Tomboy childhood

Once I thought I was going to write a thesis on how their environments differentiated southern writers from northern writers.  Fortunately I never did, and saved myself from being found guilty of terminal pretension.

I grew up easily classified as a tomboy, and I do have some theories on what makes a tomboy.

1.       The neighborhood is populated almost exclusively by boys.  On looking around, the tomboy finds no one to play with but boys, excepting the sissy girl next door who won’t play with you anyway because you play with the boys.

2.      The tomboy realizes early on to be part of the gang you have to play fair, not rat anyone out and take a hit on occasion.

3.      The tomboy is rational about not being a boy.  I almost quit being a tomboy when I got glasses in the fifth grade.  We settled it as follows:  someone held my glasses and I wrassled my challenger to the ground.  Having settled there was no need to do that again and risk breaking my glasses, I remained a tomboy for another few years.

4.      The tomboy’s parents have few expectations past doing well in school, helping around the house and staying out of trouble in the neighborhood.  And coming straight home when you need the emergency room for stitches.  It may have helped my mother was a tomboy with only a brother and boy cousins.

5.      The tomboy knows when to exit the field.  There’s a change in the air.  The side lot fills up for a pick up game, but the only hearts really in the game belong to the little kids who have been coming up.  Their big brothers would rather be under a car hood, and to tell the truth, you are packing your pj’s for a sleep over with the girls you’ve meet in ninth grade.

It’s sad that children don’t know childhood until they look back on it.  Hopefully they can appreciate it.  The concept of childhood didn’t exist until the late 19^th century, and even then, as now, not for all the children in the country and the world.  Children have the same amount of time free today as in my childhood, but it seems filled with endless structured activity.  I won’t be around to see how that turns out.    Probably just fine; they’re all in it together.  And there will be a new generation of grandmothers fussing about the past.

Jan and neighborhood buddies enjoying an apple on a fall afternoon.

Just goofy

The whole extended family often visited when the children were young. Several generations of brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, grandparents, aunts and uncles in the summer, in someone’s back yard, watching all the children at play.  Children were required to get dirty so they could get a bath and go home to bed.  My niece and a nephew:

Sometimes the grown-ups might have made themselves just as dirty.  My dad on a tiny tricycle. Early ‘70’s.

My Uncle Hank back from a spin up the road.  I believe that’s my brother’s motor scooter.

When I got my motorcycle I drove it home from the dealer to my parents’, but needed practice trips through the neighborhood before I rode to Mentor.  I practiced corners, downshifting, stopping and starting.  Feeling pretty confident after a couple of hours, I started back up Gardendale hill and saw my two brothers across a vacant field, on Moraine.  There was a footpath between the streets that went down a hill, across a flat plain of ground that Grandpa Schook gardened, back up a hill and onto Moraine.

The grades down and up were fairly steep, and as I started up the grade to Moraine my bike gave a little choke signaling imminent stall.  Walt and Mel were yards away, above my head on the road.  Mel yelled “Downshift and give it some gas!,” both of which I promptly executed.  The front wheel immediately came up off the ground.  I looked up at two brothers laughing so hard as to be no help as the front wheel rose higher and higher.  No question I would be over backwards in a minute.  What to do?

I stood up on the pegs and leaned over the handle bars to get the front tire back on the ground.  And my brothers kept on laughing.  Leaning on each other, tears rolling down.  I crested the hill on the back tire and got the front tire down only when I reached the level of the road.  My brothers were behind me, shaking with laughter.  I was furious.  I did a one footed U turn and aimed straight for them.  At the last moment they moved aside, revealing the big oak tree they were in front of.  I missed it, too, and turned to face them.

“That,” said Mel, “is called a wheelie.  You’re damn good.”

Dad’s hats

  

Dad generally wore a hat on leaving the house.  So did my grandfathers and my uncles.  They would no more have gone on a Sunday picnic without the hat than without a suit coat and tie.  The hat was part of the outfit.  Once when I was two or three I was on the corner of Euclid Avenue and 12^th Street in Cleveland, waiting for the light to change to cross the street.  Dad had a load of parcels in his left arm, clutched to his chest in order to also keep hold of the brim of his fedora.  My hand was in his right hand.  As the light changed and Dad helped me step down off the curb the wind caught his hat and sailed it down the sidewalk.  Dad considered only briefly; we crossed the street.

There was a green fedora on the hook in our closet, too.  Dad wore it to irritate my mother on occasion, and he always wore it on St. Patrick’s day.  It didn’t scream green; it was a very subdued dusty cedar green.  I remember him going off to work in that hat, once a year, for a long time.  Then one day it no longer hung in the closet.  I doubt it blew away.

