Chapter 8—Love and Loss

            My first great love was LeRoy Nutting, son of the high school principal.  We met in what today would be called Junior High, in eighth grade.  He had a flat-top, a short haircut that was combed with wax to stand straight up on top. It was popular in 1955. He was awesome at playing the piano, all kinds of music, from Broadway tunes to Boogie-Woogie.  Since it was puppy love, there was no "hanky-panky."  I think the most we did for several months was to hold hands in the movies.  Then at Christmas time, Karen, a classmate, invited the class to her house for a party with food and dancing.  We didn’t know much about dancing, but we could hold on to each other and move our feet a bit. 

            After the party got going, someone turned the lights out so only the Christmas tree lights with their red, blue, yellow and green glowed, while slow music was put on the record player. LeRoy held me in his arms, my cheek against his.  The room was quite warm, and the thrill of being close added to that heat.  Everything went into slow motion as we swayed to the sounds of Secret Love by Doris Day.  I wanted to kiss him and he wanted to kiss me, but we were afraid.  Then, in a brief moment, as quick as a butterfly landing on a flower, he brushed his lips over mine. Chills ran down my spine. 

            As the school year went on, LeRoy developed all kinds of friends, and some of them were other girls.  One day I was feeling particularly jealous, angry and desolate as he spent a lot of time with one of them.  After school I went up to my room under the eves, and wondered if there might be some solace in Proverbs. I had a little white Bible with my name in gold on the cover.  I opened and began reading, and for the first time I felt like God spoke to me.  It was about love, and when love is not returned, how it hurts. I learned later that the time LeRoy spent with the other girl was for a project they had been given by our teacher, and all was well again. 

           I don’t remember being surprised that the scripture spoke to my heart at that time, but I’m impressed that I turned to scripture when my first romantic stirrings were disturbed, impressed that such a young person would think to find life and comfort in words written so long ago. Many years later I learned to read scriptures as God’s love letter to me, and would find further deep comfort and wisdom at just the right moment.

           While I was practicing being in love, my parents who couldn’t get away from the family business for vacations, suddenly announced they had bought a cabin at Lake Tahoe for back taxes. We went up to investigate.  There was a small kitchen cabin just big enough for a wood stove, small table with chairs and some shelving.  In front of the cabin was a hand pump to get our water, and way out back, the necessary shed which we avoided as long as possible.  Next to the kitchen, was a large, square cabin with a round, black iron fireplace in the middle.  Beds were arranged around the knotty pine walls, and if it hadn't been cold most of the time, it would have felt like home.  When it was time to wash dishes, one of us would pump the water into a large dishpan and put in on the wood stove to heat.  It was a kind of deluxe camping out.  I wasn’t much interested, though, unless my friends could come along.

            Sometime that year, LeRoy and I were at a football game.  I was a cheerleader, and we were shouting and stirring up the crowd for our team, the Cubs.  From somewhere, the news fanned out over those gathered.  Paul Aldax, a classmate and good friend, had been shot in a hunting accident by another student.  This was death’s first close touch, and I was nauseated with alarm, tears running down my face. The whole crowd got quiet.  We left the game that night shaken by the terrible news.

            School was let out for the funeral which was held at St. Gall’s.  I’d never been in a Catholic church, and even though I was welcome that day with the rest of my class, I felt like I’d come into another world and didn’t quite belong. The ceiling was painted a wondrous blue and there were symbols I didn’t understand.  It was both inspiring and intimidating.

            For days I was heavy hearted, quiet inside and tearful.  I couldn’t get my mind around the fact that one day Paul was alive and full of life and the next, totally gone. My faith did not include the possibility of an ongoing mystical kind of life. It was too much to take in. Then there was the other part of the tragedy.  The school cook’s son was the one who had shot him accidentally.  The cook was Our Sunday School Superintendent, and I loved and respected her.  There was no room in my soul to be with this kind of tragedy, and there was no help from the adults in my life.  There in my cocoon, in a quiet kind of way, I tried to contain feeling alone, lost, sad, confused and horrified.   Withdrawn and hunkered down, I didn't even think of my little white bible.

            This was an initiation of sorts, and I needed what anthropologists call a “ritual elder,” someone who has the wisdom to share with someone younger, to help them understand life, so they can stand up to life’s hardships without being permanently wounded. I also needed help finding that sacred space within where Creative Love could work transformation. Although I didn’t have this support then, I would learn to seek it out. What would life be like if parents understood and could perform this role?

Chapter 7—A New School

            Fifth through eighth grades meant a new school which was just next door to my friend Cookie’s house, a block from my home. I could walk to and from easily. We had a merry-go-round that we could jump on as someone pushed, or we could all push and then jump on and gleefully spin around until we were dizzy.  We had monkey-bars which let us swing upside down and do all kinds of gymnastic tricks. One day I fell on my head which meant many chiropractic appoints ever since.

The slide seemed to be so tall it reached the sky, and we could shoot down its great expanse at tremendous speeds or climb up the metal poles that braced it.  At least Cookie could.  She could climb anything, especially the ancient weeping birch in her front yard.  I envied her athletic ability.  Behind the school was a grassy field for baseball, football, Rover-Red-Rover and other sports. The school itself was very old. I had to push with all my might to get through the heavy, high wooden doors.  Inside was the waxy smell of the varnished hardwood floors.

            One of the real perks of walking to school was being able to come home for lunch with Mom.  Just the two of us.  The old kitchen radio was on that played country western music in the morning. Now it was set to the station broadcasting Mom’s favorite soap opera, Pepper Young’s Family, sponsored by Beech Nut Gum and Camay, the soap of beautiful women.  Lunch was always a bowl of Campbell’s soup and a Wonder Bread sandwich, usually tuna.  I don’t ever remember Mom’s usual criticism or advice giving, just a sense of home, security, of safety and warmth.  This kind of comfortable tenderness was so rare in my family, and it helped to lessen my sense of being on the outside looking in.

            A buying trip to San Francisco meant Mom and Dad had to find some place for us to stay.  Susan and Steven were sent to my Dad’s father and step-mother in Folsom, California near Sacramento. I was scheduled to go to Mom’s parents in Reno, and I could hardly wait.  It would mean being the center of attention, outings to the Mackay School of Mines rock museum with Grandpa, and graham crackers with butter and a cup of milk at bedtime with Grandma. Maybe even a movie at the old Granada Theater. I could lay aside my cocoon for a few days and breathe in the rarefied air of unconditional love.

