Disney: Not Just Mickey

It's amazing how much of my life was influenced by Disney. I grew up with the gorgeous cartoons and believed all the stories that he told . . . but I want to see if I can remember enough details to make sense of it all.

 

The first Disney feature I remember is actually The Mickey Mouse Club. I must have started watching before I started school, because I remember tidbits of the show and where I was sitting. I was in the parlor of our apartment on Broadway, and I think I was three when we moved. I don't remember much, but it's enough for me to know that's when "it" started. By the time we moved to Woodlawn Street (where I had the tire swing in the backyard and met my best friend, Therese), I knew enough about the MM Club to be able to name all the Mouseketeers. Annette was my favorite, and I am sure I wasn't alone. In fact, when I met a girl named Annette in grammar school, I was sure she had to be related to Annette Funicello from the Mouseketeers. She even looked like her, except that her dark hair bounced in sausage curls rather than the short coif Funicello had. I could sing the song (couldn't everybody?) and felt a certain nostalgia everytime they signed off with it because it meant the show was over for the day.

 

 

 

When we moved to Road B, I got my first taste of the nighttime Disney show, Walt Disney Presents, and I was hooked for life.

One of my fondest memories is being awakened by my mother after we had already gone to sleep. She would usher us downstairs, and we'd be treated to Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. It aired on Sunday night, so this was a BIG treat for me. My mother believe in early to bed/early to rise, and we kids were always the first ones in the neighborhood to be ushered in, bathed and pajama'd and sent to bed (there were times during the summer that the sun was still high in the sky! I was always jealous of the kids who got to play outside until it got dark). For Ma to wake us up and allow us to watch television made me almost reverent. I remember sitting on the couch, my bathrobe wrapped tightly around my feet (Ma always kept the house ten degrees cooler than it should have been), engrossed in the show and afraid that if I moved or did so much as breathe loudly, this special gift would be taken away and I'd be sent back up to bed.

 

 

Donald Duck and Ludwig von Duck were early favorites of mine, but once the show started airing the color cartoons that I loved (like Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella ((Boy, did I want a fairy godmother to turn me into a princess!)) and Snow White), I wanted to make sure I took advantage of every Sunday. I made sure that by Sunday afternoon, I was on my best behavior, and sometimes I got myself so keyed up that I couldn't fall asleep. Of course, those were always the times that my parents decided we needed our rest. Determined to get my "fix," I crawled out of bed and sneaked to the top of the stairs, sitting quietly in the dark, trying to imagine what was on the television by the dialogue and noises that floated up the hallway. 

 

 

 

Sometimes I got caught, and if I did, I got a spanking and was put back into my bunkbed, crying. But as soon as my tears dried, I was back by the edge of the stairs, hoping that they'd realize how much we wanted to see the show and reconsider letting us watch.

 

I was so naiive back then that I thought the cheerful, moustached Walt Disney was related to another Walt -- Mr. Cronkite. After all, they both had moustaches, they kind of looked alike and they both worked in television. They must be brothers, right?

 

 

 

One Christmas, I received an album of Christmas music, and I must have driven my mother nuts playing it over and over again. I memorized all the words to "Someday My Prince will Come" and "When You Wish Upon a Star." One night in early winter, I was crossing the yard to see my new friend Patti, who was visiting her cousin in the apartment diagonally across from us, and it was so quiet and clear that the stars seemed close enough that I could reach out, grab a handful and put them in my pocket. It was one of the only times I remember the projects as being peaceful. I saw a few lights in windows, but all the doors were closed because it was a bit chilly, and I was the only one outside. I felt all alone and free, and hopeless romantic that I was even then, I started dancing around, arms flung, singing "When You Wish Upon a Star." It was probably good that all the doors and windows were closed, because I can't sing, but at that moment, for that split second in my childhood, I was that fairy princess who trilled like a lark in those Disney movies. It was probably one of the most happy times in my childhood, yet it only lasted less than a minute.

