There are moments in your life that change you and your perspective forever. September 11 is one of those moments. The Berlin Wall coming down. The Challenger explosion. Kennedy's assassination. And there are moments that happen just within your own family that forever change who you were into who you are. Events of the mid to late 60's changed me from a young happy girl into a confused insecure and often times, scared teenager. I was 10 in 1965 and the world was changing at a furious pace. And inside the Barton Street house, well, things were about to come undone.
I remember my family in our little den in the house on Barton Street. The room was tiny. I think us kids must have sat on the floor when we all wanted to watch TV. There was a couch that could comfortably seat 3 adults and an overstuffed chair. I think there may have been a rocker by the window too. The TV was wedged in the corner. You remember the TV right? Small boxy thing with rabbit ears we were always adjusting and the stations would get all fuzzy and snowy. You had to get up to change the channel......but there were only 5 or 7 channels anyway....black and white TV though we were one of the first on our block to own a color television.
Our family watched Ed Sullivan. I remember watching the Beatles debut on Ed's show. Ma, my grandmother, she liked Lawrence Welk. Remember the bubbles? Dad liked Mitch Miller - Sing Along with Mitch.....follow the bouncing ball. Sandy and I watched I Dream of Jeannie; Gidget; The Flying Nun; Star Trek; Bewitched; Lost in Space; Lassie; Dark Shadows, oh and the Twilight Zone! So many TV shows! We were happy in our little den watching our shows.
We watched TV all day as Kennedy's funeral took place. All the schools were closed for the funeral. I was in third grade in 1963 and my teacher's name just happened to be Miss Johnson. She made it clear to us that she was not related to our new President and that I wasn't either. I remember watching the Mall in DC filling up with hopeful, peace-loving people when Martin Luther King used to "have a dream". I remember watching the TV when Dr. King was shot.
I have these memories that are clear as a bell. But I wonder if time has changed them in my mind. Are these memories as they actually happened? Were things in our household as good as they seemed? Was I just a clueless naive little girl or pretty much normal for a child of the 60's? Life seemed pretty simple. How could it get complicated so quickly?
The note said "I love you all."
I'm in the sewing room at the Barton Street house, only the sewing room is now my bedroom. The year is 1969, and we are just past "the summer of love". The hippies have converged on San Francisco. The United States' youth are in the midst of a social phenomenon; free-thinking, culturally diverse, sexually active, drug experimenting young people..."hippies!" The pop radio waves are dominated by songs from the musical "Hair" and The 5th Dimension's "Age of Aquarius." I am fourteen and the noise in my head is really loud and becoming really painful. I am alone. But let's back up slightly.
In the mid sixties the three of us sisters, Sandy, Shirley and I, got involved in roller skating at the rink in Old Town Alexandria; first for fun on a Wednesday evening and then competitively shortly thereafter. We each took lessons in figures, freestyle and dance and soon became involved in the skating "club" and connecting with a new group of friends outside our school friends.
For me it was the second year of integration and the students from my school were unlucky enough to be bussed from all the friends we had grown up and went to school with for the last 7 years in North Arlington into South Arlington. The school we came from was in an all white slightly upper-middle class neighborhood. The school we were bussed to was in an all black middle class neighborhood. They didn't want us there and frankly, we didn't want to be there. It was a tough time. My roller skating friends offered a welcome change from the daily torture of middle school. I connected with this group of friends better than with my current junior high school friends. Pretty much, I didn't know anyone in middle school. I was starting over and it was hard.
My little sister Shirley excelled at skating and was completely adorable with her long braids and shy, sweet smile. She was good at figures and dance. All three of us had dance partners but Sandy and I skated in the same dance division being only two and one half years apart in age. Sandy's dance partner, Doug, eventually became her husband and father of her two children.
We participated in the rink's skating shows wearing various fun costumes, fixing our hair up and skating routines with the rest of the club members. I was having a blast!
On Saturdays our mother would take us to the rink for our lessons and to practice our "moves". We'd meet up with our partners and go through our dance routines preparing for a local competition or practice for the annual skating show. Our mom would always take us to skate during a session on Wednesday nights. She would bring sewing from the house and sit in the same spot, alone, with her draperies or what-not that needed hemming or other finger work. She never sat with the other moms but some would come and sit by her a little. We'd skate from 7:00 to 10:00 pm on Wednesdays. For me it was the most exciting time of the week. Hanging with my non-school friends and getting a little exercise. Listening to the Wurlitzer organ and occasionally skating couples or the best was when they called for "triple" skate which was when three of us would link up and skate together! How corny it seems now but such fun when I was younger. There would also be a chance to practice our set pattern dance routines with our partners.
It was not usual for our father to take us skating or to come to the rink to watch us. I really didn't give it a lot of thought. Dad worked from 7:30ish in the morning until 5:00 pm. He didn't really seem to have a lot of free time. He was involved in choir at our church so he and Aunt Sis would go to church during the week for practice and sing in the choir on Sundays. I guess I just figured he had his thing and mom took us to do our thing. Division of duties.
So it came as sort of a surprise when Dad said he was going to take Shirley and I to the rink one Wednesday night and that he wanted to leave earlier than our usual time because he wanted to stop off to watch the jets taking off and landing at Washington National Airport. Okay - a little odd. I sat in the backseat and Shirley was in front as we left the house. Sandy wasn't with us that evening as we drove to the airport lot which was only a few short miles from the skating rink.
It was that night life as I knew it began to change and the naivete with which I had lived my life to this point abruptly came to a halt. For me, that night explained what innocence lost feels like. As Dad told us that he and our mother could no longer live together and therefore would be separating, the painful noise began. It was only a whimper then. In time the bomb would drop.