            Just days before our scheduled departure, Grandma pleaded exhaustion, and Mom had to generate a new scenario. Her best option was to send me to her old high school buddy, Dee, who lived in Fair Oaks, also near Sacramento. I didn’t know Dee and her husband, Harry, or her daughter Carolyn, or the house, or the smells of eucalyptus or the new tastes of unfamiliar foods. Not only did I have my cocoon on, I added several layers.

            By the third day, I couldn’t eat, cried a lot, stayed in bed.  Dee had some of Carolyn’s friends over hoping to snap me out of my funk.  As I sat on the porch with these girls and listened to their bragging about how they went to middle school with underpants off to tease the boys, something inside me crashed. My Puritan morality couldn’t find support here either. I was way over my head in a cross-cultural experience.

            I began to hibernate with the bed covers over me, repeatedly crying to go to be with my brother and sister, even though they were so much younger. Now if I’d been five or six, I wouldn’t see my behavior as that odd, but I was at least ten years old, maybe even twelve, and I felt orphaned, abandoned big time.  For me, this was a concentration camp. After a second day without my taking food or water, Dee became alarmed, and took me to my Dad’s parents. I calmed down a little and began to eat a bit, but I remained silent and aloof.  I often climbed a tree in the front yard and took out a one dollar bill my Mom had left with me, smelling the smell of my mother’s perfume and pining for home. After a few days, Mom and Dad returned and took us home to what I had come to experience as normal.

            Some children who have an alcoholic parent become absolutely petrified of desertion.  The emotional unavailability of my mom, because of her intense focus on dad, and dad’s unavailability because of alcohol and work produced a feeling of unworthiness in me, and anything that felt like abandonment produced the extreme symptoms I experienced during that time at Dee’s.

           In my new school, my fifth grade teacher was Miss Cody Shaw. It was whispered that her brother had been killed in the Korean War, and we were all to be very respectful of her broken heart.  She was a great teacher, tender and strict, but her most valuable contribution to my life was the adventures of Marco Polo. Our family didn’t travel, and these stories whisked me up into great fantasies of the mysterious East and great and exciting happenings across the sea.  I did the normal reading, writing and arithmetic, but wait until Marco Polo came on the scene.  I was entranced. Although they weren't the same as the bible stories I'd read, they held a certain luminosity that furthered my love of learning.

            This was also the year we had our first dance, a Boy Scout dance.  No one invited anyone particular, and we didn’t dress up.  We all just showed up.  I remember being strangely popular and only later realized it must have been because I would cuddle up to my partner and put my head on his shoulder.  I wasn’t fussy because I was a sucker for romance.  My other romantic gestures included passing notes during classes to who ever had my heart at the moment. There was the thrill of doing something forbidden.

            By sixth grade, I had developed a certain expertise at math, and during a math test, a boy named Harold whispered for me to give him the answers.  As I filled in my answers, I would quietly fill him in too.  I was promptly brought up on charges of cheating. Just trying to be helpful.  Not feeling particularly guilty about the whole thing, I expected it to blow over quickly.  However, we had class officers who met together to decide the punishment for such as I, and their creative penalty had me scheduled to play one full recess of football with the boys.  Thinking this was great fun, the boys proceeded to nominate me to carry the ball.  I was tackled…repeatedly…still wearing those little cotton dresses.  Not being used to rambunctious play, I felt like a victim being pummeled and beat up with lots of scrapes and bruises.  But I wasn’t going to cry.

            I thought the worst was behind me, but then I stumbled onto a mean dog in the neighborhood.  In those days, none of us kept our dogs penned in and they ran where they wanted.  This dog was a biter, and belonged to a beloved member of the community, my first grade teacher, Mrs. Booth.  With her he was probably an angel.  But I’d never had any trouble with him, so I wasn’t afraid of him.

            Then one day I went over to see if anyone was home at the Chambers’. All of us kids liked to visit the Chamber’s house across the street.  Myron and Byron were retired twin brothers, one of them married to “Grandma” Chambers, and they liked to tell stories of the old days.  Just being with them on the back porch listening to their drawl and their attitude of having timeless space for us was a big draw.  I climbed up on a pillar to better see into the house.  It was dark and no one seemed to be at home.  When I jumped down, I accidentally landed on Mrs. Booth’s dog.  Quick as a shot, he jumped at my face and took a bite.  I screamed and dashed for home leaving my sandals in the street.

            My mother met me at the door, my face dripping in blood.  Grabbing a dishtowel to staunch the flow, she bundled me into the car and we raced down to Dr. Hand’s office.  It turned out the dog had taken a piece out of my upper lip.  Mom, who was frantic over loose teeth, was coldly calm, but fretted about my looks.  Dr. Hand simply accepted the whole thing matter-of-factually, cleansed the lesion, reassured my mother, and gave us a powder to apply to the wound.  Today you can barely notice anything.  It never gave me any sense of self consciousness.  When it could have been my eyes or nose, I felt there must have been some divine intervention. 

            Mrs. Booth’s dog disappeared for good.  My mother only hinted that Dad took his rifle one night and  disposed of the animal.  That was the way of country towns.  You took matters into your own hands without giving it much thought.

Noticing Others

Chapter 5

            Second grade is a blur, probably because the teacher was a perfect replica of  The
Wicked Witch of the West. And not only did she put a spell on the classroom, she oversaw the lunch room on certain days too.  One day, as I headed down the hallway to lunch, I smelled my greatest fear—the stringy, slimy, stewed tomato and brown rice casserole that made me gag.  This posed a dilemma.  I couldn’t get to recess without cleaning my plate, and I couldn’t dispose of it in the garbage either.  I had to figure out a way to get rid of the dreaded food.  An nifty plot began to take shape in my mind.  I’d eat the fruit and bread, and put the offending food in my mouth but not swallow, then spit it out in the girls’ room when I had safely negotiated the exit.  

            I began to get nervous as I listened to the many chattering voices next to me.  I waited until the Wicked Witch’s back was turned so I could execute my plan.  I had to wait longer than usual because she-with-hair-pulled-severely-back, sent her beady eyes roaming the room looking for the least mischief.  The lunch room began to empty.  If I didn’t hurry, I couldn’t get away with it.  The Witch turned her back, and I stuffed my cheeks with the hated casserole.  My plate clean, I headed for the counter to turn in my dirty dishes, not realizing I looked like a healthy chipmunk.  I pushed my empty plate and utensils through to the other side.  When I turned around, I collided with HER.  In a voice not unlike my father’s, she commanded me to swallow. I froze.  I melted into a puddle of dread, chocking the miserable mess down and bolting for the door.  Outside, I found some friends playing jacks, and I calmed myself down taking the ball in my hand for a turn. Play is always a good remedy for distress.

