Family Fun

As I’ve already alluded to, I had a large extended family. Not having any brothers or sisters of my own, my cousins were a big part of my childhood. I really had two sets of cousins. My first cousins were my "almost" siblings. I had six of them: Neal (who was one year older than me), Susie (who was one year younger), and their little brother, Rusty; and then there was the younger set—Jeff, Steven, and Julie. When we were little, it seemed like we did everything together.

Then there were my second cousins. Most of them were older than me, and although I loved them, they were too old for us to really be playmates. However, they were always there, at church on Sundays, at every birthday party, every Christmas, every Easter, and every summer at the bay. It was a large, happy, boisterous family, and I loved being part of it. In my large extended family, it didn’t matter that I was an only child. Acceptance as one of the crowd was an automatic given. We were all loved and we all belonged.

What I remember most about my large extended family is the time we all spent together at “the bay house.” It was actually more a collection of bay houses that various members of the family owned in a tiny community called San Leon on the edge of Galveston Bay. For years, the entire family came and went during the summer months, vacationing together and having a marvelous time.

The first bay house I remember was called “the Big House.” I’m not sure which family members actually owned the Big House, but everyone was welcomed to stay there. I think I was about four years old the first time I really remember it. It was a long wooden frame building painted white with big wooden shutters. What impressed me the most about the Big House was that it was really just one great big room with what seemed like dozens of beds! A long row of double beds in old iron bedsteads with bumpy chenille bedspreads stretched the entire length of one side of that building. On the opposite side of the house there was a separate bathroom and then an open kitchen area with a large picnic-style table. That was it. The big wooden shutters were propped open to catch the cooling bay side breezes, a couple of big ol’ box fans to stir the air at night, and Lord only knows how many people all crammed up in there sleeping together every night.

But the bay house was just for sleeping. During the day, we spent almost all of our time swimming and fishing and crabbing on the Big Pier. There were no beaches at San Leon. There was, instead, a tall bulkhead that ran along the water’s edge and protected the land and houses perched along its shores. In order to reach the water, families built long, long piers that stretched way out from the top of the bulkhead over the shallow waves to finally descend down to the water. At the end of the pier’s long narrow walkway, the structure expanded into a large covered rectangle, much like a big porch, that sat high up out of the water (and away from the waves) on pilings. But there was always a lower deck or dock that stretched across the front of the pier for access to boating and for swimming.

I don’t know how many people that big ol’ pier could hold at one time, but I remember there were many, many families that used it. My dad, along with all of the uncles, shared the maintenance of that pier and all of their families used it.

We used to spend hours down on that pier. All of us kids were water rats and we all loved to swim. Even before we knew how to swim, we were out there in the water, bobbing around with our “inner tubes” on. Usually the water wasn’t really very deep, maybe four feet. As we grew older, we could “touch bottom” easily and the inner tubes came off. We played in that salty water for hours at a time, jumping off the pier to see who could make the biggest splash, dunking each other under the water, playing water games like “Marco Polo” and no doubt screaming our heads off.

Up and down the long walkway, the adults, usually the moms, were all busy crabbing for blue crabs. When the crabbing was good, we kids were often recruited to man the nets. Crabbing was so much fun! We would tie a long string with a big safety-pin type hook on the end of it to the edge of the walkway, usually right next to a barnacle-encrusted piling. Raw pieces of bony chicken that the moms had saved, usually either a neck or a back, were securely threaded onto the hooks and lowered into the water. Then the fun began.

We would run back and forth, up and down the pier, checking the lines for crabs. When there was a crab pulling and gnawing on that raw piece of chicken, you could feel it! First you would holler for somebody to “bring the net!” and then you would begin to pull the line up out of the water, inch by inch, holding your breath lest the crab get off. When you got the crab just to the surface of the water, your partner with the net would scoop the crab up, bait and all. And then both of you would try frantically to extract the hook without extracting the angry snapping crab from the tangled up net! Finally, when the hook was free, the crab would be dumped into a large galvanized washtub with a bit of salt water in it to be cleaned later that evening.

I can remember times when we caught so many crabs that they would literally climb over the backs of each other and escape the tub! Much screaming and running would then occur to try and capture the snapping, sideways-crawling crustaceans before they reached the edge of the pier and tumbled back into the water.

Cleaning the crabs in the evening was always an exciting and slightly dangerous occupation, and one that we children loved to watch. One of the adults would slip on a thick glove and using an ice pick, would make a hasty stab into the tub of crabs, spearing one of them in the back. Those pinching claws would be snapping madly and we would all scream in appreciation of the danger. Once skewered on the end of the ice pick, the crab would be held upside down and the claws could be twisted off. Thus rendered basically harmless, the crab would be passed on to another cleaner, assembly-line style, and the whole process started again.

Many times we sat down to a fresh-caught dinner of fried fish and crabs. I can still taste those fried blue crabs! They were so good. My Mommaw would batter them in buttermilk and flour and fry them up for us for supper. We might also have french fries or onion rings, sliced cantaloupe, fresh sliced tomatoes or cucumbers, and gallons of cold, sweet tea. Those were wonderful family dinners.

