Excitements: Imagined, Real and A Near Miss

The Past Remembered Anew:

How Childhood Moments Reveal   

Who We Are Now

Gin

Kidnapped

You can’t blame TV. We didn’t have one yet.  I hadn't started reading Nancy Drew so plots about people just disappearing were not in my head. Still, when I arrived home from fourth grade one afternoon and my mother was nowhere to be seen, only one thing occurred to me.  Someone had kidnapped my mother.

I looked at the crime scene.  A step ladder was set up in the living room near the  wall; she had obviously been painting.  The open bucket of paint occupied a spot near the ladder with the brush still wet.  My mother was not in the living room. Not in the kitchen.  Not anywhere. My older brother wouldn’t be home for a while. He had a job after school at a local grocery. My father wouldn’t be home until 5 after his shift at the Pittsfield General Electric plant.  I looked at the clock.  It was just past three. My world was spinning out of control. So I did the only reasonable thing. I sat down on the floor near the ladder and cried. As I peered up through my tears, the room looked crooked and wrong.

After a few minutes, my mother came in through the front door. She looked at me both confused and concerned.  “What's the matter?”  I couldn't stop crying right away, but managed to mumble out, “I thought you were kidnapped.”  She looked at me kindly enough but started to laugh.  “Why would you think that?”  I pointed to the room.  “You weren’t here.”   She reached in her apron pocket and pulled out a Hershey bar with almonds. “ I went to buy us a treat.  I just didn’t get back before you did.”   Then she sat on the floor next to me. We broke the candy bar into pieces.  It felt so safe sitting there next to her, eating chocolate.  My world had been righted.

Breaking and Entering

When I was nine we lived in a duplex triple decker, six families, on Dewey Avenue in Pittsfield. We were on the right hand side on the second floor. On the front of the building each family had their own porch. I loved that. I could sit out there to watch whatever was happening down on the street.  If I saw some kids starting to jump rope or draw a hopscotch pattern, I'd run down to join them.  If no one was around, I’d just sit up on the porch and read. It felt good to know I wouldn’t miss anything going on in the neighborhood.  I wouldn't have to go down and be alone on the street with nothing to do.  I could wait until I saw activity in the meantime doing my other favorite thing, reading.  But this is a story about the back porch not the front.

In the back, the building was crisscrossed with stairs.  The stairs connected to landings which led to the kitchen doors on the backside of the house. My bedroom was next to the kitchen but away from the landing. There was a gap between my bedroom window and the stairs. From my window I could peer beyond the staircase structures and look into the backyard.  I knew the house was built with a certain symmetry (even though I didn’t know that word at the time). There was another staircase with its landing for another kitchen door and another bedroom window, a mirror image, for the apartment next to ours.

My older brother was in his early teens, but he seemed like a grown-up to me. Now that I think of it, I realize he was just in ninth grade, but he had a part time job, stayed out late (to me) and seemed to have friends who weren’t part of the neighborhood. People we didn’t know.  Guys he hung around with in the evenings doing, I don’t know, grown-up things.  I looked up to him in a way, but I also felt distant in other ways.   He was a teenager; I was just nine. He was out in the world; I spent my time in the house or in view of the house.  Our lives didn’t intersect much. We had our parents in common and where we lived, of course,  and while we were nice enough to each other, we led separate lives.

One night I was startled awake by odd noises coming from outside my window.  I thought it was voices  but I couldn’t make it out.  I lay quiet hoping I had been dreaming and that the sounds would stop once I was fully awake.  They did not.  I lay very still wishing whatever it was, whoever it was, would go away.  Suddenly I heard something banging on my window.  My room was on the second story and the landing to the kitchen door was three or four feet away. No one could be there banging on my window.  There wasn’t anything to stand on right outside.   I tried to imagine what was making the noise coming up with only scary options.  I tried just being quiet again.  If I were quiet, so might whatever was outside my window.  My strategy didn't work; the rapping got more insistent.

