Growing Up

 Growing up we didn't have a safe loving home that is part of the American Dream, ours was more like an American Nightmare. Our parents were very young when they married and Mother had 3 children before she turned 21. We lived in some bad places, places that probably should have been condemned. I remember fights, never physical but loud and things being thrown, sometimes even food and at times there was precious little food. Daddy wasn't skilled at anything except running around and drinking. I remember a story about Mother sitting in a porch swing with my Granny (Daddy's Mom) and he left to go on a date and Granny asked her wasn't she going to stop him, Mother looked down at her swollen belly and asked how she was supposed to do that? So, that was what we lived with, to us it was normal. I do remember some fun times as well, I remember especially a Christmas cocktail party we all went to waaayyyy back in 1960, shortly before I turned 3, Mother was 4½ months pregnant with Paula (who was born very early on the first day of February) it was the first time I had seen my Mother dressed up, she was so beautiful and Daddy was so handsome, I saw drink glasses with fruit perched on the side and marveled at how they cut the glasses to get that fruit to stay there, Mother burst my bubble by telling me they cut the fruit, not the glass. Someone had a Derringer pistol and put it down at his side and pulled the trigger, unfortunately it was level with my ear and I have had tinnitus ever since.  I don’t much remember my parents doing anything together…except…when there was an emergency. A medical emergency, weather emergency or the threat of rioting after Martin Luther King was assassinated.  I remember one big snow  when they walked (we rarely had a car) to the grocery store, my brother Buck and I dared each other to go outside barefoot, we ran around the back yard and then came back in to warm out frozen feet at the heater, standing on a chair to be closer to the heater coils. We probably played like this for about 20 minutes before we saw our parents coming back. We quickly cleaned up the water and put the chair back where it should be, ha, fooled them. Oops, we didn’t think about the naked footprints all over the back yard, but Mother calmly told us to not do that again and explained to us as we stood in astonishment at how they knew our secret, that we had left footprints.  Who knew? So, for some reason this came to mind as I have been sitting here watching the neighborhood children making spears from icicles and bombs from snowballs. Skating and sliding along the frozen ground and laughing at each other’s antics. What a great day in Happy Holler.