And of course there were boats. The older cousins all loved to water ski. I can remember as a little girl, being squeezed into sharing a seat with one or two other smallish cousins, and zooming around the bay in a big old wooden motor boat, bouncing over the waves: ka-woom, ka-woom, ka-woom. We would be pulling my older cousins around on skis and thrilling to every minute of the exciting ride.

Or sometimes we went sailing. But I’m talking about the old-timey kind of sailboat, one that was nothing much more than a wooden board with a sail perched atop of it. They were forever “tumping” over and throwing all of the sailors into the drink! Then the sailors had to climb up onto the rudder board and heave and pull to get the thing turned upright again, always accompanied by lots of screams and shouts of encouragement from the onlookers on the pier.

And then there were the jelly fish! We had encounters with all kinds of jelly fish down there at the bay. Most of these were of a common variety that were always around. Half-spherical in shape and about the size of a sand dollar, some were clear and veined with an iridescent blue; they were the "good" jellyfish because they didn't sting. Others were also clear, but with sizzling hot red veins; they DID sting. However we did also get the occasional man-o-war or other exotic variety of jellyfish. I remember one time my mother and I walked down to the pier and the water was filled with round PINK jellyfish which were covered in black polka dots. There were hundreds of them floating on the surface of the water. Needless to say, we did not go swimming that day!

One of our favorite occupations while we were waiting for the requisite hour of rest after lunch to pass was to take the crab net and swish it through the water. Invariably we would pull it up with one or more blobs of jelly fish hanging from its net. Oh, the horrible tortures we devised for those jellyfish! Sometimes we would stuff them into empty Coke bottles. Sometime we would pretend to be frying eggs and pour salt all over them. Other times we would just squish them into unrecognizable blobs. But don't feel too sorry for the poor jellyfish. We were all stung by them countless times over the years. The poor jellyfish definitely had their revenge!

Fishing was another favorite pastime at the bay. We would cast our lines rigged with big bobbing corks out from the pier and there was no telling what we might pull in. Mostly we caught mullets (which we used for cut bait as they were no good to eat) and a peculiar kind of fish we called a "croaker", so named because of the croaking sound it made once out of the water. They were delicious fried. But there were also salt water catfish and trout. Sometimes we would hook an alligator gar! The gars always seemed to move up into the bay in the late summer. Ferocious-looking (but probably harmless) we wouldn't go swimming while the gars were in residence.

But mostly the philosophy at the bay house was “live and let live.” Nobody minded the screaming kids, the roaring motorboats or the blaring radios. Adults drank ice cold bottles of dark brown beer from old washtubs filled with cracked ice. Kids drank gallons of Kool-Aid and bottles of ice-cold Coke or 7-Up. Picnic-style lunches were served on the pier with plenty of peanut butter-and-jelly or bologna sandwiches and Lays potato chips and cold dill pickles. And kids were made to sit on the edge of the pier and wait, kicking their feet impatiently, for one hour to pass after eating before it was “safe” for them to go swimming again.

(It was widely believed at that time that if you went swimming right after you ate a meal, you could get the cramps and drown. Our mothers may have been slightly inebriated from all the beer and sun, but nobody went swimming until that hour was up!)

Eventually several of the families in the Big House broke off and bought their own bay houses. Our own family bought a small blue frame house just one street over from the Big House. It, too, was a one-room house, but this time only shared by my grandparents, and my immediate family. I think it was originally built by my Uncle Frank. We only had three double beds and a couple of pull-out sleeper sofas, but it was all ours. There was a private bathroom with a big clawfoot tub and a small kitchen area separated from the living area by a corner bar. No air-conditioning, of course, but lots of old-fashioned hand-crank windows and a couple of fans made it quite comfortable.

We also had our own pier at the end of our street. It wasn’t as large as the Big Pier, but it was great fun. We kept that bay house until I was a teenager, at which point I guess we all must have lost interest in it. Or maybe a hurricane blew down the pier (again) and nobody wanted to build another one. Whatever the reason, that chapter in our lives came to a close, but I will always remember all of the good times we had in tiny San Leon at the bay house.

Elementary School Days

After my somewhat inauspicious beginning at Garden Villas Elementary school, I did go on to enjoy my elementary school years very much. I have much fonder memories of my second grade teacher, Mrs. Hoke, which rhymed with Coke, and made her automatically seem more approachable than my first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston. It was in second grade that we were first introduced to “Dick and Jane” and their dog “Spot.” Oh, how I loved to read those stories! I remember avidly reading anything I could get my hands on from that point forward.

It was also in the second grade that I began to realize that I was smart. I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging. I was no genius child. But I was bright and learning came easily. This had never occurred to me before. I can remember always being one of the first to finish reading a chapter or finishing a test or working a problem on the blackboard. And it slowly began to dawn on me that not everyone was as smart as I was. It was a revelation that began to shape who I was.

