My 2 Decades

  When I was 8 years old, Bambie (next door) was 10 and Candy (across the street) was 6.   The two of them had very little in common, with different interests and a 4-year age span.   I was in the enviable position of being in the middle of an unstable threesome.   We rarely were all friends at one time.   Candy was a kind of a play-inside, dolls-and-hairdos kind of girl.   Bambie was an outdoorsy tomboy.   It was the best of both worlds for me.   (Interesting how both my friends at that time had future stripper names.   Candy was short for Candace, which no one but her mother called her.   Bambie was a nickname given her by her brother, when he was reading the Disney story of that name). Bambie was a little bigger than me, and a little stronger.   She could hold me down and spit in my face, or make me eat grass; luckily, those incidents were rare.   We were both skinny and gangly, often had skinned knees, and endured the “pi...

  Although I had taken to kindergarten (at the nice new school right around the corner from my house) with the greatest of ease, first grade was a shock to the system from which I did not recover for some time.   Holy Family Elementary School was 10 years old in the fall of 1961, but it looked and felt much older.   It gave the impression of a European abbey, certainly not an elementary school in Southern California.   When I watched movies like The Sound of Music, the Roman Catholic edifices in Europe seemed very familiar.   The transition from kindergarten to first grade felt a lot like joining the military, or going to prison.   I got a severe short haircut, was issued a drab, scratchy uniform (yellow shirt and dark green skirt and sweater), and was made to recite the rules in unison with my classmates.   While kindergarten entailed walking around the block, first grade meant a school 3 miles away (a different country, in my estimation).   ...

  My family moved to a suburb of San Diego called Kearny Mesa in 1957. There had been scrub brush and canyons there not long before, where the area had been bulldozed and the subdivision built.   Land in Southern California tends to slope up from the ocean, then level off in tablelands (the word “mesa” means table in Spanish).   My dad referred to our house as being “up here on the mesa” There were 2 basic floorplans that were repeated over and over for blocks as the houses were built, all painted in a limited variety of pastel colors (yellow, blue, pinkish…the occasional white).   Because the houses were built with the same plan but flipped (what is called mirror image) it didn’t occur to me until later that everyone I knew lived in some version of the same house.   It also didn’t occur to me until much later that the neighborhood was confusing.   Perhaps partly because all the houses were alike, perhaps because of the canyons that wound through the neig...

Up until the hour of my birth, I was a boy. We don’t know much about a baby before it is born, and in 1955 we knew even less.   What will it look like?   What kind of personality will it have?   How smart will it be?   We could guess at eye color and hair color, but even that was often a surprise.   Then and now, though, the first question asked and answered tends to be the gender.   Now, we have gender reveal early in a pregnancy and the decorating in pink or blue can begin. Baby “James Patrick” was eagerly anticipated by friends, relatives, and strangers since 2 girls and 2 boys would be a fine balance. The family consisted of the oldest, Kathie, who was almost 14, and the kids, Marilyn and Mike who were 9 and 8.   Mike had two older sisters and had been feeling outnumbered for years, and looked forward to evening the score.    My brother tells me he has a clear memory of my dad getting home from the hospital very early in the morning a...