnie never complained about our frequent moves. Maybe it came from being the eldest and the feeling of being the responsible one. Maybe her bonds with our parents were stronger than Sylvia's.

My clearest memory of Solvang is of coloring with my sisters in the evening while Mom cooked dinner. At a table in the kitchen I tried to emulate my sister's skills. Winnie, especially, combined beautiful colors and shaded her work to make it stand out.

Mountain View in Northern California was our next stop on our California journey. At that time the town was mainly orchards and smelled sweetly of apricots. The streets had no sidewalks. I remember toodling along with my family on our frequent walks.

Winnie did not fare very well in Mountain View. Once when she was up a ladder picking fruit from a tree an old man climbed up after her and tried to molest her. Traumatized, she ran home to report the event.

I don't know if my parents did anything to chide the man. In those days not much was done about child molestation.

On another day she pulled me in a homemade wagon made from a wooden crate and a metal pipe for the handle. She ran along pulling me but needed to stop suddenly. The sharp connection attaching the handle jabbed into her heel and severed her Achilles tendon.

Dad got uncharacteristically angry and punitive with me one day when I inadvertently got in Winnie's way as she navigated the hall on her crutches. He put me over his knee and spanked me for the one and only time. "Stop crying!' he said. "How can I when you are spanking me?" I replied. I was pretty precocious.

From Mountain View we headed to Sacramento. The small apartment we found was in a modest Mexican neighborhood near downtown. The two things I remember about living there are my mother's ironing in the tiny hallway, the odor of the hot iron on cotton filling the air, and starting Kindergarten.

Other children were few and far between before that, partly because of our moving; also because Mom worked, unlike most other mothers in the 1950s. This meant she was too busy to hang around with other mothers while they watched their kids.

School terrified me. I felt confused and lonely. On the playground I stood by the fence watching the other children play, too shy to join in. My teacher must have been nurturing and kind, as Kindergarten teachers tend to be, but I had little experience of grown ups, too. However she was, I was not comforted.

We weren't in Sacramento long. Dad decided to move us to Davis, a small university town then surrounded by fields of crops and cows. I remember the smell of freshness and manure as we drove by.

We moved into a small house on a quiet street. Enrolled in my new Kindergarten, I felt a little more comfortable, but not much. In the afternoon before Mom went to work, I tap danced to Mr. Tippy Tap Toes on the wood floor after Mom pulled back the carpet. I also loved the only other record I had -- the story of a dog that flew with his long ears.

My parents continued their habit of taking me on long walks. One evening as we walked along railroad tracks I swallowed the nickel I played with in my mouth. Eew! How unsanitary!

I ran to my parents in a panic. What would happen to me, I wondered. Mom explained it would pass through my digestive system and come out in my bowel movement. Another eew!

Mom was quite intrusive when it came to bowel movements. When mine weren't frequent enough for her she gave me nasty enemas. They caused me to feel so out of control and were not pleasant to have, either.

The next time I was ready to have one Mom came to supervise. She actually fished my poop out of the toilet, opened it up, and retrieved the nickel. Maybe her aim was to give me a lesson in bodily functions, I don't know. She was big on educating me in health and physiology.

This served me well when I started college. Not wanting to take the required health class I took an exam to waive it. When I was the one of only three students who passed the exam, the faculty asked me if my mother was a nurse. They said an interesting thing -- that nurses' children were the ones who passed; doctors' children did not.

My Kindergarten experience proved to be traumatic the day the class went to the Barnum and Bailey circus. While seated in the bleachers children passed their money to the teacher who bought treats for them. My parents had not given me any money, and this fact caused me to feel confused and abandoned.

Were I the teacher, I would have bought me something, anyway. I had no such luck.

Before the end of school we moved again, this time to Berkeley. We lived in a large and beautiful house on a hill in a fancy neighborhood. It was the home of a professor at UC Berkeley, who rented us the house during his sabbatical.

We had a view of the San Francisco Bay from the picture windows in the living room, a grand piano, a well-landscaped yard, and a maid. I enjoyed tossing laundry down the chute and finding it a pile on the basement floor. We also had a dumb waiter to take food from the kitchen to the second floor.

I developed a deep attachment to Bess, a heavy black woman who was kind to me. She gave me the kind of attention I craved that my mother was often too busy to give me.

We had our first family dog there, too. He was a rambunctious spotted mutt full of personality. I loved to watch him romp all over the place.

In the yard were pussy willow trees. I was very fond of their super soft catkins of white, which I caressed and rubbed along my cheeks.

The yard next to the house with filled with a groundcover with fragrant, sweet-tasting white flowers. I stepped through them as I walked to the birthday party of one of the kids from Kindergarten.

Sadly, my shyness and discomfort around other children remained. I found the party overwhelming, especially the way the boys romped around and shouted.

Kindergarten in Berkeley proved no easier than the ones before. The school was a short walk from our house, which I liked. But, I had no social skills to speak of and felt intimidated and unsure of myself. I longed to play in the kitchen, like the boys and girls alike, but instead hung back.

One day I played in the yard and when I came inside sat on the piano bench to play chopsticks with Sylvia. She patted me on the back to praise me for something I played. A sharp pain resulted and I startled her with my screaming. A bee had flown up my dress, so when she patted my back it stung me.

After just a few months the professor returned and we moved again, this time to a house perched on a steep slope in the Oakland Hills. Our stay there turned out to be short-lived, too, because the houses around us started sliding down the mountain and Dad was afraid our would be next.

That was not a happy place for me. My bed was on the lower level, downstairs from everyone else. Strange place to put a five-year-old, I think. It was cold, with a linoleum floor and a glass door leading outside. In the bathtub were huge spiders that my parents refused to kill because they said they were good to have because they kill other bugs. True, but what five-year-old wants to put up with them for that reason?

At dinner Dad and I played a game in which I put my hand flat on the table, he put his hand on mine, I slipped my hand out and slapped it down on his, and so one. That was the one and only game my father ever played with me.

My job in that house was to wash the picture window in the living room. I used a kind of cleaner that was rubbed on, and as it dried it formed a white coating. Then I rubbed it off, making circles as I went. I enjoyed that job.

I give my parents credit for always making me feel good about the jobs I did for them. They hardly asked me to do any, but as I got older I took many on by myself. When I was twelve I started doing my own laundry. Not initially from the goodness of my heart, but because one day I could find no clean underwear as I got dressed for school. Later I did my parents' laundry, as well.

The summer I graduated from high school I worked as a motel maid in a Best Western in San Simeon. Man, did we work hard! I developed a taste for exceedingly clean bathrooms, and began my lifelong fastidiousness when it comes to cleaning my bathrooms and kitchens.

Several years ago my friend finally told me it bothered her when I came to visit and cleaned her kitchen to the max! It bothered me that she had a dirty stove, and that the area around her sink never seemed to be cleaned. I had been insensitive, and stopped my cleaning after that.

Mom was always too busy to do much housework, so our houses were usually messy. Clean, but messy. Not grossly messy, like houses can be, but with books, magazines like Scientific American and National Geographic, souvenirs from Dad's travels, family heirlooms, and artwork arranged around the rooms.

When we lived in the Oakland Hills I attended first grade at a big brick elementary school in Berkeley. Still bashful and intimidated, I wet my red corduroy pants one day because I was too shy to tell my teacher I had to go. My hesitancy was not helped by her getting mad at me for getting metal shards on magnets we were supposed to keep on the other side of our papers.

I hadn't yet begun to do well in school. Reading was difficult for me at first, for example. So, my teachers felt little for me, or so it seemed. I was simply the shy little girl of average IQ.

Here I will end this post and will continue with other events and places.