Gin
There’s a difference between being smart and having knowledge. The ability to reason is different from knowing facts. We are born with the ability to figure things out and to retain information. Knowledge, however, comes slowly. You gain knowledge over time by reading, by listening to others, by experiencing life. As children we are understandably ignorant, yet we reason even with our incomplete knowledge. A young kid might say, "Yesterday I ‘goed’ to the store." Based on experience he is aware the past tense of verbs requires an ‘ed’ on the end. He is smart to know this. However he is lacking in knowledge since he doesn’t yet realize that the past of "go" is "went." He has to learn this. A simple example but there are many events in our childhood that are based on these partially correct reasonings.
I am spending a few days with my grandparents in North Adams, about twenty miles north of Pittsfield. My older brother is at camp. My parents are taking a vacation in New York City. I am eight. I love the front of my grandparents’ house which is set on a hill. There are three sets of cement steps to climb from the sidewalk just to reach the front porch. The railings, the stairs themselves, the short level landings between the sets of steps, all provide great places to read or color or just watch people walking. It’s also fun sitting on the porch. I liked the distance between me and the people below on the sidewalk. I can watch people passing by without their noticing.
This is the same porch where eight years earlier my brother David lined up six rocks, one for each day he was to stay with his grandparents while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to me. He had been an only child up to that point and didn’t like being away from home and his parents. Each day he knocked one rock off the porch to mark how many days were left before he was able to go home. Each time this story was told, I noticed the verb used was “knocked off” not removed or took away. Knocked off was a lot more forceful. The verb highlights the undercurrent of the story. Lining up the rocks was not just a way to mark time passing; it was a way to express my brother’s anger at being sent away from home. David may have been just six but he had figured out a satisfying way to cope with his feelings of loneliness and abandonment.
On the side of the porch, there is a large maple tree, part of the woods all around the house. I’ve found several little nooks in different locations that are comfortable for reading. I’ve always liked the idea of reading outside. On this day I am enjoying Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. I’m caught up in the book even though or maybe it’s because their lives have little in common with mine. Two sets of twins in one family. Live in help. Ducks for pets. And I’ve never been to the seashore. But reading makes these worlds come alive for me.
In some ways I am more comfortable outside the house than in it. My grandparents live on the top floor of this two story wooden structure. To me their apartment seems a little stuffy, dark even. Maybe this impression is due to the heavy furniture they have. It’s so different from the lighter weight, more modern furniture of my house in Pittsfield.
Even the pictures on the walls are different. My parents have a Van Gogh and a Utrillo, both purchased from Newberry’s Five and Dime. There’s a family story about these wall decorations. The day my father picked up the Van Gogh, he jokingly said to the clerk, "Is this an original?" The sales clerk, looking around flustered, stammered, "I don’t know. I can ask the manager for you." My father just shook his head, paid the five dollars or whatever and walked away. It just reinforced his mantra, his threat.
I am spending a few days with my grandparents in North Adams, about twenty miles north of Pittsfield. My older brother is at camp. My parents are taking a vacation in New York City. I am eight. I love the front of my grandparents’ house which is set on a hill. There are three sets of cement steps to climb from the sidewalk just to reach the front porch. The railings, the stairs themselves, the short level landings between the sets of steps, all provide great places to read or color or just watch people walking. It’s also fun sitting on the porch. I liked the distance between me and the people below on the sidewalk. I can watch people passing by without their noticing.
This is the same porch where eight years earlier my brother David lined up six rocks, one for each day he was to stay with his grandparents while my mother was in the hospital giving birth to me. He had been an only child up to that point and didn’t like being away from home and his parents. Each day he knocked one rock off the porch to mark how many days were left before he was able to go home. Each time this story was told, I noticed the verb used was “knocked off” not removed or took away. Knocked off was a lot more forceful. The verb highlights the undercurrent of the story. Lining up the rocks was not just a way to mark time passing; it was a way to express my brother’s anger at being sent away from home. David may have been just six but he had figured out a satisfying way to cope with his feelings of loneliness and abandonment.
On the side of the porch, there is a large maple tree, part of the woods all around the house. I’ve found several little nooks in different locations that are comfortable for reading. I’ve always liked the idea of reading outside. On this day I am enjoying Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. I’m caught up in the book even though or maybe it’s because their lives have little in common with mine. Two sets of twins in one family. Live in help. Ducks for pets. And I’ve never been to the seashore. But reading makes these worlds come alive for me.