            School itself, the studies, the spelling bees, this rule and that, were just things I had to put up with, a kind of doing one’s duty to society.  Then a special day would break up the repetitiveness.  I loved Valentine’s Day in third grade because we got to make our own post office box for incoming valentines.  We’d decorate shoe boxes with red crepe paper and white school paste, cut-outs and decorations of paper lace and ribbon, then cut a slit in the top with our name.  On that day of pink and redness, of little candy hearts with “so fine”, “all mine”, written on them, we’d go around to the other boxes and leave a valentine.  I thought everybody gave everybody one, but when Andy, a kind of bumbling, awkward kid who flunked third grade the year before, got only three, my heart started to bleed.  I had a special feeling for him because the year before, when I was sitting behind him in the bus on the way home, he’d stuck his arm out a window as we came to a stop sign that snapped his arm back.  He was in a cast forever…well, almost.

            This began an inner knowing to pray for others.  There’d be that inner tug of sadness and wanting to make it all better.  To stop the hurting.  I often prayed following Sunday School. After we rode our bikes home, there were the funny papers to read.  I’d lie on the floor, head in my hands, the big pages opened so I could read my favorite strips, like “Nancy,” my namesake.  Other family members were doing what they liked best, and the great, shiny radio console, at least as tall as me, would be tuned to the opera or the news.  No TV’s, cell phones, video games or e-readers in those days.  Some days I heard bad news, like the year the snow was so deep in the Sierra’s the six miles of snow sheds that protected the Central-Pacific’s tracks fell in and trapped the passengers.  Here came that inner tug of sadness and alarm, and there in my cocoon, I’d ask God to help.  On a different Sunday the news portrayed the disaster of a little girl who fell into a well and it was taking a long time to get her out.  I felt her aloneness, her pain, the dark creeping into my bones imagining myself in a similar mess.  The tug.  More prayers. I felt a connection to the Creative Mystery, and it drew me into my own private inner sanctum to plead the causes of others.

            Then in third grade I got myself in a real jam. School budgets were still recovering from the war years in 1950, and students received one pencil with eraser about every six weeks when reports cards came out. Wanting to please the teacher, I kept my papers neat, my answers legible, but to do this I had to use up my eraser. I tried to erase a mistake with the worn eraser, but the metal edges that held it in place tore a hole instead.  This meant getting a failing grade, and my stomach knotted up and my breathing almost stopped.  My mother was training me as a perfectionist. I felt like I had to do something risky, if only to be able to get a new pencil.  I conceived of what would be seen as an evil plot.

            The way I saw it was that if I got rid of my eraser-less pencil, Mrs. Roberts, our teacher, would give me a new one.  I wrapped up my old pencil and all other stubs of pencils in my desk in a piece of scratch paper and placed the bundle in the wastebasket by the teacher’s desk.  Then off to recess I went without a care.

            When we were all back in the classroom, my mouth dropped open; one of the boys in the class had noticed the bundle which had come loose with the pencils showing. 

“Mrs. Roberts!  Look at this!  Someone’s thrown away their pencils and there’s still enough lead to write!”

“Give that to me!” Mrs. Roberts, commanded.  The boy handed it over.  “Who did this? I want to know right now!” (Big scowl!)

The classroom was silent.  I was a frozen block of ice.

“I’m going to find out who is responsible for this!” the teacher promised.  She went to her desk and grabbed a notepad, tearing off the sheets one by one, glancing up at us every few sheets.  Then going to each person in the front of a row, she handed several sheets to be passed toward the back, “Now the person who did this can simply write their name and “yes” on the paper and that will be that!”  We did as we were told, but I never wrote a thing.

After reviewing her handy work and not finding what was expected, there was more grimacing.  My heart was beating fast, and my hands began to sweat.  There was no way I was going to admit to this act, which in my mind was no crime at all; but only a way to obey instructions to hand in neat papers!  It was the stupid rule that should be on trial, not me; but, having grown up with the maxim that children were to be seen and not heard, it never occurred to me to defend myself.

Finally, “No one is going to be allowed to leave this room until someone admits to this!”

That did it; I was caught now.  The buses wouldn’t wait for the country kids, and my budding morality told me it wasn’t fair for me to keep them when I was the guilty party.  I would have to sacrifice myself.

“Put your heads down on your desk, and the person who did this, put up your hand. This is your last chance!”

I did.  Turbulent feelings of shame, rage, fear, freeze, all the victim feelings I’d been learning at the family dinner table emerged and threatened to swallow me.  The rest of the day is a blank.  One thing I learned—your sins will find you out.

That night at dinner, I was very quiet.  Dad had gotten home late, having stopped at his favorite watering hole after closing the store.  Mom had been waiting, ready to unleash a torrent of disgust at his behavior.  Before he arrived she’d been punctuating the air like hornets hovering over a piece of raw meat, “Where is that man!  He’s probably at the bar!  Why can’t he ever get home on time?”  Now with him finally home, smiling and smelling of beer, she lit into him.

“Don’t you think the rest of us are hungry?  Don’t you care?  Why do you have to go to that bar anyway?”  Her tone of voice said, “You’re disgusting!”  Dad batted her words back to her, “Thoughtless?  You’re the one who can’t ever give me credit for all the work I do around here! I’d call that thoughtless. If you’re so hungry, where’s the dinner? Let’s get this show on the road!”

            I cringed on the inside, making myself small and hopefully unnoticed, hardly daring to breathe as their blaming and shaming grew to a white-hot heat.  Somehow I chocked down some food and left the table as soon as my plate was empty. I sought the refuge of my bedroom and a Nancy Drew mystery.

            After dinner, Mom called me downstairs for the nightly ritual of preparing my hair for school the next day.  Pin curls were the “in thing.”  Mom would comb out a portion of hair, dip her fingers in a bowl of water and wet that hair before wrapping it around her finger, smoothing it to my head, and anchoring it with two bobby pins.  I would turn as she finished each section until my whole head was covered.