I’ll never forget the first time I made straight A’s. It was in the third grade. My teacher was Mrs. Butler. Not a particularly sweet or sympathetic sort, she was exacting and demanding as a teacher, and I rose to the occasion. I had my best year ever, academically, under Mrs. Butler’s tutelage. No other teacher at Garden Villas Elementary after that ever really challenged me or insisted that I give my best, and so I didn’t. My parents were also undemanding of me, always happy with whatever grades I brought home, as long as my conduct grade was good. But I never forgot that I could learn and master anything I set my mind to, and that was what mattered to me.

Unfortunately, third grade was also the year that I began having trouble seeing the blackboard. Mrs. Butler had assigned us all seats based on the alphabetical order of our last names. Somehow I ended up in the last seat on the first row and I remember squinting and struggling to see the blurry white chalk marks on the blackboard at the front of the room. Toward the end of the school year my mother finally took me to see the eye doctor and to no one's surprise I tested nearsighted. Personally, I was just relieved to finally be able to see the leaves on the trees. In my youth and naivete, I was even excited to pick out my first pair of glasses--a truly ghastly pair of pointy pale blue frames with rhinestones glittering in the corners. I thought they were "cool." Little did I know how quickly my eyes would deteriorate or how thick my "coke bottle bottom" glasses would become in the future.

As third grade gave way to fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, I struggled to find my place among my peers. I might have been bright, but bright never did equal popular. I knew early the pain of being excluded from the popular girls' clique. I was fairly shy and a little bit "chubby" as we said back then. Not having any brothers or sisters, I had a hard time sometimes holding my own with the other kids at recess. I didn’t like being teased or picked on, but I always tried not to show it. One never forgot the lesson of poor James in the first grade. I wasn’t particularly athletic either, and from an early age, knew the shame of being picked last for dodge ball or kickball. But I wasn’t an unhappy child either. As long as I had one or two girlfriends or my cousins to play with, I was fine.

I remember reading a lot during those years. We discovered the Bobbsey Twins, Charlotte's Web, Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, the Little House on the Prairie books, and a host of other childhood classics. I loved our weekly excursions to the library. I could spend hours alone in my room reading and reading. By the fourth grade, I was reading on a ninth grade level. Books were my very best friends and I loved them all.

There weren’t a lot of extracurricular activities for girls to choose from in the 1960’s. I never belonged to any kind of organized sports. I do remember taking tap and ballet lessons for awhile from Miss Emelda. Miss Emelda’s studio was filled with young hopefuls like me who soon discovered that we were born with two left feet and quickly dropped out.

I also belonged to the Brownies. I loved being a Brownie. My best friend, Martha Ann, was a Brownie, too, and we were in the same troop. I remember the special feeling of wearing our Brownie uniforms to school on meeting days. Later on, when we became Girl Scouts, we wore our green uniforms to school, too. It made us feel very special.

There was a rival girls’ group called the Bluebirds. They only had a blue vest to wear over their regular school clothes on their meeting days. I remember we Girl Scouts in our green dresses with our dark green sashes felt very superior to them.

Girl Scouts was fun, but I soon wearied of having to earn badges. I think I dropped out after fourth or fifth grade. I do remember that both my mother and Martha’s mother took turns being troop leaders of our troop. Those were the best years! We went on tours of several factories and went camping and did arts and crafts in the afternoons. I remember we went to a candy factory once, and I can remember them making candy canes. I remember the big machine with two opposing “arms” pulling the white candy into a huge satiny ribbon, looping it over and over, like a figure eight. Then, when the time was just right, the red candy was fed into the machine and viola! Red and white stripes appeared and the candy cane was formed. The factory visits were always so fascinating.

It was also along this time that I started piano lessons. At first I took lessons from a neighbor, Mrs. Delay. She was very sweet and patient with me and, as we didn't have a piano of our own, she allowed me to come over every afternoon and practice at her house for thirty minutes. I loved Mrs. Delay. She had three small children of her own, but she treated me like a long lost daughter. I probably played more with the Delay children than I practiced, but I did pick my way through Book A of the John W. Schaum Piano Course.

Christmas came, and lo and behold, a "new" piano arrived at our house. It was an old used upright, of course, but my mother had painted it and it looked brand new to me. Sadly, Mrs. Delay went to work shortly after that, and my lessons moved from her house to the nunnery at Mt. Carmel. One of the nuns there gave lessons in the afternoon, and I started taking lessons from her. I don't remember her name, but she quite intimidated me with her starched wimple and voluminous black robes. I do remember my mother being in a dither over what to give her as a Christmas present. She kept muttering about how the nuns weren't allowed to have any personal items. She finally decided on houseshoes, and I dutifully carried a package of pink houseshoes to her on the last lesson before the Christmas holidays.

But most afternoons we all just came home from school, changed into our play clothes, and went out in the yards and the streets to play until our dads came home and our moms called us in to eat supper. These were the days before daylight savings time, so darkness fell pretty early. My dad got home at 4:30 p.m. and supper was always waiting for him on the table. After supper, I sat at the kitchen table to do homework, and then maybe there was time for a television show or two. Bedtime came early, too. I remember watching the kitchen clock, even before I could really tell time. Each year my bedtime increased by one half hour, from seven to seven-thirty to eight and finally to eight-thirty. I'll never forget how grown up I felt when in sixth grade, I could finally, finally stay up until nine o'clock. It was a landmark of my youth.