 

 

 

And even now, when Fantasia is on TV, I will watch it to see Magical Mickey and that dancing broom, the whales who fly out of the water, the way the spirits swirl to the sound of Night on Bald Mountain. It was another introduction to classical music, and probably the only one most children have, and who better to lead the orchestra than Mickey himself. It's funny, because when I got older and realized that film was created in the 1940s, I was amazed. Disney was a genius.

 

Disney affected me so much that I ended up in Disney World for my honeymoon. Even then, grown and much wiser, I felt like I'd walked into a fairytale when entering Cinderella's castle. And to see the incredibly ornate and electronic world Disney had created made me appreciate the man much more than I had during those early years when the Mouseketeers and Davy Crockett were the emblems of Disney's forays into television.

 

 

I think there are very few true geniuses in the past couple of decades -- in fact, I can probably count them all on one hand -- and probably each of the moviemakers I would add to that list can honestly say that Disney taught them some valuable lessons about imagination and the power of a good story. To this day, I would prefer going to the movies with a child and seeing animated brooms and flying whales than to see a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. 

 

Thanks, Mom and Dad, for waking us up.

Penny Candy

When we lived in the projects, there were no big malls anywhere close by, and the grocery stores weren't the superstores they are now.  We bought just what we needed that week, and sometimes supplemented our refrigerator on a daily basis.  To get anything for supper quickly, we simply walked to the corner store.  To me, that little store on the corner was open for the main purpose of selling us kids penny candy.

 

 

Though we were poor, my mother attempted to give us some kind of small allowance every week.  Before I reached fifth grade, it was usually between a nickel and a quarter a week.  And as soon as that hot little piece of silver landed in my hand, I sprinted to the corner store to fill up a tiny brown paper sack with a variety of penny candies.

 

I had several favorites, and occasionally, I still find a general store that has the old standards.  In fact, this Christmas, I found a small net bag of gold wrapped chocolates in the shape of different coins just like the ones I used to buy back in the early '60s at the little store on the corner of Road B and Ferry Street, across the street from Ski's Homemade Ice Cream.

 

For a nickel, I could get some strings of red licorice, a few sheets of sugar dots pasted on paper like the roll they put in adding machines, some of the chocolate coins I just mentioned, and a few hot balls that scorched your mouth and left your lips a bright red to rival any of out mothers' lipstick.  I'd make that candy last as long as possible because I knew I wouldn't get another nickel anytime soon.

 

During the summer, that nickel might be spent on a Popsickle or a Fudgesickle that would start melting as soon as we walked down the block back to where we lived.  My hand would be covered in grape Popsickle juice, and within a couple of minutes of standing in July's heat, it would be so sticky and smelly that it would take several washings to get it out of my skin.  (What did they put in those things anyway?  It was like dye!)

 

My mother also had special favorites from the store.  If she had an extra nickel, she would send me down there to get a large sour pickle for her from the big wooden barrel they kept at the end of the deli counter.  I'd walk in, letting the wooden screen door slam behind me, and ask whoever was minding the store to give me the biggest pickle from the barrel.  They wrapped it in waxed paper, yet the smell still rose from the paper, permeating the air around me like a cloud on my walk home.  My mother would eat it with relish (no pun intended), sucking in her cheeks and rolling her eyes with the sourness of it.  She loved those stupid pickles.  I have no idea how she could have eaten a whole one in one sitting, but she did.

 

My father, on the other hand, was a sweets man.  He would rather take us kids across the street to Ski's for an ice cream on the weekends when he was home from work.  He'd always get an ice cream sundae, but my favorite was their chocolate chip and if I could get it in a sugar cone, I thought I'd gone to heaven and was singing with the angels.  That place had the absolute best homemade ice cream, and they'd stuff their containers so that there was at least an inch more above the top of the container, then they'd cover it with waxed paper and jam the lid atop that.  It was like getting a fourth more than the container would hold.  I'm not sure how they made any profit.