In some ways I am more comfortable outside the house than in it. My grandparents live on the top floor of this two story wooden structure. To me their apartment seems a little stuffy, dark even. Maybe this impression is due to the heavy furniture they have. It’s so different from the lighter weight, more modern furniture of my house in Pittsfield.
Even the pictures on the walls are different. My parents have a Van Gogh and a Utrillo, both purchased from Newberry’s Five and Dime. There’s a family story about these wall decorations. The day my father picked up the Van Gogh, he jokingly said to the clerk, "Is this an original?" The sales clerk, looking around flustered, stammered, "I don’t know. I can ask the manager for you." My father just shook his head, paid the five dollars or whatever and walked away. It just reinforced his mantra, his threat.
"If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up working in Newberry’s."
The same mantra was changed if directed at my brother. "If you don’t go to college, you’ll end up pumping gas." To my father, uneducated women were relegated to being store clerks, uneducated men to being gas station attendants.
On the other hand, the painting I recall from my grandparents' apartment was sentimental, in an old-fashioned pictorial style. A rural scene with dark hills, sheep in the background. In the foreground, trees and a shepherd carrying a lamb. There may have been a phrase from the bible etched along the bottom of the frame as a title. The painting fit in with the overall mood of their apartment. No family story on how they came to purchase it or where it was from. It never occurred to me to ask.
My grandparents have so many habits that are new to me. I wonder how my mother could have grown up with them when they did so many things differently than my family did. At the time I didn’t realize their lives when raising their children were not the same as when I visited, long after their children had grown. While I never thought of Pittsfield as a city like Boston, it was still nowhere near as rural as North Adams. On the first morning of my stay at my grandparents' house, my grandmother told me at breakfast we would be berrying that day. “You’ll need to change your clothes. Wear long pants so your legs will be covered. The brambles can be bothersome.”
She cleaned up the kitchen, made the beds, and straightened the house for the day while I changed. We set out each carrying a container. Mine was a stainless steel bowl. Empty, I held it by its rim and just let it dangle. When there were berries in it, I had to hold it with both hands. That’s when I understood the benefit of the handled pail my grandmother carried. Berrying was usually a one- person activity for her. She had to improvise a container for me.
We walked out of the front of the house and along the side heading back to the woods. I was excited to go berrying and eager to start. My eight-year-old self was thinking, "This is just like going on a picnic." We walked up the wooded hill behind the house. Sometimes she would tell me about people she knew from church but it was more like she was thinking to herself out loud. She didn’t expect me to respond. Not that I could anyway since I knew nothing about the people she was describing.
After a little while, she said, "Lets start here." She pointed out the small blueberries close to the ground just under the leaves of the bushes. "Those are good ones. Be sure to pick around the ones that are still green. We don’t want those." This was cool. You just can take berries and eat them? No stores between you and the fruit! We settled in to picking with me eating every other one.
It didn’t take long before the fun gave out. I began to feel uncomfortable bending over in the heat painstakingly picking only the ripe berries then having to move to a new bush every few minutes. Bugs started flying around my face. I am getting hot and feeling sticky. My excitement has faded. I looked into my bowl. It wasn’t very full. I suddenly realized this wasn’t a picnic, it was was work.
My grandmother didn’t seem to be bothered by the work, the heat or the bugs. She was picking much faster than I was. She was really putting me to shame. I decided to try to ignore my discomfort to concentrate on picking. I limited myself to eating berries only after I had added a respectable amount to the bowl. I concentrated on trying to make my bowl full. I did not want to complain. I did not want to seem like that spoiled kid who doesn't contribute.
I also began to think of my grandmother differently, realizing physical labor was more real to her than it was to me. In the past, she had cooked on an old black stove, used a washboard for cleaning clothes, kept house without a vacuum cleaner. The 1950s living I took for granted wasn’t representative of my grandmother's life. After all, she had been born in 1900. That seemed like ancient history to me. So it wasn’t surprising she would walk out of her house, toil away at gathering berries and, returning home, spend the afternoon making pies. This was a taste of a life I never had. One I was pretty sure I didn’t want. Don’t get me wrong. I did like the idea of being able to eat berries right off the bush. And I definitely liked my grandmother’s pies!
My grandfather also did things that were surprising and new to me. For instance, every afternoon when my grandfather came home from work, he’d say, "I think I’ll take a dip in the Fish Pond," announcing this as if it were a new idea and he hadn’t been doing this every night. "Do you want to come, Ginny?" Naturally I say yes. I love swimming. I love the water. The “Fish Pond” is what everyone in my family called Windsor Lake.