I cannot leave my elementary school years without remarking upon my sixth grade year. It was 1969 and integration was beginning to be enforced on the schools in Houston. Many students were being "bussed" to different neighborhoods and schools in an attempt to enforce equality across the district. All of a sudden, the private school system of Mt. Carmel appeared to be a god-send for the panic stricken families in our all-white, but lower middle class neighborhood. I was not bussed, but I did draw the first black teacher at Garden Villas Elementary school. Not only the first black teacher, but the first MALE teacher at our all female-staffed school. Mr. Gillespie was alternately regarded with fear, scorn, prejudice and awe for daring to brave the bastion of an all white, all female populated staff.

It was a scary thing for me to walk into that sixth grade classroom on the first day of school. I didn't know whether expect the boogie man or what! But I soon realized that Mr. Gillespie was just like all my other teachers had been. He had his good points and his bad points. He did have a tendency to tease, sometimes unmercifully, which as I have already pointed out, I had a very hard time handling. But he was a good teacher and I like to think I began to learn to see other ethnicities as something more than an unnamed mass to be feared. I began to understand that people are individuals, regardless of the color of their skin.

However, this realization did not change the political climate of the times. My parents fell victim to the mass hysteria of the times and joined the "white flight" from the city to the outer suburbs and small towns surrounding Houston. They sold our house on Hirondel street and during the summer after sixth grade, we moved to League City, a small town halfway between Houston and Galveston. The secure cocoon of my young world with its familiar streets and landmarks and friends was abruptly severed, and I was forced to emerge into a scary new world, filled with new schools and new friends.

First Grade

I remember being very nervous and afraid my first day of school. Funny, I don’t remember having that same problem in early Sunday school classes or in kindergarten. But in first grade, I cried when my mother left me at the door of the classroom. Not a lot, but I remember tearing up. Thankfully, I didn’t make a scene.

I definitely remember one pudgy little red-headed boy whose name was James. James didn’t just cry when his mother left him. He struggled. He screamed. He held onto his mother’s skirts and sobbed for all he was worth. He carried this demonstration on for so long that he finally had to be physically restrained by the first grade teacher, Mrs. Langston, while his poor mother made good her escape. From that point on, James was a marked boy. He was the butt of all jokes, and this torment continued on for years.

Public school lesson Number One: don’t show your vulnerabilities to your classmates or they will persecute you unmercifully for the rest of your days.

I didn’t particularly like first grade. I didn’t particularly like Mrs. Langston. It was very hot in our room. Imagine going to school in Houston, Texas in 1963 with no air conditioning. It was hard to pay attention to anything the teacher was saying with the sultry humidity steaming in through the windows and the cicadas singing us to sleep in the trees outside. I seem to remember being thirsty all the time. I can remember raising my hand and asking permission to go to the water fountain again and again, but Mrs. Langston would always say no. I have a very clear mental picture of her standing over me one day with tiny drops of sweat beading on her hairy upper lip telling me to sit down and be quiet! Nope, not my favorite teacher.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I first learned how to read, but I’m fairly certain it was not in the first grade. Mrs. Langston used to sit us in a large circle and hold up flash cards printed with words like “cat” and “dog” and “coat”. She would hold up the card, say the word, and we would all repeat it—just like a group of parrots. It was rote memorization, and it was very ineffective. I do remember being able to read my Highlights magazine at an early age. I remember reading The Timbertoes, so perhaps my mother helped me to learn to read.

I don’t remember doing any math that year either, although I have a vague recollection of her holding up apples and oranges. So much for first grade academics.

I do remember painting. Not long after school started, she sat a large easel up in a corner of the classroom. One by one we each got a turn to spend an hour painting our very own picture, which was then displayed along one wall on a clothes line, each picture held in place with wooden clothes pins. I remember waiting and waiting and waiting for my turn to come. Finally I got my chance at the paints. I painted a landscape. There was green grass and a large tree and lots of blue sky and a big yellow sun in the upper corner. I remember standing at the easel and thinking to myself, “If the sun is shining down on everything, and the sun is yellow, then I should cover the entire sky and all the earth with yellow paint as well.”

Well, no one had ever told me that yellow and blue make green. As I began to spread that cheery yellow paint across my canvas, all my beautiful blue sky turned green and the colors all began to bleed and run into one another. I was very surprised, but kept on spreading yellow sunshine, thinking that artistically, I just had to be correct. Mrs. Langston came over and said, in a very disgusted voice, “Just look what you’ve done! You’ve ruined your painting. Go sit down.” And she hung my painting up at the very far end of the clothes line, in a position of great disgrace.

I never picked up a paintbrush again.

The one bright spot I do remember from first grade is that I met my best friend, Martha Ann, there. She and I were best friends from 1st through 6th grade. Our class used to travel in pairs, and she and I were always buddies. We used to hold hands as we walked in rows, two by two, down the long hall to the school lunch room. We played together on the playground, were in Brownies together after school, and we had sleepovers at each other’s house and told each other all our secrets, then “pinkie swore” to be best friends forever.