I finally decided to be brave enough to get my parents.  This action required courage since once out of bed I had to go nearer to the window to reach my bedroom door.  I briefly thought about opening the shade to look at whatever was out there, but I really knew I wasn’t going to do that.   I made it to my parents’ bedroom waking them.  At first they told me I was just dreaming but I insisted something was banging on my window.  My father looked at me, “Ginny," he said reasonably, "Your room is on the second floor. Nothing can be banging on your window.” I looked down sheepishly knowing he was right, but also knowing I wasn’t going back to that room alone. 

I convinced them just to look. My mother came with me into my room while my father went to the kitchen door near the back stairs.  My mother lifted the shade. There was my brother standing on the stairs with a broom in his hands, the handle of which was just long enough to bang on my window.  He had snuck out, lost his key and thought his little sister would let him in.  While I was relieved, my brother was anything but. He was mad at me for telling on him. I don’t think he talked to me for days.  

Years later, as adults, David would regale me with stories of his escapades when he was that teenager.  It didn’t occur to me at the time to remind him of this event, to share my side of the story.  "I thought some one or some thing was breaking in to my room," I could have told him. Interesting how memory can be so selective. I was engaged taking in his memories but not accessing or sharing my own. Now that he is gone, I no longer have that chance to explain had I known who had woken me up,  I would have gladly covered for him that night so long ago.

Evacuation

In the spring of my fourth grade year, 1954, we got a TV set.  It was in the living room, a small black and white (of course) with a rabbit ears antenna that my brother would  manipulate. Often the picture would be perfect as he adjusted the antenna, but as soon as he stepped away the picture would break up again.  We'd all yell at him, “Just stay there and hold it!”  

In any case, it was a Saturday night. We were in the living room watching “Your  Show of Shows” with Sid Caesar and Imogen Coca.  My baby sister, just a few months old, was asleep in her crib in my parents’ room.  The Show of Shows was a must see for my parents. It may have been the reason we got the TV in the first place. I liked it too because I thought it was funny. Most of the TV my parents watched was news or culture, too serious for me. The days when children got to choose what to watch were years ahead.

During the show my mother began to complain that she smelled gas. At first my father dismissed her concerns. “You are always worrying about something.”  She would be quiet for a bit and then mention it again.  Eventually my father went into the kitchen to check the stove returning to report there was no problem.  “Let's just watch the show," he said a bit gruffly.  But by the end of the show, even he became concerned as well.  There was definitely something wrong. 

My father went downstairs to see if the neighbors noticed anything amiss.  What I was told later, much later, was that my father was shocked to see a man literally kneeling on the kitchen floor with his head in the oven with the gas on full.  My father rushed in, turned off the gas,  pulled the man out laying him on the floor. Then he went upstairs to call the police.  He told my mother to take me and the baby outside. I was to put on my bathrobe over my pajamas to go to the house next door. 

The neighbors included a boy I liked, Jack, but he was already in bed for the night by the time we arrived. I never saw him.  Disappointing. We sat in their living room peeking out the window at the commotion next door at our house. People leaving the building, an ambulance arriving for the poor sad man downstairs, and fire trucks checking on the possibility of an explosion. In spite of the excitement, I fell asleep on their couch next to my mother.  I remember waking up in my own bed the next day with no sign of anything unusual having happened. My mother told me the man was okay. He was in the hospital getting help.  I don’t recall actually understanding that he tried to kill himself.  I think I heard just enough details to imagine some kind of accident.  Perhaps that was the impression my parents wanted to give me. 

Years later my mother told us that if my father had entered that downstairs apartment with a lit cigarette in his mouth, something quite likely in those days as he smoked frequently, he could have caused an explosion. We had a near miss.

Each excitement has its own emotional resonance more than sixty years later. It's interesting the non-events like Kidnapped and Breaking and Entering still engender stronger emotions than Evacuation, an event that could have been life-threatening.  The first two events still conjure up not just the details of what happened but also my feelings, panic my mother was gone and fear that someone was breaking into my room.  Yet, when I think back on Evacuation, a situation that could have resulted in a fire or explosion, my primary feeling was one of disappointment I didn't get to see Jack in his house that night.