Seven

For years I didn’t know what Scrappy meant until my brother told me.   It that it is what fighters are called. Scrappy.   It fit.

She fought everything.  She fought for social justice by wearing an Afro in the 1960s to show solidarity with her black teacher friends.  She fought to communicate better.

“The thing in life is simple.  You have to communicate.  Say what you want.  Put your cards on the table,” Mom said.

She wanted a different life for us.  One that was more open.  Not quite sure how to get this, she sure tried.  But Mom also had a limited filter.  Her words were like a saber sword.  Another contradiction to the Margaret Mead openness.  But I understood her wanting. 

Five

My family wasn’t one to dither about things.  Determined to turn Dad’s sudden departure into a positive experience, the following week, we bought white paint for his old room.  Mom painted the walls while I did the trim and doors.  We bought white permanent press curtains at the five and dime in Woodlawn, and a few pieces of furniture from flea markets. We brought the sofa up from the basement and recovered it with a fresh brown corduroy fabric and added a few pillows for a television room.  

For the first time since I could remember, it felt like the tension in the pressure cooker lifted.

That summer, my mother got a National Science Foundation grant to study geology at the Ohio State University Field station in Ephraim, Utah. We drove her mint green Rambler station wagon with a white top across the country. 

It was the best summer ever.  We stopped in a bunch of caverns, old mining towns in the west, and arrived in Utah after a week on the road. 

We stayed in the Greenwood Hall in Snow College, where the graduate students with families were housed.  I had my own room. 

The summer was an adventure.  I started a business ironing clothes of the graduate students attending the geology field station.  Business was booming and I could hardly keep up with the workload.  It was great to have spending money also met a few of the locals in town and spent a lot of time with them.

When I was living in Utah that summer, I received a letter from my father. 

“Honey, I married a woman named Caral.  She is a college graduate and thirty nine years old. “

That was all he said about his marriage.  He wished me a good summer and enclosed a fresh five dollar bill for spending money for me.

It was hard to leave the west.  I thought I would always return and eventually settle in Utah.  But I had two more years of high school and then college ahead of me.  I sure was not ready for college.  I would give it a try.

 I corresponded to a few throughout high school.  Most went off to college and I loss touch with them. 

I rarely saw my father after that year. 

Four

Saturday mornings were always fun.  The neighborhood ladies would congregate in our kitchen, sitting on the kitchen stools.  As the group expanded they would fan out to the dining room table.  The coffee klatch began around nine a.m. and ended a few hours later.  Our egg man, Richard English, who was beyond handsome, kind, tall and could have posed as Mr. Universe, made deliveries to our home an hour after the gathering began. Children were not allowed in the gathering.  Often Richard would sit in for a cup of coffee, enjoying the female conversation immensely.

Milk was delivered twice a week in a glass bottle courtesy of Cloverland Farms.  The coffee klatch phased out in my teen years.  Milk deliveries came to and end as most women were now working outside the home.  Many had their own cars.

People began to spend more time away from the neighborhoods, often going out to dinner on special occasions.

When I turned sixteen Mom and Nana took me to Haussner’s, a well known Baltimore restaurant for my November birthday. Haussner’s was known for its good photo and myriad of paintings on the wall.   I never questioned Dad’s absence.  He rarely went to family outings after I turned ten. 

I was around sixteen when things changed.  Christmas passed and was uneventful.  Mom was especially quiet.  A few months later, as I was rounding the hall in second floor of our Cape Cod, I heard our parents speaking in soft voices. Unaccustomed to hearing them talk, I listened. 

“Do you want to end it?” Dad asked.

“Yes,” Mom said in a faint voice. 

I awoke my brother and together we listened sitting at the top of the stairs. 

“I’ll move out,” Dad told Mom. 

My brother, two years my senior and I were speechless.  He was off to college the following year.

I knew Dad liked the ladies and that they liked him, that he was seeing someone.  The year before the divorce, he had introduced me to a woman who happened to be  in the restaurant where we were to have dinner.  He invited her to sit with us. They did most of the talking  I began to wonder why I was even invited to dinner.

A week after my parents had their talk, on Good Friday, a U’Haul truck backed into our driveway. I looked out from behind the curtains. 

“I wonder if we’re getting a package?” I thought excited. Just then the truck door opened and Dad got out. 

“Dad, what are you doing?” I asked.

He didn’t say a word.  He loaded up his single bed from his room, family albums,  A worn dresser and his nature books.  He folded his clothes on top of the boxes, hangers intact, turned around and called to me from a distance.

“Half Pint, I will give you a call,” he said with tears in his eyes.

“I don’t understand, Dad.  What is going on?” I replied, still in my nightgown

Silence.

The old battered U’Haul pulled out of the driveway.

 As I went back inside, tears covered my face as I searched for her mother.

Mom asked to speak with me.