            “Quit wiggling! Can’t you sit still?” Every curl was punctuated with some objection, the water from her fingers dripping in my eyes, over my cheeks, down my neck.  My chest got tighter and tighter as I tried to keep my own resentments to myself, not daring to protest lest the exclamations increase.  When I was old enough to take the project on myself, I felt relieved, relieved, but also insecure because I couldn’t do it as well as she did for a while, and there was no one to blame but myself.  I was experiencing the beginning tremors of the pull to be independent and still be protected.

            By the time I was ten years old, home life was becoming more intense.  I was considered old enough to babysit Susan, age 6 and Steven, age 4.  This was particularly necessary on Saturday evenings because the help at The Minden Dry Goods was off for the night, and mom and dad worked from  6 pm to 9 pm together.  They were just two blocks and a phone call away.  My job was to see that my siblings got their Saturday night bath and were ready for bed by the time my parents got home.  My pay for this immense challenge was comic books—Little Lulu (especially the big 25 cents issue with Witch Hazel), all the Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics, Andy Panda, Bugs Bunny and others.

            One loathsome Saturday night, neither Susan nor Steven would pay the least attention to my invitations to the bath.  Finally I got so frustrated, feeling caught between what was expected by my parents and what was possible, rage burst out of me, and I began pounding on the backs of my siblings, yelling and screaming for them to get into “that tub!”  Since I was a tiny thing, their reaction to me was the brush off.  I was no more than a pesky mosquito to them.  I knew I’d crossed a line anyway, and even though no parental discipline materialized—the kids never talked—I was forever marked.  I knew myself to be a “wild thing.”

            To my mother’s relief and my dismay, my boy friend, Larry, announced he and his family were moving away.  I was devastated.  On an outing to Wally Hot Springs that night, where our parents took us to wear us out so we would sleep, I floated face down in the pool all evening, weeping, crying my heart break out so no one would hear.  My first lost love.

            But summer vacation cured all ills.  The park in Minden was a block square with lush green lawn and a gazebo-like stage used for announcements on special celebrations like Carson Valley Days.  Every so often it would be flooded to water the lawn, and I and my friends would run through the warm, two-to three inch water, splashing to our hearts delight.  I could feel my smile running across my face, my heart leaping in my chest as I ran and danced and splattered in ecstasy, my girl friends at my side, all of us shouting and racing back and forth.  Only our parents worried about polio which did not yet have a cure.

            On Carson Valley Day, everyone who had a horse, a tractor, certain farm machinery, and every city vehicle would be paraded down the main street in front of The Minden Dry Goods where our family always watched.  My mom’s women’s group, Fortnightly, would dress in crazy outfits and have some kind of float or truck or strange vehicle, and drive wildly, shouting and laughing down the street, breaking out of any traditional role and just being obnoxious in a totally charming way.

            The lunch was amazing in the fifties—tender, pit-cooked beef with home made beans and cottage cheese.  We stood in line forever to get ours, then run home and eat our prize on the front lawn.  I remember the joy of not eating venison and the amazingly delicious taste of beef.  As a hunter, Dad went on several deer hunts a year, and our enormous chest freezer held the bounty.  To him we were the most fortunate of children, to have fresh wild game for dinner every night.  To me it was something to remedy with a healthy dose of my grandfather’s favorite—Heinz Ketchup.  This could be an offense…or not…depending on Dad’s condition when he came home for dinner.

            One night as the shaming and blaming took on a new intensity, I mentally drew an imaginary hood over my head to block it out.  It felt like a battle field with hidden land mines that could go off at any moment.  Mom looked with disgust at my venison, potato and ketchup concoction. “Do you have to make us all sick with that mess?”  Dad reached over and thonked me on the head with his thumb and middle finger, brows furrowed and teeth clenched in annoyance.  Oh! Oh! Tears coming!

            I jumped up and rushed out to my room.  There I found peace, quiet and buried myself in a new Nancy Drew mystery.  Nobody followed.  Nobody insisted I return to the table.  I didn’t care that I was still hungry, even if it wasn’t my favorite dinner.  “I’ll never do that to my children.”  Today I often bite my tongue rather than say something I’ll regret, but now and then I can’t help acting out the same way my parents did.  Creative Love isn’t finished with me yet.

Spinning My Cacoon

Chapter 4

I sought out my own moments of quiet joy when the weather cooperated, which was often. The blue skies of the high desert are visible over ninety per cent of the time, and these skies were my skies. If I couldn’t find a friend in the neighborhood to play with, I’d head for my “forbidden land,” a fenced off area that protected the old V&T train’s railroad tracks through a swampy farm region. I had to cross highway 395 south through Minden to get there, and in the fifties there were transients who hid out in the area. Mom warned me not to go there because a “tramp” could get me.

            The V&T line was the Virginia and Truckee Railroad which was built to transport freight to and from Virginia City during the Comstock Lode. One branch went to Minden, and when the line closed in 1950, they barbed-wired the old track across the highway and behind my house.  It was my second paradise, my hidden garden like my Grandmother’s rose garden, but even better in some ways.

            With the sun hot on my bare arms, I’d grab a baseball cap and sneak over to climb under the barbed wire and saunter toward the old bridge. The sultry, fermented smell of the swamp with its cattails taller than me lent an air of jungle adventure to my lair. The warbling of the red-winged blackbirds and yodel of the meadow larks were my wild things in this enchanted land. Alone but not lonely was where I felt safest, happiest, and I found these nurturing surroundings my new sacred place. When I was alone, in worlds of my own making, I could escape that sense of anxiety that had its own life, and instead feel of one piece.

            As I was soaking up the atmosphere one July day, I heard a sudden crash, louder than an animal would make, and my mother’s words, “A tramp will get you!” burst in my brain. No two feet ever ran faster that day, and whatever it was, I outran it.  But I would go back.  This blue-sky-bird-song heaven was more precious than anything--my Great Mother--home away from home. 

            After school one day, I told my mom about my loose tooth.  This was as important to me at the time as learning to drive would be when I was sixteen.  Mom’s eyes opened wide, barely believing that her oldest could be making this life passage.  I opened my mouth for her to test the tooth.  It wiggled.  Every day or two she checked to see if it was still there.  Finally, when it was hanging by a thread, she began to obsess that I would swallow it, choke and die. She enlisted my dad to pluck the offending projection.  So, when he arrived home that evening, he convinced me to let him put a string around the thing and pull it out, “Don’t you want the tooth fairy to bring you money?” he coaxed.  Being naturally compliant, I opened up. Yank!  “Ooops!” The string pulled off the tooth, and blood began to run down my chin. That was it! I commenced my escape, dashing into the living room.  With my mom looking horrified, Dad, determined to get the job done, and headed after me. 