We change into swim wear before heading out. The lake is a brief climb up the hill through the woods behind their house. There is no particular path I can make out, but my grandfather knows the right way to go. Once we get to the sandy beach we lay our clothes on a towel and walk into the lake. I start to swim. He really does dip in, getting into the water just deep enough to duck his head below the surface. He mostly stands shoulder deep in the water dipping his head a few times. I guess he finds this relaxing. I had no idea at the time what his daily work was like.
Years later I realized just how unpleasant his job must have been and why he relished those daily dunks in the pond so much. He worked in one of the woolen mills in Adams starting there in the lowliest position rising to be an inspector, a job that required skill and a good eye. It was also physically easier than other kinds of work at the mill. Still, it was a hot, noisy, smelly place. I imagine now those quiet few minutes in the cool water of the Fish Pond was a restorative no other kind of activity could have offered.
In just fifteen minutes, my grandfather is ready to go home. "It’s time for dinner. Let’s go." The first time I went with him I was taken aback he expected us to leave so quickly. We just got here. When my family went to a lake we were there for hours. I could stay until the life guards closed the beach for the night. Now, on my third night going with him to the pond, I knew what “a quick dip” meant, a cooling refreshing break between the end of work and supper.
After dinner and cleaning up, a neighbor pulls up with a car and asks, "Would you like to go get ice cream?" We all get in the car to drive to Williamstown to a local dairy bar. The previous evening something similar had happened. A friend from the church arrived. "How about a game of miniature golf?" Each night someone else with a car, my grandparents never owned one, would arrive and suggest an outing. I remember thinking what a wonderful life my grandparents had. It was full of activities each evening. My parents rarely did anything after dinner. They read the paper. None of their friends with cars ever asked if we wanted to go out someplace. Treats like getting ice cream or playing miniature golf were special things, not a part of everyday life.
I was a teenager before I realized I had been thinking like an eight- year-old. My grandparents didn’t go out every night. They arranged all of this to entertain me. In fact I’m sure they would have preferred to have just stayed at home. Many years later my grandfather acknowledged their quiet, sedate life style. He was now retired. Each evening they had a light supper on tray tables in the living room while watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. One night he turned to my grandmother before the shows were to begin. "Let's do something different tonight," he suggested. She looked at him, a bit alarmed. He continued, "Let's change chairs." Of course they didn’t. I love this story. It captures my grandfather's sense of humor. He was a quiet man, not given to telling jokes. But this story shows how they were happy in the life they had created for themselves even while acknowledging to the outside world their routine might be considered dull.
When I stay at my grandparents I sleep on the couch in the living room. I share the room with a cuckoo clock. Every hour the little bird pops out and chirps the hour. Every half hour it chirps once. Sometimes I wake up at night and hear one chirp. Before falling back to sleep I try to figure out if it is 12:30, 1:00, or 1:30. The only way I’m going to know for sure is to wait until it chirps twice at 2 o'clock. I always fall back asleep before that happens.
There are other eight-year-old wonderings. In Pittsfield during the fifties, the air raid sirens were tested every Saturday at 11:45 am. The wailing came from atop the huge bank building at the corner of North and West streets. One Saturday, upstreet at that time, I noticed no one paying any attention to the sirens. I see the bright yellow air raid shelter signs on many banks and commercial buildings, but no adult looks around to locate one. I am curious what the inside of those places might look like. Then I begin to worry. What if the Russians found out the time we tested the sirens? What if they decide to bomb us at noon on a Saturday morning? No one would be prepared. No one would be in the shelters. I consider this for a few weeks eventually deciding to share this concern with my parents. They assured me the sirens were a left over from World War II. My parents didn’t buy into the red scare.
While my parents weren’t considering building a bomb shelter in our back yard, our teachers gave us plenty to worry about. Bill wrote about his experiences with air raid drills in his blog School Days. It wasn’t much different in Pittsfield. In addition to the usual fire drills in school, we had air raid drills, marching in single file to the basement level. We were told to be quiet, very quiet, during these drills. I wondered why we had to be so quiet. Would we make so much noise that some enemy would be alerted to our presence?