“Honey, your dad and I are going to get a divorce.  You, your brother and I will stay here.  Everything is going to be alright.  Just don’t tell your friends.  People are funny about this.  They may not like you if they know you come from a broken home,” Mom said. 

“Did your Dad tell you about this?”

“No.”

I was more than shocked. It wasn’t just the divorce.  How could Dad not tell me he was leaving? How could I not share this with my friends?  Now I knew definitively our family was truly torn apart.  Not just emotionally, but physically. 

I didn’t say a word the rest of the day.  I didn’t need to.  They had said it all.

He flew to Mexico City before the divorce was finalized  in Maryland.  I could not understand how he could afford such a trip.  My family had little money, but Dad always seemed to find enough for his own personal needs.

Three

            I grew up in Baltimore near the Woodlawn section of town.  It was typical of most tract communities lined with hundreds of white carbon copy Cape Cods, built in the ‘50s with scalloped shingles. Few people had more than one car per household. They tended to stay home a lot.  Especially the mothers who where home taking care of their children.

            We were a simple community and had the blessings and curses that come with it. A motley assortment of people, the blue collar and emerging white professionals, aspired to get out of the crab basket and seize the American dream.  One hundred sixty houses, lined up like desks in a schoolroom, only four streets, one street in front of another.  They were identical in size, not a Levitt tract home community, but on a smaller scale.

            “We’re like a giant easel,” the neighbors would say.

            Stock houses, built from one solitary plane.  Each family added their special touch just enough to differentiate them from their neighbor and to meet their individual needs. Some completed their basements with knotty pine or walnut paneling.  Most houses had a bathroom on the first floor with two small bedrooms next to it.  Other neighbors finished off the small attics, adding a room or two.  Some with bathrooms.

            Within these homogeneous Cape Cods lived a dutiful generation of people.

Nearly everyone belonged to the PTA or risked being shunned from the PTA President. Others volunteered in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies or Girl Scouts and for the fire department.  And there were many other organizations as well.  It was a generation of volunteers.  Commitment meant something.  They were working to improve their world.

             When a family wanted to complete their basement recreation rooms or pour concrete from the community concrete mixer that everyone pitched in to buy, the neighbors volunteered their help to one another.  When I was young, I thought my family special because they we chosen to store it.

            The children in the neighborhood were raised by the community.  People knew what was going on in one another’s lives.  Everyone watched out for one another.

            But one place the children could escape to was the large woods behind my house.

I remembered the short story about the Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It was James Thurber’s story about Walter Mitty, a timid person who had a two day daydreaming escapade. Walter Mitty fantasized about one exciting adventure after another.  It was in those woods I became whatever the Walter Mitty in me would allow.  There were turtles, some snappers, crayfish in the creek, skunk, muskrat, and every kind of foliage you could imagine.  A large rock pile some several miles in diameter created a limitless playground for my friends and I. 

            I’d work all day sometimes to clear the foliage to create the special little ground fort only to come back the next day to do it again. 

“You start out early in the morning when the ground is soft to pull out the greenery.  With a slight squat, you bend toward the root of the shrubs and give it a firm yank.  If you are lucky, you won’t fall backward,” I remembered telling a friend.

“There is so much work to be done.  If we do it together, we can finish early. Then we can sit back and enjoy it and we can eat our snacks.” 

            We looked a long time to find the perfect spot.  Nirvana means you find a spot near the water where it is cool even if you are only a child.  A large, brown boulder with marble-like mica running through it became their throne.  Upon it we imagined they were bigger, that we were in charge.  That we mattered.

            In the winter, the creek formed a glistening ice skating rink.  My friends and I would skate for hours under road bridges along the abutting psychiatric hospital.  No one ever worried about us.  Whether we walked along the railroad tracks, or swam in the nearby rivers, it felt safe.

            We watched with admiration the shanty across the creek the teenage boys were building.  They even had a wood stove.  They longed for a peek in the shanty, but were too timid to snatch a glimpse.  It was only when the police finally tore down the fire hazard that we saw the Playboy magazines, Camel and Marlboro cigarettes and the tiny refrigerator.  A few years later, we would learn that two of the boys, both brothers, went to prison because they broke into a convenience store.

            The woods were also next to the Seton Psychiatric Hospital.  Once in a while someone would escape.  The remains of a troubled man were found near my fort around my fourteenth birthday. He had shot himself in the head.  The Police and Medical Examiner brought his body through our back yard on a stretcher.  I never returned to the woods after that.

            It was in that community where everyone knew each other by name and although her street had some thirty houses, even as a child, I felt that I belonged.  We called her mother’s friends Miss Tillie, Miss Mary, Miss Beanie and Miss Madeline, in keeping with my grandmother, my Nana’s southern Maryland roots.         