 

When we moved to Walnut Street, there was a corner store diagonally across the street from our house called Foley's.  My biggest childhood fantasy came true when I had the chance to work there.  Now I was behind the long glass counter where all the candy was sold.  I kept those shelves neat with Milky Ways, Almond Bars, red and black licorice, boxes of Double Bubble bubble gum, jawbreakers, and Sugar Daddys.  I even got to use the slicing machine when people wanted sandwich meats.  The only problem was that there were many afternoons the store was quiet, and once I'd finished my homework, all those shelves of candy wove their hypnotic siren song.  I spent almost my whole paycheck on candy, ice cream, and sodas and probably gained about ten pounds.

 

By the time I graduated from high school, some of the corner stores in Everett were already closed, but the last time I visited, we actually stopped at one that had been open since I was a kid.  Today, it's more of a franchise than a family-owned business, and that makes me sad.  We used to know the people behind the counter at those neighborhood stores.  Now the small family businesses are gone, replaced by the sterile sameness of a chain store.  Those stores will never provide the memory of a slamming screen door, of a child filling a candy bag with all sorts of treasures, or of the refreshing chill of a glass Coca Cola bottle as you popped the top and took your first swig.  I never thought I'd become one of those people who think the old days were better than the now, but when it comes to corner stores, I can only say this:  I miss them, their intimacy,  their smells, and their personalities.  Whether it was a corner store near where I grew up in the projects or the one near my cousins' summer home where the floor was covered with sawdust and locals could sit on the porch with their Coke bottles, they were part of the neighborhood and a convenience of friendship more than a money-making proposition.  I think we should start a movement to restore small neighborhood businesses!

The Park Theater

Every Saturday afternoon from the time I was in third grade, a group of us went to the Saturday matinee at the Park Theater. Considered historic even then, the theater had opened in 1914. My father and mother told me stories about going to see live theater there, and even my grandmother had memories of vaudeville performances on that stage. Her sister-in-law, Gladys, had performed in some vaudeville shows, and I always imagined her as a Gypsy Rose Lee type of character, fish-net stockings, booming Ethel Merman-type voice, and a mind-your-own-business attitude. The theater still had the red velvet drapes and pull cords even after it had stopped hosting live shows and did nothing but movies.

 

 

During my grammar school years, I always got excited about going to the movies, largely because we'd all walk together from the projects to the theater, the farthest we were allowed to go on our own. Parents didn't chauffeur kids around then. We were actually able to do some exploring on our own. The Park was probably a mile from where we lived, and there were times during the winter that, by the time the show got out, it was dark on the way home. 

 

Another reason for the excitement was the prizes. During intermission, one of the ushers would come on stage and start pulling numbers from a spinning cage where all the movie ticket stubs had been stored. Your number was on your ticket -- and some were lucky enough to have a red stamped star on the back, which meant you were an instant winner. They'd spread the prizes out on stage, so we'd all ooh and aah over them. The prizes always included a bike -- I wanted the pink one with the long streamers floating from the handlebars -- dolls, stuffed animals, bats and balls, books, and basketballs. In the winter, they often added a sled or one of those "new" round silver disks that you could skim along the snow. Three or four lucky kids would win something each week. I was never one of them.

 

The show would start with a few cartoons, probably designed to get us to settle down before the matinee began. And the regular movie always had time for an intermission (just like the ones they showed at the drive-in theater that we went to with our parents on summer nights). I loved the animal movies, but the films I remember more than any others were the "different ones."

 

 

In 1960, I saw my first horror movie there. It was also the first 3-D movie I'd ever seen. And it scared the beejesus out of me. It was called "The Thirteen Ghosts" and starred a bunch of people who never made anything else. I can't remember the plot, but I do remember that every time one of the ghosts came out, you could see them with your 3-D glasses, but if you took them off, there was nothing there. That seemed magical to me, and most of the time the ghosts came on screen, I pulled my glasses off because it felt safer.