Now you have to understand something about my dad.  He is going to have his way.  When he got a new hunting dog, Duke, and spent months training him, then took him out on his first expedition. That dog was going to retrieve.  I know this because of a local news paper story.  Dad gunned down three ducks, and they landed in the water.  He commanded Duke to retrieve.  Duke looked at him and wagged his tail.  Dad, in wading boots, took the dog out into the water as far as he could, pointed Duke in the direction of the ducks and again gave the orders.  Duke headed back to shore as fast as he could.  Dad followed, stripped off his clothes, tied a rope to Duke’s collar, and began swimming out to the ducks, towing the dog.  When they arrived at the ducks, and Dad again issued the command, Duke got the idea and he obeyed.

So you can guess what happened with my tooth.  Our house was arranged so you could run a circuit through the living room, down the hall, into the wash room, then the kitchen and back through the living room.  With me tearing up the carpet and Dad fast on my heels, it wasn’t long before I was pinned under him in receipt of the command, “Open your mouth!”  Now when you’re a six year old, small at that, and someone that appears to be twenty feet tall is right in your face, you don’t argue.  Out came the tooth.  That was the last time anyone knew I had a wobbly denticle until I held it in my hand.

As I look back on that today, I realize how I dissociated from my body and like a ripe caterpillar, spun a cocoon of defenses, and moved in.  I withdrew into the worlds of literature and nature, and close friends, places of safety and silence, often places of aloneness but not loneliness.  The cocoon shut out all unpleasantness, but it shut out love too.  I became an orphan by virtue of my self-protective creation.  But I put a nice smile on my cocoon; along with some nice little tap shoes so I could dance to anybody’s tune when asked.  I even became an orphan to my own true self.  But the Creative Love which birthed me wasn’t finished with me yet.  And my parents, whom I’d suspected of being aliens, proved it to me that day.

And yet I was loved…loved by aliens.  On a cloudy winter morning, right in the middle of first grade, snow began falling.  They were the big flakes, as big as my little nose, and they piled up and up and up until by early afternoon there were six inches of snow on the ground.  Bus drivers were called to come and pick us up and take us home.    Any unfamiliar routine often provoked alarm in me, and when a teacher hustled me onto a bus I didn’t recognize, I wondered where I would be delivered.  Noticing my classmate, Leola, a farm child, in a front row seat, I assumed I would be taken out in the country and then what?  When you’re wearing a cocoon, you don’t ask questions.  You just try to solve your own problems with whatever know-how you can muster.

The bus approached the intersection which led to The Minden Dry Goods, and I snuck up to the driver and in my father’s best voice, commanded him. “Stop here. I have to get off now!”  He did.  Now when you’re wearing little white shoes and little white socks and a cotton dress and a light-weight coat, there’s a lot of bare leg exposed to all that cold snow.  The walk home was memorable, as my calves turned into bright blue icicles.  The pain was piercing.  It was four, very, very long blocks before I saw my mother peeking her head out the door and urging me inside.  Her remedy for numbness was to put me into cool water (not warm, but cool), but then what can you expect from aliens.  Nevertheless, she was there and she cared.  You just had to look for it a little harder sometimes.

Increasing Awareness

Chapter 6

            It never occurred to me as a child that I had choices.  Mom decided everything for me, and I simply accepted that this was the way of things.  One of her ideas was to get me some musical training.  My first piano teacher was Mrs. Doane, a pink-cheeked, happy lady, who thought I was wonderful.  She gave me my first book songs.  I warmed to her enthusiastic encouragement and memorized all my pieces for her with keen determination.  I excelled for the short time I knew her.  Because she was expecting her first child, she decided to give up teaching, and Mom went in search of a new instructor.

            I was soon introduced to the New Woman from the Big City, who came out once a week to give lessons.  She was as starched as Mrs. Doane was lithe.  There was no personal touch in her style of teaching.  I think she hated doing it.  She was strict and uncaring.  Lessons began to be a dreary experience, and I put off practicing as much as possible.  This led to failure week after week under this Miss Strang. My shoulders sagged in a depressed kind of defeat each time I reluctantly showed up for the next lesson. I told my mom I didn’t want to do it anymore, but my words evaporated before they ever got to my mother’s ears.

            Soon Miss Strang had us all in line to perform in our first recital.  I knew my piece backwards and forwards and even looked forward to showing off a bit when the time came.  However, the week before the recital, Miss Strang gave my piece to another girl, and gave me a new one.  There wasn’t enough time for me to learn it, and when the recital came and I was called on, I marched to my impending doom, knowing I was going to fail.  It seemed that I made ten thousand mistakes.  When I finished, I couldn’t lift my head, but stood by the piano while people politely clapped for me.  I made a hasty exit feeling shamed, angry, disgusted and heartbroken.

            After that, I couldn’t bring myself to attend any more lessons from Miss Strang.  My mother was deaf to my pleas to stop this misery, so I took matters into my own hands.  I’d learned about paper cuts working with certain class papers, and when no one was watching, I slit my fingers just under the fingernail with my homework.  This caused the nail bed to fill with blood.  When I showed up at my lesson, I told Miss Strang I hurt my fingers playing soccer, and I couldn’t have a lesson. Mother must have gotten the message, that her dream of me playing piano at parties simply was not going to materialize, and I was liberated at last.  How easy it can be to some parents to dismiss the discomfort of a child, insisting on behavior that is counter-productive.  I still struggle with nerves to face the public and perform, although I’ve been a teacher most of my life.

            Summer would sooth over any disillusionment, and soon I my friend, Noreen and I were chatting on the old lawn swing just outside our back door.  We wasted away a long, hot afternoon, our “to and fro's” causing the swing to protest with rasping scrapes and cranky squeaks.  It must have been a Sunday afternoon when Dad was not at work, because suddenly he was standing at the battered, screen door yelling at us, “Cut out that noise!  I’m trying to sleep!”  If his unexpected appearance wasn’t enough, he was standing in his underwear with his private parts hanging out the left side of one leg.  I froze.  I don’t know what Noreen thought.  I felt like we were tumbling down Alice’s rabbit hole with no end in sight.  The only coping mechanism I had then was to pretend the whole thing never happened.  Children in alcoholic homes become expert at pretending.  I just sealed the whole thing off in a deep, dark inner room. It never happened.