            But in this tightly knit community, the neighborhood had a block party once a month rotating throughout the community.  My brother I relished the times when our parents hosted the event.  Even though we were eight and ten, I remember well the anticipation we had early each morning after our family hosted the parties just waiting to check out the leftovers. 

“Wake up.  There are some goodies left. C’mon down,” I would whisper in his ear.

Down we we would go to the basement.  Still left in the heavy double cement sink, where the block ice melted to water, we would find Nehi, Grape Soda and Root Beer, and a few bottles of Fresca.  My Dad and I went into downtown Baltimore the evening before to the ice house where this was purchased.  He would lie it in the trunk of the car between two pieces of leather to ensure it wouldn’t melt too much on the long ride home.

Dad’s family were originally from England, too, although he was born in New Jersey.  Most of his family immigrated to the south living in Virginia and North Carolina.

            Dad was the social organizer for the community.  He started the first baseball league in Woodlawn, an honor for which he was long remembered.  But his efforts were mostly confined to outside the family.  I don’t ever remember a closeness between our parents.  A cold war lived in the silence in our house for as long as I can remember.  Both of them would bury themselves in their individual interests. The tension was ever present and I always felt as though a storm was about to erupt.  It was like a living inside a pressure cooker. 

Dad wasn’t home much in the evening, but he was home during the day.  On occasions in the mornings, he would make pancakes before school.  They were ordinary pancakes, but because he made them they were special to me.  They were delicious.

            He worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance.  In the early mornings when most fathers were preparing themselves for work he often ,stayed in bed long after my brother and I had left for school.  Many times when we returned from school, he hadn’t moved. He wasn’t sleeping.       

Chapter Two: Scrappy

Two

Eleanor Mae was born in Baltimore. An Aquarius.  Born twenty-two years into the millenium. The second child and the only daughter, to a British mother, Jennie and a father, Howard, who enlisted in the Royal Canadian Mounties before the United States had gotten into the first world war.  It was there that Grandaddy lost his arm.

Her dashing older brother was three years her senior.  There was another dashing brother five years her junior.  A couple of siblings were born interspersed around them. Had they lived, there would have been seven children in the family.

Mom married at eighteen.  She and my Dad joined the Army.  Mom was in the Women’s Auxillary Corps (WAC). She must have been about twenty in this photo.

 My memory is that they were both in the military for two years.  After their service, they returned to Baltimore.

Somewhere along the line, Mom ran a lathe.  That was typical of most women during the war years after their spouses left for military service.  

Mom said her father was an alcoholic, that her mother always crying, always whining.  None of it was what I experienced except for my Granddaddy’s drinking.  He was often drunk.  I know that because he often fell off a barstool.  

I would spend part of my summer vacation taking care of him while his six ribs healed from the fall. There were lots of jokes about his drinking.  One in particular was that he needed something to strap him upright to the bar stool.  That was long before seatbelts were invented in automobiles.

My memory of my Nana was that she was loving, wore colorful jewelry (costume, but who cares) and always had a hat on.  She also said, “to mat toes” for tomatoes.  It didn’t make sense she didn’t pronounced potatoes the same way. It always made me laugh.

Nana, a petite and warm woman, came to the United States in the early ‘20s from London, England.  Over time she lost most of her accent except when she would speak of tomatoes.  She pronounced them “toe matt toes.”  It always made me laugh.

Nana had eloped in her early twenties to marry her handsome boyfriend from Maryland, who at the time of their meeting, was in London as he had enlisted in the Canadian military long before the United States got into the first World War.  That is where he lost his left arm. Nana later learned his family owned the land on which Cape Canaveral is built.

Nana says that there were maids in her home when she was raising her children.  An upstairs maid and a downstairs maid.  There is also evidence the family was wealthy.

Granddaddy’s parents died when he was young.  Penniless, he took a job working for a mean couple, living in a barn essentially an indentured servant. Granddaddy was seventeen years old when a lawyer came to the house where he was working. The attorney told him of his inheritance.  He left both the barn and his employers immediately.  After he finished high school he went to college.

I never knew Granddaddy to be anything but quiet.  Even as a young child, he never talked to me.  I was expected to hug him when I saw and left him.  I often wondered if losing his arm in the war, and living through the Great Depressions were some of the reasons he started drinking.

Mom said he was often abusive to her, both physically and verbally.  That she couldn’t go to medical school and had to go to work to support the family because of his drinking and inability to work consistently left her both angry and bitter. She never spoke about her anger but was quick to identify it in others.

Aunt Phyllis, my mother’s childhood friend, called her “Scrappy.” My brother and I called all of my Mom’s family and friends “aunt.”  It was a southern endearment. Phyllis was my father’s second cousin.  She introduced my parents to one another.

Phyllis was one of the best people I knew.  And very aware of children, unlike my mother.  Phyliss always offered me a treat when Mom and I visited her in the next town.