 

 

 

 

And then there were the Elvis Presley movies. It almost feels now like we saw one every other weekend during the 1960s, but that was impossible, especially since Elvis only made 2 or 3 movies a year. Still, I can see scenes from "Blue Hawaii," "Kissin' Cousins," "Viva Las Vegas," and many others in my mind, and I saw each of them at the Park Theater.

 

 

 

As I got older, I still went there on the weekends, and it became common to go there with my high school dates (mostly because we could sit in the back rows and make out). It was almost a rite of passage to be seen there on the weekends, and if I were with a girlfriend rather than a guy, we spent most of the movie craning our necks around to see who was in the back row making out with their date of the week. That ended up being gossip for the school cafeteria during the rest of the week.

 

 

The Park Theater ended up being demolished in the 1980s, and there's a high-rise apartment building there now. It's kind of sad that a place with so much history has disappeared, but I know there are many of us who treasure the memories still in that moving picture that plays in our brains.

 

 

The Barbie and Ken Years

Okay, so if my earliest years and earliest images of relationships were built by the connections I had with my parents and by watching them together, the more formative years were built by the images on TV and the stories I read -- and the dolls I played with . . . how sad.

 

Those TV families I mentioned earlier built the impression that we would all be wonderfully happy if the moms would stay home wearing shirtwaist dresses and crisply-starched aprons, their hair permanently in place (thanks to hairspray that we didn't know damaged the ozone layer), the breasts abnormally pointy (thanks to killer bras) and their feet jammed into high heels that definitely weren't meant to be worn while making dinner for a family of five. 

 

The stories we read during the 1950s and 60s were just as damaging, even though they were delivered under the guise of being fairy tales. Let's face it, Cinderella was a housewife, even though she never had an electric stove. She cleaned as many kitchens, swept as many floors, and did as many chores as those women we watched on TV (probably more). The only difference was that she was doing all those chores for women (her stepmother and stepsisters), while the TV housewives did their chores for husbands and children. Why was Cinderella's fate so drastically different? We all felt bad for her, but we didn't feel any compassion whatsoever for women (like my mother) who stayed home for their families day after day.  And look at who Cinderella got -- the perfect male. Good looking, rich, in a position of prominence in the town, and, of course, devastatingly, hopelessly in love with her.   Our mothers might have gotten decent men, but Prince Charming they were not!

 

Here's another fairytale maiden: Snow White -- rescued from death by a man's kiss. Another devastatingly beautiful, fine specimen of a man, who was going to rescue her from the most dysfunctional family ever: an evil stepmother that wanted to cut her heart out and seven of the weirdest little dudes in the history of fiction.

 

Then we have Sleeping Beauty. The poor girl just wants to close her eyes and forget it all, but again, the guy (yet another prince -- how many of them were there in the olden days anyway?) finds her in that dusty, cobwebbed castle, and kisses her, waking her up and sweeping her away from that horrible lifestyle.  (Men must love taking advantage of the women who are simply out of it.) And, again, another devastatingly handsome, wealthy, privileged guy carrying her away from her troubles.

 

All of these fairytale princesses were both beautiful and sweet and exceedingly happy to have their Prince Charmings,  a pretty solid basis for failure for any of us 'normal' women growing up in the innocent Fifties.

 

Why should it surprise me that we fell into the Barbie trap so completely?

 

Here comes the doll that all the little girls (who won't sprout breasts for at least another five years) beg for from their parents. An impossible figure: that waist was so tiny, she couldn't have hidden an extra spoonful of anything fattening, never mind breathe properly. Boobs so large for her figure that, in real life, she would have been stooped over with the additional weight. And those first Barbies didn't even have real hair!  Their molded upswept hair defied the worst tornadoes.  And those molded, made-up cat's eyes.  Do you think Elizabeth Taylor modelled for them?