We also practiced what to do to protect ourselves if there was a sudden flash while we were in our classroom. I understood the idea of crouching under the desk. The desk seemed sturdy enough over my head but I never understood why I also had to cover my head with my arms. My arms? Really? I look at my arms. They seem quite insubstantial compared to any kind of bomb, never mind an A-bomb. What protection would my arms offer? This confuses me. I never speak to anyone about these concerns. I have decided teachers don’t take kindly to my questions. They have all the answers but only to the right questions. The questions that occur to me are not the ones they are prepared to answer. I had evidence of this.
One time the previous year I arrived at my classroom early. Just casually walking around the room, I stopped by the globe. As I turned the globe, I asked the teacher. "Look. Do you think Africa would fit here in this space near South America?" The teacher looked at me and said, "Virginia, that is the silliest thing I ever heard." Now I know this was years before tectonic plate theory would prove me partially right, but her response was so unnecessarily negative. In fact, some times when I relate the story I have her saying, "Virginia, that is the stupidest thing I ever heard." As an adult, after telling that version to a friend, he commented, 'It is hard to believe a teacher would say such a thing." It made me pause. Perhaps the words “silliest” or stupidest” were not exactly what was said. However her comment made me feel as if that is what she said. In any case, she didn’t commend me on my curiosity or say, "I can see how it might look that way but scientists who have studied this haven’t proved that." No matter what the teacher actually said that morning, what I heard was, "Stop thinking. Just listen to what I tell you." I had two mental lives. What I was supposed to learn in school was one. Parallel to that were my own thoughts. The term parallel is appropriate. Rarely did my interior thoughts and the school knowledge I was gaining intersect.
Another case in point was the time my class went to a play. I was in second grade. This was an unusual event. From our own schools we were taken by buses to Pittsfield High School, a huge building set back from the street with several sets of cement stairs leading to a plaza in front. The auditorium was directly across from the four sets of front doors. Each class had been assigned certain portions of the rows in the auditorium. There were at least six or seven schools of grade school kids in there.
A traveling children’s theatre group was performing The Emperor's New Clothes. I hadn’t read or heard of it before. I enjoyed the experience but was bothered by the story line. The king was being conned by a couple of tailors who convinced him they had a special cloth which would make him more grand than ever. Trouble is, the cloth would be invisible to anyone incompetent or stupid. The king did not want to appear stupid in front of his ministers while the ministers did not want to appear incompetent in front of their king so everyone went along with it nodding as the tailors held up their empty hands, not a stitch of cloth to be seen.
On the one hand, I got the moral of the play. The king and his ministers were too vain to expose the con artists. However, if the premise was true and there was a special cloth that stupid people couldn’t see, wouldn’t the king object that the special clothes would make him naked to all the stupid people in his kingdom? Whether he could or couldn’t see the cloth himself, why would he agree to such a plan? No one else around me seemed to notice this oddity. Hans Christian Anderson wasn’t there to ask. It was another example of my interior musings not being shared by others. I stored this thought away for years, expressing it for the first time here, some sixty years after it first occurred to me.
Sometimes events in school were confusing but not in the way that might have been intended. In sixth grade we had a series of visiting science teachers. Some weeks it would be a lady from the bird sanctuary with a nest or a live bird or a film-strip about beavers. As you can imagine, least popular was the film strip about beavers. Other weeks, someone would come from the GE with booklets about transformers and other wonderful electric devices. While we may not have found this particularly exciting, it was the livelihood of most of our parents. At least some of the booklets featured cartoon characters. Not that I ever really knew what a transformer did.
One week, the lesson was more personal. I can picture this very clearly. The visiting teacher set up a table in front of the teacher's desk. She placed three buckets on the table. She asked for a volunteer and at the same time pointed to me. I do not remember volunteering! As instructed, I stood facing the class, the three buckets in front of me on the low table. She had me place one hand in each of the two outside buckets and describe what I felt to the class. I told them the water in the right bucket was warm, the bucket on the left had cold water in it. After a short time, she asked me to take my hands from the outside buckets placing both in the middle bucket and tell the class what was happening. I was shocked. One hand told me the water was warm, the other indicated it was cold. All I could think was, "My body is lying to me." Suddenly I couldn’t count on my senses to tell me the truth. I don’t know what I said to the class, but I do recall sitting down in utmost confusion. If I couldn’t expect my own body to be accurate, was there anything I could rely on? These thoughts remained unvoiced as the others in the class were more interested in the science of the lesson, that sensations are relative, and not in my own personal revelation of the implications of this experiment.