            Later that summer when I was somewhere around ten or twelve, Mom and Dad enlisted me to fill in for a lady who couldn’t make the square dancing practice at my Aunt Marie’s and Uncle Lin’s next door.  I was dressed in a fresh outfit, a dress with a full skirt, all clean and starched.  Feeling excited and looking forward to the fun, we ran down the alley behind our house and into their backyard.  I remember the music, the words of the caller, the “do-see-dos,” the “allemande lefts,” and “promenade homes.”  My feet never touched the ground, my head in the clouds.  I was a princess at a country-style ball, never missing a beat, belonging, welcomed, having the time of my life.

            In the fall, after the first freeze, our parents would put paper bags, old kettles and rags in the trunk of the car and pile us kids in for an adventure in the pine nut hills south of town. I loved being outdoors with the astringent smell of the pines, the dusty scent of the sage-brush air, the crunch of pine needles underneath my feet and being able to go off by myself. We’d bump along dusty, dirt roads, coughing all the way, taking a left fork here a right fork there until we were out in the middle of the high desert forest.  Stopping the car, we leapt out, grabbed our bags, and ran off to search out the pine nuts that had fallen from the trees.  I liked the nuts raw or roasted, so a good half of all I found went immediately into my mouth.

            Sometimes we picked up the green cones themselves, stuffed with nuts and full of pitch, which blackened our hands and clothes.  Mom and Dad were the ones who actually got enough pine nuts to take home.  Some of the nuts were last year’s and hollow, and would float to the top when Mom washed them in an old pot later.  The nuts would be boiled briefly then roasted with salt in the oven.  Because of the pitch, the same pans were used every year so our every day pots were kept nice.

            One Tuesday it was Mom’s turn to have her bridge group over.  My brother, sister and I were all enlisted to get the house in perfect shape—window washing, dusting, vacuuming, curtains taken down, washed and ironed, bathroom (just one for the five of us) polished and shinning.  It wasn’t the work so much that we hated, but the constant finding fault with everything we did, the yelling, the disgust thrown our way, “Do I have to redo everything you’ve done?  Can’t you do it right for once?  I’ve told you a thousand times…!”  We breathed a sigh of relief when Mom finally let us take off.

            That night, as I lay in bed just down the hall from the festivities, I heard Mom telling her friends my secrets, things I’d shared with her in confidence.  Freezing was getting to be one of my normal states, and I punctually became an icicle.  I spent the night increasing the size and thickness of my cocoon, insulating myself from further betrayal, but also building up greater defenses toward love itself.

            Also overheard that night was Mom talking to someone about Diane’s mother.  Diane and I were constant companions.  Words like, “lost her mind,” “that female operation,” were tossed around.  And, the next day, I was told to be very quiet when I went to get Diane to play.  I had a kind of feeling that something very sad and mysterious and dark was taking place in that house.  Year’s later when I had “that operation,” I would understand about hormone imbalance, but at the time, it was a dark, shameful mystery.

            One warm fall morning before school, Dad grabbed two fishing poles, “ Get yourself into the car.  I’m going to teach you how to fly fish!”  This was a first. Curious and feeling pleased to be singled out from my brother and sister, to be asked to do something with Dad, just the two of us; I bounded out to the car and hopped in. It only took fifteen or twenty minutes to get to the west fork of the Carson River.  I took to my lessons like a pro, casting the line out from the low railed bridge and making the fly skip on the water back to me.  I felt elated when an eight-inch trout broke the water tugging on my line. I pulled in a nice trout. Dad showed me how to clean it.  I wasn’t bothered a bit by the blood and guts, focusing more on not slitting my own hands. I was very impressed with the way my dad handled his knife. We took several fish home for Mom to fry up for breakfast.  It was my first newly-landed trout from a fresh water river, and my mouth watered with anticipation. That rainbow tasted better than any food I’d ever eaten.

           

Chapter 3—Turning My Own Pages

The store continued to do well, and we moved into our own home in Minden, just a couple of blocks from the Minden Dry Goods on the main street. To a five year old, it looked like a castle.  Peach colored stucco with two stories, both of which we lived in.  There were white birches in the front, a large lawn and sidewalks to roller skate on.  Within months of the move, November, 1948, a new baby arrived—Steven.

Just two months earlier, I was six years old and was introduced to public school.  How favored I was to have a carbon copy of Tavie Howard in my first teacher, Mrs. Booth, another warm, loving and nurturing woman, and added to that a good sense of humor. Even when a child had an accident and pee ran down the isle, there were no reprisals, and everything was handled quietly.  I fell in love with school forever.

And then there were the recesses. The front of the school had large, dirt playgrounds.  They were perfect for outlining rooms of our “houses” in which we played together.  One of us would be the mother, and if Johnny Nelson was playing, he would be the father.  The rest of us would be the children.  If you were the parent you got to boss everyone else about.  Part of being a “dirt-housewife” meant you had to sweep up.  We would break off a small, lower branch of an arborvitae next to the school building and use it as a broom to sweep the dirt until there were no rocks or sticks showing.  I remember having a sense of determination and delight in whipping that little broom back and forth over the outlined space until another game was announced by one of the more assertive girls.

We might play hide and seek or “Mother may I?", or jacks with its onesies and twosies.  But the most fun was playing cowboys and horses.  All the girls wore cotton dresses to school, and each dress had a tie-belt in the back.  When the belt was untied, one on either side of the dress, they made for perfect reins.  Each boy would select a girl, grab her sashes and off they’d race through the grass at the back of the school yelling at the top of their lungs.  Larry Taylor, my “cursing instructor,” and I were always Roy Rogers and Trigger. (I love palominos to this day.)  It was exhilarating to gallop and prance and race for all we were worth.  However, when I arrived home with one or the other piece of belt in my hand, my frazzled mother, home with a baby and toddler, would heave a sigh of disgust, “You have no respect for the clothes on your back!  Don’t you know these cost money?  Don’t you know they have to be washed and ironed?  Don’t you realize how much work it is for me to keep you looking good, and this is how you repay me!” I’d cringe and freeze until she took a breath, then dash upstairs to change into my play clothes.