 

I was probably 7 years old when my parents bought my first Barbie doll -- and it wasn't even the real deal. No Mattel Barbie for me. I got  an imitation of the original, and like any other kid influenced by commercials for the real deal, I was upset with my parents that they had given me a simple fake. Gotta give it to them -- this one really looked like an original. She had the same painted on cat's-eyes, the same molded hairstyle, the same impossibly out-of-proportion figure. But the fake had knife-sharp seams in her plastic legs and along her arms, as if she just came out of the mold, and she was physically lighter in weight than the real Barbie. Barbie had a rubbery heft to her that made it obvious she wouldn't wear out early. My doll was light and a bit on the brittle side, as if when I worked her legs and arms, they would simply break off if I moved them too quickly.

 

 

And she did break. By the end of the first week, the Fake Barbie's head loosened and popped off. My grandmother was mortified when I continued to play with the doll without a head. It was almost like the doll was human and my grandmother wanted to turn me in for beheading the poor thing. She did everything she could to fix my doll, including asking Grampie for help, but there was no way the head was going to stay on the doll.   So, I played with this big-boobed, tight-waisted doll that had three changes of clothes and tiny mule shoes that attached to her feet with a tiny plug.

 

By that time, my Fake Barbie and I had connected. I wanted to keep her. She had clothes I could change her into, legs and arms that still worked. Besides, I had no replacement. 

 

But within a week, Nana saw to it that I had a replacement (I really think I freaked her out by playing with a headless doll), and along with the Official Barbie, I received a Real Ken. But I kept the Fake Barbie, and when no one was looking, the Real Ken and the Fake Barbie (with or without the head) went on dates. I wanted to prove to myself that even a woman/doll with faults could still get the devastatingly handsome guy, but even I couldn't get that past the Fake Barbie. She knew the Truth. So did the Real Ken.

 

And, I think that after a while, the real me also knew the truth. Some men wanted to be there for me no matter what, while others couldn't have been bothered. One thing's for sure: I knew that the Fake Barbie's head was the most important part of her body because that's where her brain was. And even though she might not have the brain everyone thought she should, she was the person I counted on. Ironically, she ended up being more real -- faults and all.

TV -- The 'early' years!

I think everyone who grew up in the 50s/60s fondly remembers the television shows that shaped their lives.  I definitely remember the ones that shaped mine, and my very first memory of a TV show is a very young one because my family and I were still living on Broadway, and we moved from there when I was around 4 years old.  I distinctly remember the show "Rin Tin Tin," and it must have been something I regularly watched because we had a cocker spaniel type of dog at the time that we (I) named "Rinny" (after Rin Tin Tin, who was, ironically, a German Shepherd -- quite the opposite of my dog).  I can still feel the nobby fabric of the couch under my legs as we watched the black and white TV and can see the regal profile of Rin Tin Tin as he gazed down at whatever enemy he was fighting that week from his lookout point.

 

 

There were lots of animal shows back then that I fell in love with:  "Lassie," "My Friend Flicka," and later on, "Flipper" (which made me fall in love with dolphins).  Watching the gorgeous collies who played Lassie and seeing the connection Timmy and his favorite dog had made me want one of my own.  The closest I ever came was Buffy, a Sheltie with the same coloring as Lassie but nowhere near the size.  Unfortunately, her hair was too long for my mother (who had asthma and a lot of allergies) and Buffy was also quite ill with seizures.  We had to have her put to sleep before she reached her first birthday.  Of course, living in the city made pets like Flicka, a gorgeous black stallion, impossible to consider, and Flipper . . . well, that wasn't even a remote possibility.  But I did learn all about pets and the kinds of connections people could have with them, and eventually, I did have several animals that were incredible (but that's another story).

 

 

 

By the time we moved to the house with the swing, "International Showtime" was popular.  To me, it was like having a circus in your house once a week.  I watched the flying trapeze act with awe.  Little did I know it then, but I would develop a fear of heights that made the trapeze act even more awesome to me.  I have no idea to this day how someone can take such chances in midair.  And the show horses that ran in circles around the ring with gorgeously costumed women atop their muscular backs were one of my favorite parts of the show.  Don Ameche played the ringmaster on the show, and he was every inch the consummate showman:  handsome with black hair and a well-oiled moustache, a deep voice, and a gorgeous white smile.