I wondered a lot about how my body worked. There was the day I felt off my bike hurting my arm. Once my mother determined it wasn’t broken, she gave me aspirin to reduce the pain. I knew my mother took aspirin for a headache. I wondered, "How does the aspirin know where to go?" Does the arm send out signals in some way? I imagined cartoon drawings of an arm with jagged lines emanating from it with a sound bubble saying, "Ow." Perhaps this would let the aspirin know not to go to the head but the arm. What if I had a headache and a sore arm? Would I have to take two aspirin?
Some of my father’s comments were also a puzzle to me. On our trips to North Adams to visit my grandparents, we passed the North Adams cemetery. Every time we did, my father would say, "People are dying to get in there." I would look at the gates expecting to see a line of people, wondering why this place out in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of town would be so popular. There was usually no one there. I never noticed anyone trying to get in. It was several years way too many before I understood his joke. I don’t know if anyone in my family ever realized I didn’t get it. We all groaned when he said it. I joined in. My mother and brother were groaning because he had said it so many times. I was groaning because it was a puzzle I hadn't yet figured out.
Sometimes my father would teach me jokes I both understood and was able to tell other people. Many evenings after dinner he would announce, "I am going for a walk." Looking in my direction, he’d ask, "Do you want to come?"
Usually these walks were really just trips to the store to buy wine or cigarettes, but they were always called walks in my house as if they were something healthy to do. On the way he’d tell me a joke. We’d practice it on the way back. He'd play the straight man. As we practiced, he would offer advice about how long to pause or when to look up at him. Once we got home, we’d do the joke for my mother. My father would feed me the lines.
Ginny: “It’s raining cats and dogs outside”
On the other hand, the painting I recall from my grandparents' apartment was sentimental, in an old-fashioned pictorial style. A rural scene with dark hills, sheep in the background. In the foreground, trees and a shepherd carrying a lamb. There may have been a phrase from the bible etched along the bottom of the frame as a title. The painting fit in with the overall mood of their apartment. No family story on how they came to purchase it or where it was from. It never occurred to me to ask.
My grandparents have so many habits that are new to me. I wonder how my mother could have grown up with them when they did so many things differently than my family did. At the time I didn’t realize their lives when raising their children were not the same as when I visited, long after their children had grown. While I never thought of Pittsfield as a city like Boston, it was still nowhere near as rural as North Adams. On the first morning of my stay at my grandparents' house, my grandmother told me at breakfast we would be berrying that day. “You’ll need to change your clothes. Wear long pants so your legs will be covered. The brambles can be bothersome.”
She cleaned up the kitchen, made the beds, and straightened the house for the day while I changed. We set out each carrying a container. Mine was a stainless steel bowl. Empty, I held it by its rim and just let it dangle. When there were berries in it, I had to hold it with both hands. That’s when I understood the benefit of the handled pail my grandmother carried. Berrying was usually a one- person activity for her. She had to improvise a container for me.
We walked out of the front of the house and along the side heading back to the woods. I was excited to go berrying and eager to start. My eight-year-old self was thinking, "This is just like going on a picnic." We walked up the wooded hill behind the house. Sometimes she would tell me about people she knew from church but it was more like she was thinking to herself out loud. She didn’t expect me to respond. Not that I could anyway since I knew nothing about the people she was describing.
After a little while, she said, "Lets start here." She pointed out the small blueberries close to the ground just under the leaves of the bushes. "Those are good ones. Be sure to pick around the ones that are still green. We don’t want those." This was cool. You just can take berries and eat them? No stores between you and the fruit! We settled in to picking with me eating every other one.
It didn’t take long before the fun gave out. I began to feel uncomfortable bending over in the heat painstakingly picking only the ripe berries then having to move to a new bush every few minutes. Bugs started flying around my face. I am getting hot and feeling sticky. My excitement has faded. I looked into my bowl. It wasn’t very full. I suddenly realized this wasn’t a picnic, it was was work.
My grandmother didn’t seem to be bothered by the work, the heat or the bugs. She was picking much faster than I was. She was really putting me to shame. I decided to try to ignore my discomfort to concentrate on picking. I limited myself to eating berries only after I had added a respectable amount to the bowl. I concentrated on trying to make my bowl full. I did not want to complain. I did not want to seem like that spoiled kid who doesn't contribute.
I also began to think of my grandmother differently, realizing physical labor was more real to her than it was to me. In the past, she had cooked on an old black stove, used a washboard for cleaning clothes, kept house without a vacuum cleaner. The 1950s living I took for granted wasn’t representative of my grandmother's life. After all, she had been born in 1900. That seemed like ancient history to me. So it wasn’t surprising she would walk out of her house, toil away at gathering berries and, returning home, spend the afternoon making pies. This was a taste of a life I never had. One I was pretty sure I didn’t want. Don’t get me wrong. I did like the idea of being able to eat berries right off the bush. And I definitely liked my grandmother’s pies!