After he retired, Dad’s penchant for hats blossomed.  He experimented with caps.  He had a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker for a time, but it really didn’t suit him and it disappeared.  He had a Russian Cossack that he did wear all winter.  It was a beauty, dark, curly lambs’ wool.  I think it was left behind somewhere and lost.

Dads' hands down favorite hat was his French beret.   Unlike other hats that he removed on entering a building, greeting a friend or sitting down to a picnic, the beret never left his head. He found the headwear of his life late in life, but he logged more beret hours than any other, including the red wool French Canadian hat he wore every winter.

One summer, on a joint family vacation, probably rock hunting in North Carolina, we were touring some historic site, looking in old barns and cabins at the displays.  A small knot of tourists always seemed near us, chatting excitedly.  Finally two of them broke away, approached my parents and asked, “Excuse me for interrupting, but may I ask, are you Norman Rockwell.”  My dad was so pleased he led them on for a few seconds past my mother’s tolerance.  She said, “Now, John, tell them I’m not Mrs. Rockwell.”

The only picture I have of my dad with a hat, and it's his beret.

Tasty pesto

Beth used to live upstairs in a two story on Whitcomb.  I love the name of the street.  It was only a little seedy back in the ‘80’s.  Beth’s friend Carol and her son Joseph lived downstairs when Beth moved in.  Their cat, Neighborhood, eventually became Beth’s cat.  When Carol and Joseph moved, Shelly and her husband and Bekka moved in.  Hammy came along shortly thereafter.  That’s enough of the group to be getting on with, although no one figures in this story except Beth and her friend, Christina.  The redhead who grew up next door in Mentor.

Beth always favored ethnic neighborhoods.  Her stock argument for living in the city was “If we don’t live here, Mom, who will?”  This was a fairly old Italian neighborhood of small lots, tidy homes, occasional two family homes, built that way in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s; the upstairs and downstairs identical.  There were sidewalks, flower gardens and adventures.  Like police helicopters overhead, illuminating the bushes looking for a suspect, and all the neighborhood out on their first and second story porches, watching.  Stories any mother likes to hear.

Chrissie must have finished her degree in harpsichord because she was back in Cleveland, taking her law degree at Case.  Beth may have been back at school, too, earning a degree that earned a living.  I think they were between boyfriends and especially partial to cheap entertainment, like the second run movie theater on the corner.  Experimenting with cooking, having parties that involved a little money and a lot of friends.

Beth invited me to come to supper one night for a spaghetti and pesto dish Chrissie was making as a trial run before trying it out live.  I arrived and found the table prettily laid and the two girls working in the kitchen.  Basil leaves, garlic cloves, pine nuts and olive oil was disappearing into the mortar and pestle.  I hung out in the kitchen door, watching the two girls working.  They decided they needed more basil.  One of them went out on the back landing and returned with a flat of tall and leggy basil seedlings.  Past their prime they cost a pittance at the corner nursery.  They made excellent pesto.

Open winter

The subject of the mild winter came up last weekend.  With family patriarchs around the table I suppose it was inevitable.

My time and event continuum is tenuous; I’ll take most anyone’s assertion of a date and a fact as gospel.  My brother Walt said, apropos summer leapfrogging spring this year, winter was so mild twenty nine years ago he rode his motor cycle to work every day but one, when it snowed.

How did he remember that?  Well, the next year he was transferred to another city for his job. Oh.   Jan backed that up by saying Yes, that was the year mom broke her shoulder. Mom said “Let’s go home, Dutch,” to the Doberman, who immediately took her down Walt’s steps and through Walt’s motorcycle to get home.   And Walt’s motorcycle was on the sidewalk in December because he was still riding it to work.

I wondered if I could find out anything about that winter and asked my friend, Mr. Google.  He immediately sent me to a 1984 Ohio Journal of Science article devoted to the winter of 1982-83 in Ohio.  The winter was among the mildest of the 20^th century, warm and rainy, record high temperatures set, due to the jet stream coming from the west and south west for the season, and warmed by El Nino. 

Another proven fact and it happened just twenty nine years ago.  I can remember mom calling some winter we all lived here an “open” winter.  It didn’t mean much to me at the time except to realize she meant it was mild.  I’m sure I won’t be lucky enough to turn up another Ohio Journal of Science citing some winter between 1988 and 1997 as mild, so we’ll take her word for it.

The term open winter may come from sea faring times, when the water was open, or ice free.  On the first day of spring here in Northeastern Ohio, our magnolia is open.  Completely unheard of. 

 I read in the morning paper that the seasonal ice cream stands are opening early.  Now that’s worth a look.