 

 

Of course, there were also the shows that were either cartoons or with cartoon-type characters.  "Bozo," the clown with the white face and huge head of orange hair, invited kids out of the audience every day, and I wanted to be one of them.  "Captain Kangaroo" did the same thing, and he was much less scary than Bozo (though I'm sure there were quite a few stories floating around about his irritation with being unable to speak during that show.  And  "Howdy Doody" who was almost a puppetized version of Bozo, though on the quieter side.  "What time is it, kids?"  "It's Howdy Doody time"   Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!!!

 

 

 

Though my mother wouldn't let us sit in front of what she called "the boob tube" all day, the hours that I did spend in front of the television were my favorite time of the day.  I felt that Miss Jean of "Romper Room" really did see me in her mirror and that if I had seen the Cleaver, the Anderson or the Nelson families on the street, they would have called out my name to say hello.  I wanted to dance with Lawrence Welk and to meet Topo Gigio when he came on the Ed Sullivan Show.  Every show pulled on a different imaginary thread, and they were all connected to the little world that invented itself on a weekly basis inside the little box we called a TV.

 

It's funny.  We had only three television stations, but we found plenty to watch.  Now I have more than a hundred, and I'm not sure any of the programs are going to be as memorable as "Father Knows Best" or "I Love Lucy."

 

A Tough One to Write: Epilepsy

When I was in first grade, I was diagnosed with petit mal epilepsy.  I have no real idea what was said to my parents or how they were told to handle it.  I only know what it felt  like when an episode was about to come on, and I never quite understood what was happening.

 

The first time it happened, we were living on Woodlawn Street, and I was going to school.  I was in first grade.  Those were the days when kids lived in the same neighborhood where the school was located and no one thought much about a really young child walking to school alone.  It was safe.  We were even allowed to have adventures on our own.  No one worried about kids being abducted or sexually abused, though I'm sure it was going on (ironically, in churches, where we were supposed to be super safe!). 

 

As I was walking down the street that morning with my Roy Rogers/Dale Evans lunchbox and my shiny new black patent leather shoes (I always remember my shoes -- guess it's because I was always looking down), I saw what I thought was a monster in the window of the house at the bottom of Garland Street.  The face looked like one of those horrendous rubber masks, the kind that fits over your whole head and transforms you into the creature from the black lagoon or an exaaggerated version of a dead president.  I'm sure that the image of that monster was just symptomatic of the way the first epileptic episode came on, but throughout the rest of my life, I've had nightmares about that house and that face.

 

The next thing I remember is picking myself up off the sidewalk, feeling really shaky and unsure of where I was.  I stood there for a few moments, my lunchbox open on the ground, its ingredients spilled out, the sandwich my mother had made squished under the matching Rogers/Evans thermos.  I packed up the box, and not knowing what else to do, continued to school.

 

Now that I think about it as an adult, something must have happened that day at school to make my teacher suspect there was something wrong.  She notified my mother of my condition, and after that, there was a series of visits to the doctor, then to the hospital, and that went on for years.  Eventually, I ended up at the Children's Hospital in Boston with a specialist.  Though my mother told me how famous the doctor was, I had no idea who she was.  I'm sure my parents were much more impressed than I was that the woman putting wires into the tablespoon-sized wads of gunk she spread onto my scalp was Tenley Albright, the 1956 Olympic champion figure skater. 

 

Dr. Albright and I sat in her office many times throughout the next five or six years.  She asked me about my parents, made me draw pictures (and depending on how I felt that day, sometimes they were happy scenes and sometimes they were not), and gave me what felt like hundreds of EEGs.  Every time I had one, the gunk they attached the electrodes to was never completely washed out of my hair.  It would dry hard as cement and ended up taking chunks of my hair with it when my mother and I tried to pick it off my scalp.  I think that's why my hair went from being waist-length to chin-length by the time I was in fourth grade.