So, first grade passed by like a 9-month prison sentence for me. About all I remember is physical discomfort, a lack of mental stimulation, and a great fear of the teacher. After such a poor start, it's amazing to me that I ever liked school at all, but then second grade was just around the corner. . . .

School Days

Who doesn't look back at the beginning of their school days with a bit of nostalgia? A bit of bemusement for how innocently we begin that long and laborious journey of twelve years of public education. Of course, if we dig a little deeper, those halcyon days of our youth are never quite as perfect as we think; still, the joys of one's youth should never be discounted as trivial. A person of six is no less a human being than a person of sixty. And all the events of our lives--both the past and the present--continue to shape us even now into the persons we are today.

When I was in kindergarten, my mother took me back and forth to school every day in our old Pontiac. But beginning in first grade, I was considered old enough to walk to school with the other neighborhood children, unless it was raining. This was a great privilege. It was the beginning of my independence--a step away from my babyhood. We all walked or rode our bikes to school without parental supervision, and incredibly, we all made it to school and back home again every day. If you were tardy to class in those days, it was because you dawdled on your way to school and deserved to miss recess.

At the start of my first grade year, my mother, as so many others, walked with me, to show me the way and to teach me the safety rules. We would travel up Hirondel street and turn left at the edge of a big wooded lot. There was a mysterious “shortcut” path through that wooded lot that the older kids used, but I was strictly forbidden to go in there—and didn’t for years. I was afraid of the dark shadows cast by the huge old trees, and the rumors of a crazy man who lived in there.

We turned right at the end of the woods, walked another block, and then we arrived at the corner of the huge complex of Our Lady of Mt Carmel Church and parochial school. You cannot imagine the mass exodus of children on foot and on bicycle from our neighborhood every morning. We all walked to school together for years. But for most of the children in Overbrook, their destination was the Catholic school, and the rest of us Baptists, Methodists, and Lutherans had to walk on and leave them behind.

Another few blocks and we left Overbrook for the neighborhood of Garden Villas by means of a bridge over the lazy, muddy Sims Bayou. That bridge scared and fascinated me all at the same time. When I was very young, it felt so high. It was wide enough for two lanes of traffic, with a partitioned sidewalk for munchkin foot traffic on each side. Looking down through the metal safety bars at the brown sluggish water slipping by below made me dizzy with fear and excitement. Sometimes we would see a snake swimming in it. We used to scare each other with rumors of giant alligators that lived under that bridge. Sometimes it would rain, and then the bayou would rise up in a churning boiling mass of swift, hard current filled with swirling debris and unfathomable muck. The water would be louder then, and crossing the bridge felt like an excursion across the mighty and mysterious Amazon.

Once safely over the bridge, however, it was only another block until we arrived at Garden Villas Elementary school. Ancient-looking even then, it was constructed rather unimaginatively of square corners, sturdy red bricks, and old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. It was tall, foreboding, and made human only by the enormous pecan trees and live oaks dripping with Spanish moss that adorned the grounds. Huge old ligustrums were planted rather haphazardly around its foundation, and to this day, the smell of ligustrums blooming evokes a sense of nostalgia in me so strong, that I will all but stop in my tracks to breathe in their heady perfume and remember the smells of my childhood.

The inside walls of Garden Villas were pea green. Horrible, unrelenting, disgusting pea green. Every wall, every hallway, even every bathroom was green. There was no relief from it. I read one time that someone somewhere did a study (probably in the 1950’s) and determined that GREEN was the color of choice for school walls. I personally have no problem with most shades of green. But I have never ever been able to look at that particular shade of pea green without feeling slightly repulsed by it.

The floors were study, hard-wearing linoleum tiles, and so damn monotonous. No pattern to them, just a series of green and gray flecks, perpetually dull and scuffed, except at the start of each new year when they were buffed to a high glossy shine.

Each classroom came equipped with a blackboard, a globe, an American flag standing in the corner, and old-fashioned wooden desks. That was it. No colorful posters or bulletin boards, no reading corner with colorful rugs and bean bag chairs, no cubbies filled with enticing crayons and paints, no aquariums on the windowsill with pet frogs, no hint of anything beyond a strict academic atmosphere.

Perhaps that was the point. There was nothing for a child to do except look at the blackboard and the teacher, or stare daydreaming out the window.

In those days, children didn’t stay in school all day long as they do now. Most mothers didn’t work, and afterschool care wasn’t much of an issue then. Children were slowly and gently introduced to the disciplines of school and gradually built up to a full day. Kindergarteners went half a day. They either went to the morning session, from 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Or they went to the afternoon session from noon until 3:00 p.m. First graders got out at 1:00 p.m. Second grade dismissed at 2:00 p.m. And finally, in third grade, students stayed until 3:00 p.m.

