Chapter One…
By the time I got astrology curious about my exact birth time, my mother was gone, my dad was clueless and the hospital, records included, had burned down. I’m content to know I’m a Taurus, born in spring 1950 in the deep south of Florida. My folks were first generation Americans; their people, the ones that survived the pogroms, immigrated from what is now Belarus around 1917. I wish I knew more about their ruptured experience. How they found the means and courage to make the journey, what it was like to find their footing during the first world war, the depression, the rampant anti-semitism, how they made the transition from shop-keeping to farming. What it meant on a cellular and soulful level to be utterly disconnected from the roots of their ancestry.
I only picked up the story line at the point Dad left the family chicken farm in New Jersey to enlist in the Navy for WW2, rear gunner in a bomber that created misery all over Europe. How Mom completed an ordained high school secretarial track and worked in a Manhattan office throughout the war. They were young and full of post-war hope and the G.I. bill put their feet in the door of a two bedroom home in Miami.
Memory can be downright devious, but my recall of this first home is uncommonly sharp. The backyard was encircled by a requisite white picket fence just the right height for leaping, superman cape affixed round my neck. One time those leaps landed me atop a red ant hill and I had to be tub-dunked for relief. Another time, family legend has it, I came running from my bedroom crying “Boy hit me.” Boy was my imaginary friend. These days this story actually feels more creepy chilling than laughable cute. My brother Lance was born two years after me. There are photos that document my mixed feelings about this intrusion. Billy and his horse lived next door and the somatic memory of riding that big beast lives on in my body. I still love horseback riding.
My grandpa, Mom’s papa, brought me a cloth body/rubber faced doll with matching stroller. I remember us walking the neighborhood together, my trusty dog Kelly at my side. We had one of the first televisions on the block. The unbridled anticipation I felt for the weekly Liberace show is still a felt sense I can touch. He was so black & white bejeweled and provided the score for unabashed twirling through the living room, an acutely embodied memory. Apparently I have always danced. We lived in Miami until I was four. After the age of four, geographical childhood stability was just not in the cards.
Dad was a self-taught engineer slowly working on his education and could not turn down opportunities as they arose. And so we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio for a job at General Electric. One apartment and then another where my monkey love for tree climbing bloomed and where I was allowed to solo walk to kindergarten, faithful Kelly by my side. I remember a steep hill strewn with daffodils, a giant light-filled classroom, winning the reading contest, proud recipient of an emerald green copy of Perry the Squirrel. When I was five, my sister Beverly joined the family.
And right around this time is when this young family’s existence started to veer south. My brother was a behavior hand full. There was a problem with my sister’s little feet and she had to wear a brace. She was slow developmentally, which I had no way of knowing but my little nervous system had no trouble picking up on the brewing household tension. I began to have painful stomach aches, was even hospitalized a couple times. No one understood why. Retrospect is amazing. My guess? This is when I swallowed whole the unspoken imperative to be the good girl, the oldest and most together, the one with no extraordinary needs.
But that undercurrent pressure aside, I loved my best friend across the hall, Leta. We swam in the backyard pool, dug holes to China and danced to anything Elvis Presley. The black and white TV, a little bigger now, mesmerized us with Romper Room, Howdy Doody, My Friend Flicka, the Mousketeers, Sky King and The Lone Ranger. After two years in Ohio we had to pack up and move again.
This move took us to Long Island, New York. I recall that Levittown house with it’s central fireplace and upstairs bedroom with the big bay window where chin on forearms I painstakingly counted stars each night. I remember the second grade classroom, clock on my right that I still reference to distinguish my right from my left. Sledding and roller skates, hula hoops and jump ropes. Climbing the big tree out front. I remember the day Mom told me that Beverly was mentally retarded and would need to go to a special school and this is why we were leaving again. Moving to California in the midst of my third grade year.
The three kids, Kelly and the caged parakeet shared the backseat of that giant white Oldsmobile 88. Since it was winter, we road tripped all the way through the southern states, bribed into good behavior by the promise of Disneyland. Right before we left Mom gave me a teensy red vinyl diary with a tiny silver key. My life long passion for writing was ignited right here. I wrote in that journal on and off until I was seventeen and then one day, in a fit of shame, I threw it out . I’d give a thousand bucks for the magical opportunity to read that treasure now.
We arrived in California in February of 1958 and went to Disneyland on our first day in the Golden State. Back then the air was clean, the Pacific Ocean was on call and the valley was filled the miracle of orange groves. We settled in the first of three homes in the San Fernando Valley. I was eight years old.
❤️Bella