V's Version

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The B-day festivities were so much fun! Pk had a very good time and the weather was beautiful! I had the unforgettable experience of looking directly into Pk's eyes (as he was directly across from me) when we were suspended completely upside down about 100 feet in the air. It was the among the first "big kid" rides that he has been on and it was the first time he dared to open his eyes on one. I met his gaze and we both laughed that kind of shocked laugh that one hears from those suspended upside down 100 feet in the air. Precious. What an amazing blessing!

This weekend we are going camping. A late spring storm series will make it a stay in the shelter and play dominoes kind of camping trip. I think I will get a puzzle and it can't rain every minute so we'll get a few hikes in, I am sure. Rain or shine, there will be s'mores. (But we have to brush our teeth right away because this last dentist appointment was a fright!)

We are bringing along a friend who has never been camping. I can't imagine! Never! I mean it's different if one has not much family or lives in the city - but he has 6 older brothers and siters. We live within a half hour of 5 state parks. ? It boggles my mind.

So - I've been thinking a lot of my past. Maybe you have noticed.

I believe in redemption. I have made significant changes in my life and have made ammends whenever I could. But, what is it all about if I can't learn from it? Part of what I thinkI can do with my past mistakes, at least, is to make stories of them. Maybe someone will learn from them. Maybe someone will relate. I'm not going to preach or turn them into parables. My life is just what it has been. Do with it what you will.

Here is a piece I wrote about growing up in Hoxie Four Corners.

We moved from the basement apartment in urban East Providence to our very own little suburban house in 1970. The rough and tumble kids near Hoxie Four Corners in Warwick, Rhode Island didn’t know what to do us. They were fort builders. They played “Cops and Robbers”, “Cowboys and Indians”, “Freeze tag” and “Flashlight Hide and Seek.” They fished in the pond behind our new house and played hockey on it in the winter. They ruled the neighborhood, on foot, on bike, on roller skates. When asked what games I liked to play, I suggested “House” or “School”. There were blank stares. Why play “House?” Why play “School”? But it was pretty much all I knew.

For much of the time in the basement apartment, I played “House” or “School” a lot. With “House”, I was the “Mommy” and either my doll or my sister was the “Baby”. Jenn was born when I was two and a half and was a fairly good prop to play with. I was just mimicking the dynamics that I saw in our own home and in the neighbors’ homes on our occasional visits. I vividly remember the first toy that I saved up my very own money to buy. At the age of 5, I took a bag full of rumpled dollars and unrolled quarters to the Ann & Hope discount store. I knew what I wanted and searched the aisles until I found it: a miniature iron that heated up to just the right kid-safe temperature and was made of real, shiny metal. What kind of child buys herself a mock appliance for a toy? It’s no wonder that I felt a duty to become a wife and mother. Women may have been able to vote, but this was 1970. The Equal Rights Amendment hadn’t yet been introduced and Snow White was still singing with the dwarves. I was hard wired for service. In terms of our play, someone had to be the “Daddy” but it was cameo role. When we were very young, our real Daddy left the house in the wee hours of the morning and didn’t come home until very late. We weren’t too sure about what bakers did all day so whoever played “Daddy” either had to leave for work or come home and lay down on the couch.

It’s not like Jenn and I never got to see our father in real life. We did. We were blessed by his adoration and his genuine interest in us, but the man worked his butt off out there in the bakeries. By the time he got home, he was exhausted. Even so, there were plenty of fun times playing “Horsie”, a game where Daddy carried us around on his back, whinnying and rearing up just like Black Beauty. But eventually (and all too soon for us), he tumbled onto the floor.

“Horsie dead,” he would declare just before he went rigid, arms and legs sticking out.

As tired as he was, Daddy sometimes fell asleep in the bathtub and ended up very pruney. That gave us a good laugh. And sometimes, on the nights that Mom went off to work, he would let us stay up, but only on the condition that we massage his aching feet. Jenn took one foot and I took the other. Pretty soon, he was snoring and we could just relax and watch TV for as long as we could keep our little eyes open.

“School” was a game somewhat like “House” except that Mom usually played too. For years, it was just Mom and me playing at home together. “School” is how I learned to read and write and calculate simple math. Thinking back on it now, it makes perfect sense. My mother was still in high school when she got pregnant. The majority of her world was “school”. Mom was the teacher and I was the student. When I was 4 or so, I became the teacher and Jenn was the student. Poor Jenn.

In our new neighborhood, we broadened our horizons. Among other things, we learned to play “muckle ball.” What a crazy game. Each kid stole a bit of tin foil from our mothers. We put it all together to mold a giant ball of foil which we proceeded to hurl at each other with all our might. Whoever caught the ball, for some idiotic reason, tried to keep it while the rest of the kids tried to tackle and pig-pile upon the one with possession.

We did our share of stunts in that neighborhood. We rode our bikes out to the sand dunes at the edge of the airport where we drove at breakneck speed off the cliffs into the sand below. We brought our salt shakers to the late August fields of a nearby farm to eat tomatoes right off the vine, juice and seeds running down our chins. We put frogs into Tonka trucks so that they would look like drivers as they sped down the hill in front of our house. The boys went further, of course. They put lit firecrackers in the frogs’ mouths so that it would look like the truck driver was smoking. What a mess.

Although I cannot say as much for the frogs, the trucks always managed to get fixed. Louis and Robert Sanagata lived across the street. Big Louis, their father, worked at an auto-body repair shop. I secretly suspected that they were a Mafia family (there are so many in Rhode island) but I’ll never know for sure.

Anyway, Louis got bondo and sanding paper and auto body paint from his father to fix the trucks. He loved to fix things. He loved to build them too. He built me a little Swiss A-frame house once. It was so cute. He detailed it with shag carpeting and windows made from that ‘70’s avacado green and mustard yellow plastic stained glass stuff. It had two floors and a little balcony in the front, complete with flower boxes!

When I was 9, the clubhouse was our home base for criminal activity. I was Bonnie Parker. Louis was Clyde Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde was one of our favorite games. Inspired by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway’s movie characters, we rode Louis’ bike to the Ben Franklin (a local five and dime store.) I waited for him outside the glass door, watching for him, watching for the man behind the counter. Louis ran in, snatched as many model airplane supplies as he could hide under his shirt and came out running. I was ready with our getaway vehicle and off we went, peddling like crazy back to the A-frame.

It’s kind of spooky how our young lives mirrored the true lives of our favorite criminals. Crime is fun for a while (or it was in my life) but eventually, something goes wrong. Not even Bonnie and Clyde wanted to continue thier crime spree. In our case, something did eventually go wrong - but, unlike Bonnie and Clyde, we did not get caught. That probably would have been the blessing that could have altered my future life of crime. No - what went wrong was Louis' anger. But still - the coincidence of how our life of crime ended is not lost on me. Just like the car of the real Bonnie and Clyde on that fateful day in Shreveport, our hide-away A-frame house ended up riddled with bullets. Real bullets. Little Louis just got mad one day. He took one of his father’s guns and shot that little house all to bits, thereby ending Bonnie and Clyde.

Tragedies of different proportions but sad nonetheless.