During one particularly heated game of hide and seek, I went charging up the school stairs to the “free” wall, and for some reason collided head on with it, knocking myself out.  I woke up in the “time-out” room with a woman pressing a cold, dinner knife against the great lump on my head.  This did nothing to help.  I can only assume she thought the coldness would help reduce the swelling.  This fabricated first-aid had to be where my disillusionment with institutions began.

One morning when I should have been getting up for first grade, my fingers were swollen and itchy with a red, bumpy rash, and a terrible pain in my head wouldn’t let me stand.  Being a child, and even though six years old, I simply did the next best thing and crawled down the stairs and into my parent’s bedroom.  I showed mother my hands, and cried about my headache.  Alarmed, she immediately called our country doctor, Dr. Hand who often forgot to charge for his services and also still made house calls.  He diagnosed me with Scarlet Fever, a dread disease at the time because fatalities occurred as there were no antibiotics.  First I had to be isolated from my sister, Susan, now two-something and my brother, Steve, a baby.  My father, Ken, was told to leave the house so he could keep working, and he moved in with his sister and brother-in-law next door, co-owners of our retail store.

We were all quarantined.  Fun for Mom and Dad?  I don’t think so.  They would talk through the kitchen window over the sink.  Dad would bring groceries or whatever was needed for the day, and there was Mom with a six-year-old with a serious illness,  and a two-year-old and a baby in her bedroom she was trying to keep safe.

 Then my sister, came down with the disease, and was placed in my brother’s bedroom downstairs to make it easier for mother to care for her. She had to be kept quiet in her crib.  My brother was isolated in Mother’s bedroom with the hope of keeping him from getting sick.  I was kept on a cot in the kitchen and not allowed to move.  For some reason we had to be kept as still as possible.  This meant six weeks of quarantine, six weeks of living on a cot in the kitchen and no school—I had just started first grade in the fall. I look back on it now and realize that many of the reading assignments and worksheets which kept me occupied on that cot must have been an attempt to keep me learning with the rest of my classmates. The best part of the disease was pulling off the dead skin cells after a while.  I must have looked like a moth-eaten beastie. I suspect Scarlet Fever weakened my immune system for future bouts of sickness, preparing me for long stretches of isolation and inactivity.  Reading would be my escape.  This love of reading is the wonderful gift my mother gave me.

            Dad was in most ways an absent father. He worked. He hung out at his favorite tavern. He worked. He slept. When he came home to dinner and headed the table in what seemed to me at the time, like an army sergeant, Mom heaped bitter complaints of his lateness on him.  Our dinner atmosphere was always tense.  When I try to remember my dad, I picture him behind the counter or at the antique cash register at the Minden Dry Goods or with bills laid out across the living room floor on a Sunday as he tried to decide which he could pay and which had to wait. On his rare days off, I remember his bringing home fish, game birds, deer and other prizes for our dinner.

Mom was good at dodge ball. She managed to stand between us and Dad when he’d “had a bit too much,” but her frustrations landed on us when we didn’t measure up to her perfect standards. She could find the tiniest bit of food left on a plate we’d washed, and then our ears would burn as she went on incessantly about our ineptitude and stupidity. 

And yet we were loved. Mom was a voracious reader, and encouraged us in every way to imitate her. By nine o’ clock, she would hustle Sue and me up the steep, shiny-brown wooden stairs to our bedroom under the eves. The knotty pine walls and the sloping ceiling gave us a sense of being in a tree house, and we scrawled our own graffiti into the wood above our beds making the space our own. Mom would sit in a chair at the foot of our beds and read to us books her mother had read to her, Honey bunch, The Bobsey Twins, The Burgess Stories of animals that talked, and later on the series of Oz books and Nancy Drew. I think she enjoyed revisiting the stories of her childhood with us. These were rare and wonderful moments of calm and happiness. The stories helped me realize I wasn’t the only one upon whom discipline might descend suddenly like a hawk on a mouse.

One of the early highlights of my life was learning to read.  I couldn’t put a book down once I’d started it.  Mom would yell up the stairs, “Nancy, get that light off!”  I complained to my grandfather one day, and he conspired to make me a special reading light which had two chains to pull, one to dim the light and one to brighten it.  I could dim it when Mom called up; and, when I heard her steps going away, pull the chain down just enough to be able to see.

In the winter, the oil stove downstairs sent very little heat up, and so we had mounds of quilts to keep us warm. My favorite amenity was the chrome hot water bottle in a blue-blanket cover placed in the bed before we hopped in. The sheets felt icy, but there in the middle of the bed was this haven for cold feet.

In the summer Dad would hook up the hose to the swamp cooler in our bedroom window.  The chilled air would blast its full power over our beds and flow down the stairs to give the house a bit of relief on those hottest of days which could get up in the high nineties, even higher.

There was one great and terrible disadvantage to having our bedrooms upstairs—no bathroom.  Enter the White-Enamel-With-Red-Rim-Receptacle-With-Cover for our pee, just big enough for a child’s bottom and deep enough to hold a good yellow gallon.  When it was introduced, I, as the oldest, was assigned the daily emptying.  I could put it off for days, until my mother questioned me about my duty.  By then it could be nearly full, reeking and heavy.  How I negotiated those slippery, varnished stairs without ever spilling a drop amazes me today.

But those stairs could also be a source of noisy delight when my new friends, Cookie and Sheila came to play.  Their steepness made a wonderful slide, as we would toboggan down them with blankets, pillows or just the seat of our pants, whooping and hollering at each bump so we sounded like a gigantic truck trying to start. Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!...Ahh!

Aliens, Possibly Aliens

Thanks for all the feedback on Chapter 1. I'm going to keep all your suggestions and implement them when I complete this first draft and start the second.  So please keep those suggestions coming. Don't think I'm not paying attention if I don't implement your ideas immediately. My current goal is simply to get the whole story down from beginning to end in the coming months. When that's done, I'll begin the "crafting phase" when all your suggestions will help a lot!

Chapter 2 – Aliens, Possibly Aliens

My father’s return from the army in March of 1946 brought about my departure from all I knew, loved and belonged to. I now had a father I didn’t remember, my mother had changed dramatically—pregnant with my sister. My sheltering, nurturing grandparents disappeared in a puff of smoke from our car’s exhaust, and nothing looked familiar—no rose garden, no swing, no sandbox, no old kitchen wood stove, no Catalpa tree, no apples, and no chocolate pudding skins. But my curiosity was still with me, and it wouldn’t take long to get into a mess.