 

My mother described my episodes as "trance-like."  She said that I would stare straight ahead, unblinking, unseeing, for what seemed like five or ten minutes at a time.  I remember those times as being deep in thought, away from whatever was happening in front of me, and focused on something deep inside.  Sort of like daydreaming.  But there were other times that were more scary -- like the face in the window. 

 

When we lived in the projects, my bedroom was on the second floor, and one day I stood at the top of the stairs, ready to walk down, when one of the epileptic spells hit.  My mouth went dry, what felt like little electrical shocks ran through my body, then everything went black.  I had tumbled all the way down the stairs to the bottom, and when I focused again, all I could hear was my mother's voice.  I thought she was angry with me.  Her voice, loud and shrill, made me nervous.  Scared.  I tried to stand up, but my legs wouldn't support me.  Every time I opened my eyes, things would go black around the edges again, and my face felt prickly like I'd run into a rose bush.

 

That type of event happened at school several times, and I could always tell when it was going to occur.  Then Dr. Albright put me on some kind of medication (I later learned was Phenobarbital) and all I wanted to do was to sleep.  The teachers started complaining to my mother that I daydreamed all the time.  It became evident that when I started "daydreaming," it was best if I could get up and move around.  No one knew that I was smart enough to realize that it meant I could get away with doing things the other kids couldn't.  In the fifth grade, I had special "permission" to get up and leave the room whenever I felt like it.  I started venturing further and further from the classroom (our room was on the second floor -- the older you got, the higher you actually went in the building).  Soon, I found myself in the basement of the building where I often took violin lessons.  The basement was our bomb shelter, with a glossy, painted cement floor, and wide open rooms we used as a gym during rainy or snowy days, but during regular times, the place was empty. 

 

When I went down there, it was quiet, and my imagination roamed freely.  I danced among the stanchion poles that held up the rest of the school, pretending to be Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly.  I wanted to be a ballerina, wanted to waltz in one of those flowing ball gowns from the movies, and I could when I was down there.  No one bothered me.  No one even knew I was there.

 

But soon Mr. Sansone, my teacher, figured out that I was gone for longer and longer periods of time, and he must have said something to my mother because my permission to leave the classroom was curtailed.  About that time, the episodes of epilepsy were also waning.  Surprisingly, I grew out of the "disease" about the same time I "became a woman," and by the time I left the projects, I hadn't had an episode in quite a while.  I couldn't have been happier not to have the horrible EEG tests anymore, but when I became old enough to take my driver's license test, the disease reared its head again, and I had to go back to the doctor's to get ok'd to drive.

 

Many years later, I heard Caesar was an epileptic, as was Napolean.  Somehow, that made it cool.  But my younger cousin, Ernie, was also epileptic, and his grande mal seizures were much more scary than my petit mal ones.  The disease was no joke, I realized.  Nothing about it was cool.

 

Here's Where My Love of Reading Came From . . .

Once I learned how to read from those gigantic Dick and Jane books, there was no stopping me.  I began thinking of books as little treasures -- and I'm sure I had an odd expression on my face as I flipped the pages of those early books, practically fondling them like some kind of pervert.  I was hooked.

The first book I remember receiving as a gift was a Christmas present from my parents:  a large, thick treasury of Shirley Temple stories.  I read "Heidi" over and over again until I could practically recite it by heart, then "The Little Colonel," "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," and if I'm not mistaken, there was one more.  I can't think of it right now, but I knew them all.  That book stayed with me for many years until one of our dogs chewed the corner off.  Even then, I still zealously guarded it, but my mother (in her own zeal -- cleaning!) commandeered it and threw it away.  I was heartbroken.