I cried. And I cried. And I wondered how on earth this had happened without me having any idea. Did this just happen? Did my older brother and sister know? Did Aunt Sis and Ma know? Nobody had said anything. Mom hadn't said anything. I never heard them speak crossly to each other. I never heard anyone speak crossly in our house. I never saw them angry. I never saw anyone angry in our house. Everyone was always civil in our home. Everything seemed normal. And we were happy weren't we? We had big Sunday dinners; we went on two week vacations in the summer to the beach; we had huge happy Christmases. We took drives up to the mountains with a picnic basket. We watched TV on our new color television set in our little den. We were normal right?
But thinking back now I remember that I never saw my parents smile at each other. I never saw them hold hands. I never saw them kissing. I never heard kind words either. I never saw them do anything together. I guess I never saw anything between them. I guess I only saw each of them going about our daily lives and me thinking everything was normal. Me in my blissful state of young ignorance noticed nothing.
So I sat in the car in shock, dumbstruck, in silence and with tears streaming down my face while I listened to Dad drone on about how he loved us and he loved our mother but just couldn't live with her any longer. I looked at the back of Shirley's head and wondered what she was thinking... just another shocked, sad face staring......waiting for this to be over.....waiting for this to end.
That night's skating session was difficult. I spent a lot of time in the ladies room trying to re-arrange my face into my old face. The one I used to recognize. The happy one - the one without the redness around the eyes and the puffy bags. The one without this new knowledge. The one that didn't look as old as this one seems to now.
When I got home nothing else was said and we just sort of went along as usual all summer. Like nothing had happened. Did I dream it? We had dinners together; went swimming and played games together. And we prepared for National's; a skating competition in New York held later that summer. I had only been to New York once before and was looking forward to really being in the city for a period of time and watching a National competition.
Mom drove us up to New York....Sandy, Shirley and me. By then Sandy and Doug had totally fallen for each other. She seemed so grown up to me. Sandy and I shared a double bed in our hotel room and Mom and Shirley shared the other. It was really exciting for me staying in a hotel for the first time. AND the hotel had a swimming pool though we weren't allowed to use it because it might effect our muscles. You know, the ones we used for skating?? Each day we would go to the rink to either practice or watch the competition. Sandy and I skated in a particularly competitive division as most of the kids in that division had been skating for years. We weren't very good but we were happy to have participated.
Soon the week was up and we were dragging our suitcases and skates back into the Barton Street house and up to our rooms. In the hall just before my bedroom sat a small desk with a lamp and a rotary phone with a long extension cord. The light on the desk was on and there was a note with that single sentence....."I love you all". The handwriting didn't register with me immediately and I proceeded to my room questioning in my mind who had left this odd note.
I can still feel the impact when the realization of who wrote the note hit me. The bomb dropped and the noise began. It was our Dad's handwriting. It was a goodbye of sorts; it was meant as a reassurance. It was a planned cop-out that us kids didn't know about. What I did next was like something from a movie. I was in slow motion. I dropped everything I was carrying and ran down the stairs to my parents' room. I threw open the closet where Dad's clothes used to be - there was nothing there. I opened each drawer that used to hold his clothes - there was nothing there either. He was gone. Nobody told us he was leaving while we were away. I don't recall anything more being said since that night in the car weeks ago. My Mom was standing in the room with me and she said nothing.
I spend most of that night crying. A young persons tears. Selfish tears. What will Christmas be like now? What will happen on my birthday? What about Sunday dinners? Summer vacations? Church on Sunday....will Dad still be there singing in the choir? It all seemed so hopeless to me. And still I cried knowing that my life was changing; knowing I'll be the kid at school with the divorced parents. Knowing Dad won't come home for dinner at 5:00pm any more. I knew from that day forward my life had changed forever. Who I was was no more. This was the new me.
And all the while I was crying my mother was laying in the room next to mine with my little sister. She never came in to reassure me. She never came to hold me or stroke my hair and tell me everything would be okay. She never said a word. Not one word.
For years I held this against my mother. After all how could she be so heartless not to talk to me about the situation or reassure me? Why didn't she explain what had happened or help me to understand? How could she know I was so upset and not come to comfort me? Why did the whole summer go by without any acknowledgement of what was to come?
Now, years later, I think, who was comforting her? Who was answering her questions? She was about 46-47 years old and a mother of four children. She hadn't worked out side of the home since her first child was born. We lived in a six bedroom home on a large lot and she was alone now. She had lost the one to share her life with. Her first and only love. And my father had lost his first love too. They were just trying to survive and doing the best job they could under the circumstances. That is what I came to understand.
Our Dad re-married two years later. But that is a story I have yet to tell. He has lived a happy and fulfilled life.
Our mother slowly recovered as we all did. Still we have never talked about the divorce and what happened. I only know Dad's side truly. Mom never remarried and she only dated one guy for a short period of time. She has always been a hard person to understand; never a warm kind person at least not with her girls. She is a person who holds on to a grudge. She has never truly been able to be friends with my father or forgive him.
Dad never did sing in the choir again. He didn't come home for dinner at 5:00 pm any more. There were Sunday dinners just not with Dad. Christmas was weird because we now had Christmas Eve with Dad. Dad ALWAYS remembered our birthdays and would do something special for us. Sometimes he would come over and sit on the front porch in a rocker and Shirley or I would sit in his lap...but he wasn't warmly welcomed at the Barton Street house. His grandparents' house.
There was a lot of hurt in our family over that summer in the 1960's. That summer changed us all forever. I grew up a little quicker. I learned that things are not what they seem and there is never a perfect normal. Normal comes in all shapes and sizes and it changes all the time....at the drop of a hat. I learned that a single sweet affectionate sentence can change your life forever.
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