There was no air conditioning in Garden Villas Elementary School. Given Houston's heat and humidity, this almost seems inhumane, until you remember that the school was built early in the 1940's, perhaps even in the 1930's, long before the advent of air conditioning. So each classroom had a solid outer wall of tall, old-fashioned hand-crank windows. I can remember the teachers dutifully working their way down the bank of windows each morning, cranking each set of louvers open as wide as they could go. Classroom doors stayed open, in the hopes of drawing in a cross breeze or two. Large double doors flanked every hall way, and stood open to the world to draw in as much air as possible during the sultry September heat. Security wasn't an issue then. Comfort was.

And so, in September of 1962, I bravely entered the hallowed halls of Garden Villas Elementary School with a lump of nervous fear in my throat, butterflies in my tummy, and my mother's hand clutched rather desperately in my own to begin the First Grade.

The Neighborhood

As I have already explained, almost all of the neighbors on Hirondel Street were Catholic. I grew up in the shadow of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church, and it made for some very interesting experiences. Of course, when I was a very young child, I didn’t understand the difference between Catholic or Baptist or Methodist or atheist, nor did I care. It seemed that every family went to some church on Sunday, and we were all united in faith simply because we all went to church every week.

As children in the early 1960's, we all understood the concept of "wardrobe", too. We all had three sets of clothes. There were church clothes, which were reserved strictly for Sundays, weddings, or whatever other function our mothers deemed "proper". There were school clothes, which were slightly less dressy than church clothes and, if you were a girl, always meant dresses. And then there were play clothes: jeans with button-front flys for the boys, shorts and pedal pushers with side zippers for the girls, and pullover tee shirts. We could run and play and ride bikes and just generally be kids in our play clothes without fear of scolding.

On our street there were scores of children to play with. Each yard came equipped with swing sets and sandboxes and water hoses for free drinks of water. We played wonderful games in the warm summer evenings like “hide and seek” and “freeze tag.” We caught lightning bugs in old mayonnaise jars and stayed out until the street lights blinked on at dark and our mothers called us in for the night. The ice cream truck made regular forays up and down the streets of Overbrook every afternoon. We could hear the calliope music tinkling merrily from two blocks over, which gave us plenty of time to race home and barrel through the house, shouting, "Can I have a nickel?!?"

No, theology made very little difference to the children on Hirondel street. But I always felt a clear separation from my neighborhood playmates anyway, because from the very beginning, I understood that in all those other homes on our street there were many, many children, and in our home there was just one: me.

My first real memory of a friend who was not a cousin (we’ll cover the whole family issue later) was a little girl named Eileen who lived down the street from me. Eileen and I went to kindergarten together at the public elementary school in Garden Villas. What I didn’t know at the time was that while Our Lady of Mt. Carmel had its own school for grades 1 through 12, it did not have a kindergarten, and so the Catholic families often availed themselves of the "free" public kindergarten in the next neighborhood before subjecting their children to the iron will of the nuns at Mt. Carmel for the following 12 years. Of course, the Catholic families all had to pay property taxes which supported the public schools, so the "free" public kindergarten wasn't really free for them at all. In addition, they then had to pay tuition for their children to attend the private Catholic school at Mt. Carmel. I do have some vague memories of adult grumblings along these lines, but as a child, I never paid them any attention.

All I knew was that Eileen and I laid down side by side on our little red and green plastic mats to take a nap each day at kindergarten (we only went for half a day-—did we really need a nap?), and we drank our juice and ate our cookies together, and we eventually discovered that we lived just 4 houses apart on Hirondel street.

I’ll never forget the terror and fear I felt each time I stepped foot in Eileen’s house. Eileen was the youngest of thirteen brothers and sisters. Her house was as foreign to me as Mars or Venus. The first thing I saw when I walked through the door was a horrifying, very real-looking crucifix of Jesus, bloody, torn, and naked, hanging on the living room wall. I was shocked. In the Baptist church we didn't have images of bloody Jesus. We had pastoral Jesus tending his "flock" of sweet, smiling children leaning against his knee. Bloody Jesus scared me.

But even worse than Jesus dying on the cross right over our heads while we sat on the floor and played jacks, were Eileen's five terrifying older brothers. Like birds of prey, they could swoop down on you at any given minute and pull your hair or steal your toy or say something mean and unintelligible (but even a five-year old could understand that they were making a joke at her expense). She also had hordes of older sisters, some of whom were nice, but they were all so loud and rambunctious and independent of one another. It was quite overwhelming for an only child who lived in a quiet house with only her parents for company.

I rarely remember seeing Eileen’s mother. I have a vague memory of a thin, weary-looking woman standing at the sink washing dishes. Her hands were very red and cracked-looking to me, as if they spent too much time immersed in hot soapy water. However, I never saw her dressed in anything other than heels and hose. Shades of Donna Reed and June Cleaver! If you thought those women were just Hollywood make-believe, think again. They really existed in Houston, Texas in 1962.

I only remember seeing her father once. Fathers disappeared from our neighborhood early in the mornings and reappeared at suppertime every evening. On the weekends they mowed the grass on Saturday mornings and hung out in their garages on Saturday afternoons drinking cold, sweaty dark brown bottles of beer. Occasionally, they barbecued and once in a great while, they played a game of ball with us. So all fathers, except for my own, were pretty much an unknown quantity to me, and Eileen's father absolutely terrified me. I don’t remember what the joke was, but I distinctly remember him saying (in a jovial manner, I am sure), that he would “string me up by my thumbs”. I took him quite literally and hid from him every time I saw him after that.