That early gift made me realize there were lots of stories that I had yet to read, and when my mother took me to the little library on Union Street (hardly more than a storefront), I had found Nirvana.  I roamed the stacks, immersed in the infinite number of books available to me -- and the variety!  I could read about Annie Oakley or Abraham Lincoln, I could learn about Japan or the deepest parts of Africa.  I could go on sleuthing explorations with Nancy Drew or enjoy the family stories of The Bobbsey Twins.  I rampaged that place!  The maximum number of books you could take out on that cardboard library card the librarian stamped with the date (one stamp for every book) was ten, so that's how many I took out -- every seven days.  And, yes, I read every single one of them (some of them twice!).

I carried those ten books all the way home from the library, stopping at my grandmother's on the way in the hopes that my grandfather would be home to share some graham crackers and milk with me.  We'd sit at the pine table in their kitchen, silently (my grandfather didn't talk much), smashing the graham crackers in the bowl of milk and slurping them until the last crumbs were left at the bottom.  My grandfather had dark Clark-Gable-eyes and a pompadour of pure white, soft hair.  He was gruffly handsome, and one of my favorite photos of him is the doughboy shot of him in full uniform from World War I.  But when we sat at the kitchen table together, he was always wearing a white t-shirt, khakis and his brown leather slippers.

My grandmother had a birdhouse outside the kitchen window and while we were eating our graham cracker mush, my grandmother (Nana, I called her) would name the birds for me:  "That bright blue one is a blue jay.  See how pretty that one is?  That's the male.  That smaller, plainer one over there?  She's the mama.  She needs to be plainer so that she doesn't attract attention."  By the time I was 8, I knew all of the city birds that visited my grandmother's house, what they ate, and what their eggs looked like.

That's one lesson my Nana never learned:  how to be plain.  Instead, she was always taking instruction from the flowers she grew along the driveway coming into the house--gladiolii, tulips, jonquils, lilacs, roses.  I have pictures of her in a three-quarter length sleeve white coat with huge round buttons.  She wears elbow length black kid gloves and a matching hat.  She stands like a model, one foot in front of the other.  I thought she was elegant, slim, classic.  (She was responsible for my love of gardening.  I think she would have been thrilled if she had seen my climbing roses at my last house.)

I loved the library, but I also loved visiting my Nana's house on the way home.

My best friend, Therese, loved to read, too.  In fact, we still talk about books to this day, and one of my alltime favorite photographs is of the two of us -- lying on the front stoop of her house (not a porch, just a cement, two-step stoop with an iron railing) on a hot July day.  Both of us on our backs, books raised in front of our faces.  You can only see our legs, bent at the knobby knees, our Keds flat against the cement stoop.  We both are wearing cotton shorts and sleeveless tops because it's the middle of the summer, and I can bet you my last dime, that as soon as one of us finished what we were reading, we silently passed it to the other and we'd start at the beginning. 

My "rite of passage" occurred when I graduated from that little library on Union Street to the big library on Broadway -- the Shute Library, an impressive brick building with a tower in the middle that was the entrance to the upper level.  You had to walk up around two flights of stairs to get into the adult section.  The kids library was in the basement and the entrance was around the side.  I can still remember the first day I entered the adult part of the library and was told "shush."  I walked through the stacks as reverently as I had walked through the vestry of our church.  I was afraid to touch anything.

The first "adult" book I read was KON TIKI by Thor Heyerdahl.  It was a story about his journey around the world on a raft, complete with disasters, battles with sharks, horrible storms and near-death experiences -- as well as visits to completely exotic lands I had never heard of before.  I promised myself when I brought that book back to the library that someday I would have my own traveling adventures -- though I wasn't sure I wanted to have them on a raft.

Years later, I found a copy of that book at a yard sale and couldn't resist.  It was nowhere near as large as I remembered it, but the magical voyage was still as vivid.  It is still on my bookshelf, and if I have to sell every book in my collection, that will be the one that will go to my grave.  That and my white Bible that my mother gave me on my 13th birthday.  But that's another story.