In order to find the messes I could get into, we moved into a remodeled chicken coop between the country towns of Gardnerville and Minden—Tietjeville--just 50 miles south of Reno. There I met my first boyfriend, Larry Taylor, a little devil disguised as a blond, smiling cherub. He taught me to swear. I can guess what words he taught me, and before I knew it I was plunked down in our dark, spider-webbed wood shed, the offending words washed from my mouth with Lifebuoy deodorant soap. I began to suspect that my parents were aliens, and this was a very foreign land. Thus began a multitude of experiences where I was just “being myself,” and then ended up in trouble.

While I was being a pest, my grandfather was helping finance a down payment on our family’s retail store called The Minden Dry Goods, and on July 1, 1946, it opened. The shelves were stocked with men’s, women’s and children’s clothes, all kinds of shoes and boots, toys, jewelry, notions, yardage and lingerie. It’s hard for me to imagine how my dad was able to accomplish this only four months after returning from the war. His sister, Marie and her husband, Lin, already living in Minden and aware of the store for sale, were part of the plan, so that must have helped.

The store would take all of my dad’s time and a lot of my mother’s. As I think about the store today, I imagine it as a wonderful enterprise. The owners were always on the premises taking customers’ interests to heart. Mom studied fashion magazines so when they went on buying trips to San Francisco, she could bring back the latest styles to our country town. Dad knew all the background of every item, explaining the wonder of some blouse’s material. He could sell the moon to any Scrooge.

My next jam involved a Rotary picnic at Lake Tahoe. My father, who had a taste for hops, spent some hours with me and his cronies in one of the tents erected for their meetings. Somehow he and his buddies (who knows where my mother was) vacated the tent, leaving my four-year-old self to my own reflections. Being thirsty, and finding many almost-empty beer bottles around within easy reach, I simply helped myself to whatever foam had settled to the bottom. At some point I passed out and was taken home in the back of our old Plymouth, the one with running boards that I could hop on and hold onto the windowsill while my dad slowly crept down our street. My inclination to fill my mouth with whatever was handy must have begun then. This time there were only guilty looks between my parents, and I escaped any discipline.

Looking back on the casual way I was raised, I can see a growing sense of a lack of security building in me. In my home, life often seemed out of control, and it wasn’t long before I began to take up the slack, learning from my mother how to be a “controller.”  Over the years I would learn to be god of my own life, but not an all-powerful one.

To be good community members, my parents joined the local Methodist Church. The meaning of life began to make itself known to me in that small, white wood frame building located in the 1940’s in Gardnerville at the south end of town. A gentle, older woman kept us children occupied while our parents attended the services. Tavie Howard was this first official face of God to me—a nurturing kindness, tenderness and sweetness, and the source of fun and games. Before View-Masters and 3-D movies, there was the Stereo-scope which I looked into and found a flat photo suddenly transformed into a 3-D experience. Although my philosophy of faith received no illumination, the fact that church meant Tavie, love and some excitement were enough to fertilize my budding interest in attendance.

As The Minden Dry Goods began making money, we moved into the downstairs of a large rental house just in front of our old one. Other people lived upstairs.  And it wasn’t long before my mother brought a new sister home, Susan.  I did my best to ignore this helpless creation, unless I was harnessed to hold a bottle for her while Mom fixed dinner.

            Larry and I continued our misadventures, catching crawdads in the irrigation ditch which ran into a sheep pasture nearby. Of course we had to climb through the barbed wire fence to play with the sheep, tearing our clothes. Coming home from my sheep-hugging adventure the first time, I shocked my mother with half-closed eyes and red welts all over me. I was allergic to sheep.  Who knew.

            To dissuade me from mishaps with Larry, Mom invited a little red-haired girl named Georgia over to play. My first look at her told me she was foreign, with a large red birthmark over her cheek and chin. I was sure she had some kind of disease, and, when left alone together in the play room to do whatever we wanted, I locked her in the closet and took off to find Larry. Just being myself. Another surprise punishment ensued without a clue to me of what my sin was. Withdrawal and separation became my pattern when I encountered new and uncomfortable situations in my life.

Battle Born

I would love your help....

With the New Year, I begin my autobiography in first draft form.  There will probably be mistakes in grammar and spelling.  Please feel free to point them out.  There will also be chapters of little interest to you.  Let me know why. If they don't interest you, they probably won't interest others.  Hopefully, there will be incidents that help you remember your own special moments or that touch you in some way.  Let me know that too.  Thank you for your participation in making my coming book worthwhile.

Chapter 1 – Battle Born (Opening paragraphs only)

A river runs through my birth place. The river has “rills,” and not just any rills, but “silvery rills” according to “Home Means Nevada,” our state song. This is my hallowed ground, my sacred space, Reno, Nevada, whose history of divorce and gambling might lead you to believe it is anything but holy. Not so! Love covers a multitude of sins, and it was love that birthed me in this place…actually two kinds of love…the Creative Love of a power greater than myself, and a more convoluted, earthier kind of love, my parents’ love, complicated by conflicting desires and self-motivations, and yet it was still love.

*****

Trying to re-orient myself and find out “who I am now,” no career to define me, no children to raise, no one’s time clock to meet except my own, I spent the morning with my sister, Susan, going through newspaper clippings and hand scrawled notes about our family and its roots. We kept thrusting what we found under each other’s noses, “Look at this!  Can you believe that?!”

Gradually, little by little, but steadily, a new and stunning truth began to grip me. It was like walking through a tunnel and coming out the other side to see the glory of the ocean. A whole lot of people had to be born, fall in love or be thrust together, and have children over hundreds of years, had to pick up their lives and possessions and move thousands of miles (some even had to die) in order for me to be born in Reno, Nevada.  Surprisingly, this knowledge boosts my morale and helps counter those “Sweeties” I get at the grocery store from the checker who sees the gray hair and the wrinkles I’ve accumulated over the years in this dry, high-desert climate.

            The five major family lines, with stories, that have come down to me are woven into my ancestry—the Palmers, Stanleys, Munks, Watsons and Fishers. The Palmer line has a certain distinguishing feature that didn’t get promoted by the time it got to me.  No one ever bragged about this fact, but with my Ultimate End approaching all too rapidly, it gives me something of interest to pull about me like a cloak, kind of providing a buffer between me and the Deep Sleep—the remarkable truth that my roots go back to the Mayflower!  I know this from a scrap of paper my sister and I ran across the day we dug through our archives.