At Eileen’s house they didn’t have a regular kitchen table and chairs, as we did. They had a picnic table with long benches on either side. Imagine trying to feed 15 people at a time, 7 days a week, three times a day. You have to remember that in the early sixties, there were no McDonalds. No wonder Eileen’s mom had dish pan hands. I only remember having dinner with them once, but I’m sure I didn’t eat a bite. I was too shy around all of them.

One last memory, before I leave Eileen. It was common for the mothers in our neighborhood to feed “snack” to whatever youngsters happened to be around each afternoon. Most of the mothers during that time period stayed home, and so we were treated to homemade cookies and cupcakes, hand-squeezed lemonade, and even homemade ice cream wasn’t uncommon. But at Eileen’s house, when it was time for snack, we always got a big bowl of ice cubes. Just plain ice cubes. I remember asking my mother about why we didn’t get popsicles or cookies at Eileen’s house. She told me that not everyone had enough money to go around, and that we should always be grateful for the things that we had. It was my first glimpse into “working class” poverty, and I never forgot it.

Well, all my friendships always seem to come to an end, and so it was with Eileen. Kindergarten ended and we turned six years old. The next fall Eileen disappeared into the rabbit warren of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, and I went off to first grade at Garden Villas Elementary school. And although we lived on the same street together for the next several years, our friendship never renewed. Our lives became too different and we were too young.

Coming Home

Bringing a new baby home from the hospital is always joyous occasion, but bringing home a baby who was not expected to make it is quite a landmark, in any book. My parents were overjoyed when, after three long weeks, they were finally allowed to bring their new baby daughter home.

Home was a small 3-bedroom brick home in a brand new neighborhood in suburban Houston called Overbrook. The appellation “Overbrook” was a bit misleading. There was no brook, only a muddy, sluggish bayou called Sims Bayou, but I supposed the developers thought Overbrook sounded more inviting to potential home buyers. In fact, in that rather desperate, all-of-our-streets-have-to-have-a-theme mode that developers get into, most of the surrounding streets were named for birds: Heron or Thrush or (god-forbid) Flamingo. Our street was named Hirondel. I looked it up once; it means “swallow” in Latin. What were they thinking? I promise you, dear reader, most of the residents who lived on Hirondel Street in the 1960’s hadn't the slightest clue their street name meant swallow in Latin.

Besides having some rather odd ornithopic delusions of grandeur, Overbrook was also very Catholic. As a child, I once asked my mother why we, as good Southern Baptists, lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood. She just shrugged and said something vague about how our little house was just perfect for us, but I later got the whole story out of her.

During the Korean War, my dad joined the naval reserves, but he was never stationed overseas. After a couple of years of leading a rather nomadic life (they lived in shabby little apartments everywhere from sunny Key West to freezing Boston), my parents wanted a permanent home. They rushed back to Houston and bought the first little tract house they found. I think they paid $7000 for it. Turns out our home was one of the first spec houses built in modest Overbrook. It was the first house built on Hirondel Street. Only after my parents had bought the house did they learn that the Catholic Church was planning to build a huge complex called “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” just a few blocks over. The entire neighborhood turned Catholic overnight, but my parents--childless at the time--shrugged and stayed put.

When I was older, my mother confessed to me that they had bought in “too big a hurry” and many times wished they had instead bought a home in the nearby neighborhood of Garden Villas, where later I went to elementary school and to church and to Brownies and everything else. But my experiences growing up in Overbook in the wild and woolly 1960’s were quite priceless and I wouldn’t trade them for any other history.

But to return to our story, I was finally ensconced safely in the little white bassinet in the little brick house on Hirondel street. My mother, well-rested after three weeks of enforced bed rest, was ready to take on the challenges of new motherhood. But something was wrong. The baby wouldn't quit crying--or spitting up--or projectile vomiting. What could it be? Was she just a bad mother? Did she not know what to do? Everyone told her it was just the colic. Not surprisingly, my mother couldn't quit crying either.

In that peculiar way that doctors had back then, each doctor had his own office and his own staff, and there weren't any large pediatric practices with multiple doctors taking turns being "on call". My doctor was taking his annual summer vacation and there was no one else available until he returned. For two long weeks my mother was at her wits' end as she struggled to cope with a screaming, colickly baby. When the doctor finally returned he pronounced I was allergic to baby formula and that my mother must feed me soy milk instead. Soy milk?

You must remember that my mother had had no opportunity to breast feed me, even if she had wanted to, which was highly unlikely. I was nearly a month old by the time I came home, and her milk had long since dried up. Breast feeding was strongly discouraged by the modern medical community of the 1950's and was looked down upon as being extremely old-fashioned and slightly unclean. New mothers, forced to stay in bed in the hospital for up to two weeks' recovery time after giving birth, readily submitted to having their tender, swollen breasts bound after childbirth to stop their milk from coming in, while down in the nursery, the staff took care of feeding the babies. Breast milk was considered a poor substitute for modern, clean, sanitized baby formula. But soy milk was a hard-to-find commodity and expensive to boot.

However, on the doctor's advice the switch in formulas was made and the baby, thankfully, finally quit crying and began to thrive. There was peace and joy in the little brick house at last.

Reflections of an Ordinary Life

I am new to blogging. I've been considering dipping my big toe in its unknown waters for some time now, but I always have to wonder: who will read this? who will care? And yet, the lure of blogging--the fascination of it--just won't go away, so here I am. My first blog. You lucky reader, you!

Let me tell you the purpose of this blog. For about 15 years I have been researching my family's history. Now quickly--before your eye glaze over in tedious boredom--let me assure you that this is NOT a blog to publish my genealogical research. Far from it. Instead, it is going to deal with a far more mundane and probably boring subject: my life. So if you're not one of those who like to "peak in" on your neighbors, just to see what they're up to, feel free to check out now. (Myself, I can never resist doing a bit of spying on co-workers or neighbors.) But, the point I am belaboring to make is this: if it were not for my genealogical research, I probably would never have been motivated to set down my own life's story. So genealogy is the root of this blog, if not its actual subject.

As I sit down to write these memoirs (such a pretentious word), I wonder who my audience might be and who might even care. I’ve worked long and hard on researching my family's history. I even started a website in order to record the “roots” of my family. I’ve traced back my ancestors through the last two centuries, marked the places of their births on maps, and gleaned what little facts I could about their lives from old pictures and history books. I believe there is great value in preserving my family’s past, and I hope my efforts will endure and be well received by future generations.

But to include my own reflections--a letter, of sorts, from me to you--isn't that a bit narcissistic? Suppose I do set down my recollections of growing up in Houston, Texas in the 1960’s—who besides my immediate family would be interested in that? My life has been pretty ordinary, and I’ve not made any great accomplishments. No, my life has not been all that exciting usually, and really, who would want to read about it anyway?

But I’ll tell you something I have learned. During my research, I have read the letters and journals of pioneer women who, at the end of a fourteen-hour day of grueling labor, somehow found the strength to set down a few lines each evening by flickering firelight about their day. And the value of those antiquated records lies not in the dazzling or exciting tales of an adventurous life on the western frontier. No, the value lies in the very ordinary details of a life lived honestly, often times tragically, but with human strength and dignity.

These women with their work-worn hands and oft-mended calico gowns wrote tenderly of their children—their first smiles, their beauty and grace. They railed against diseases they could not fight and grieved when the battle was lost. Sometimes their writings were comic: daily struggles with mud puddles on dirt floors, exploding stovepipes, and piglets multiplying under the porch. They recorded their recipes for laundry soap and beeswax candles and dried raisin pies. They wrote because they were isolated in their little sod huts and had no girlfriends to have coffee with every morning at work. They wrote because somehow they knew that as short and as hard and as futile as their lives must have seemed at times, one day their children, and their children’s children, would come to know them through their words. They left us a love letter from the past.

What would we give if we could catch a glimpse into our great-grandmothers' lives? How fascinating it would be if we could know more about them than just their date of birth or the number of children they had? When I look at some of the women in my family who were married at thirteen, bore twelve children, moved five times, and still lived to be eighty, I yearn to be able to talk to them. What must their lives have been like?

Were they happy? Did they find joy in their lives? Did they long for something different? Did they have dreams and aspirations beyond marriage and family? Did they secretly shudder with fear every other year when, just as they weaned one child, they found themselves nauseous, exhausted and tied down by yet another pregnancy again? Did they resent their husbands for the inevitable result of their conjungal relations? Or did they--having no choice other than abstinence--just accept the perils and dangers of multiple pregnancies as part of their lives and go on? Were they so worn down by endless work and worry that they had no energy for love or laughter? Or did they love life passionately and look forward to the start of each new day with a bright smile and hope in their hearts?

And where did they find the sheer courage it must have taken for them to pack up and move their children and household belongings and livestock hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles, over unknown lands and seas in search of a better life?

Don’t you wish they had written us a letter?

So I have come to realize that’s what I want to do: I want to write a letter. I want to write about the good and the bad, the happy and the tragic, the ordinary and the sublime. I want to open a window and let you all have a glimpse into the life of an ordinary woman who lived and worked and loved and died, and whose memory will fade into obscurity just as surely as the tides will continue to turn. I will be mourned by my family, but then forgotten by all, just one more statistic in a time line that marches down through the ages, unless I allow you to know me through the words on these few pages.

Most of us will never earn a place in the history books, and yet all of us contribute in our own way to the legacy of man. Is my life worth a moment or two of reflection by some future generation? Only time will tell. But I write this love letter for my children, and my children’s children, and if by some happenstance, these words should survive beyond that time, then I write it for all of those who might one day yearn for glimpse, just a glimmer really, of what ordinary life was like "back then" in America. And maybe, just maybe, some of those future readers will be inspired to write their own love letters to their own children. And in this way, the reflections of ordinary people upon their ordinary lives will continue to be woven, in and out, among the threads of the too seldom recorded history of the common man.