My grandfather also did things that were surprising and new to me. For instance, every afternoon when my grandfather came home from work, he’d say, "I think I’ll take a dip in the Fish Pond," announcing this as if it were a new idea and he hadn’t been doing this every night. "Do you want to come, Ginny?" Naturally I say yes. I love swimming. I love the water. The “Fish Pond” is what everyone in my family called Windsor Lake.
We change into swim wear before heading out. The lake is a brief climb up the hill through the woods behind their house. There is no particular path I can make out, but my grandfather knows the right way to go. Once we get to the sandy beach we lay our clothes on a towel and walk into the lake. I start to swim. He really does dip in, getting into the water just deep enough to duck his head below the surface. He mostly stands shoulder deep in the water dipping his head a few times. I guess he finds this relaxing. I had no idea at the time what his daily work was like.
Years later I realized just how unpleasant his job must have been and why he relished those daily dunks in the pond so much. He worked in one of the woolen mills in Adams starting there in the lowliest position rising to be an inspector, a job that required skill and a good eye. It was also physically easier than other kinds of work at the mill. Still, it was a hot, noisy, smelly place. I imagine now those quiet few minutes in the cool water of the Fish Pond was a restorative no other kind of activity could have offered.
In just fifteen minutes, my grandfather is ready to go home. "It’s time for dinner. Let’s go." The first time I went with him I was taken aback he expected us to leave so quickly. We just got here. When my family went to a lake we were there for hours. I could stay until the life guards closed the beach for the night. Now, on my third night going with him to the pond, I knew what “a quick dip” meant, a cooling refreshing break between the end of work and supper.
After dinner and cleaning up, a neighbor pulls up with a car and asks, "Would you like to go get ice cream?" We all get in the car to drive to Williamstown to a local dairy bar. The previous evening something similar had happened. A friend from the church arrived. "How about a game of miniature golf?" Each night someone else with a car, my grandparents never owned one, would arrive and suggest an outing. I remember thinking what a wonderful life my grandparents had. It was full of activities each evening. My parents rarely did anything after dinner. They read the paper. None of their friends with cars ever asked if we wanted to go out someplace. Treats like getting ice cream or playing miniature golf were special things, not a part of everyday life.
I was a teenager before I realized I had been thinking like an eight- year-old. My grandparents didn’t go out every night. They arranged all of this to entertain me. In fact I’m sure they would have preferred to have just stayed at home. Many years later my grandfather acknowledged their quiet, sedate life style. He was now retired. Each evening they had a light supper on tray tables in the living room while watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. One night he turned to my grandmother before the shows were to begin. "Let's do something different tonight," he suggested. She looked at him, a bit alarmed. He continued, "Let's change chairs." Of course they didn’t. I love this story. It captures my grandfather's sense of humor. He was a quiet man, not given to telling jokes. But this story shows how they were happy in the life they had created for themselves even while acknowledging to the outside world their routine might be considered dull.
When I stay at my grandparents I sleep on the couch in the living room. I share the room with a cuckoo clock. Every hour the little bird pops out and chirps the hour. Every half hour it chirps once. Sometimes I wake up at night and hear one chirp. Before falling back to sleep I try to figure out if it is 12:30, 1:00, or 1:30. The only way I’m going to know for sure is to wait until it chirps twice at 2 o'clock. I always fall back asleep before that happens.
There are other eight-year-old wonderings. In Pittsfield during the fifties, the air raid sirens were tested every Saturday at 11:45 am. The wailing came from atop the huge bank building at the corner of North and West streets. One Saturday, upstreet at that time, I noticed no one paying any attention to the sirens. I see the bright yellow air raid shelter signs on many banks and commercial buildings, but no adult looks around to locate one. I am curious what the inside of those places might look like. Then I begin to worry. What if the Russians found out the time we tested the sirens? What if they decide to bomb us at noon on a Saturday morning? No one would be prepared. No one would be in the shelters. I consider this for a few weeks eventually deciding to share this concern with my parents. They assured me the sirens were a left over from World War II. My parents didn’t buy into the red scare.
While my parents weren’t considering building a bomb shelter in our back yard, our teachers gave us plenty to worry about. Bill wrote about his experiences with air raid drills in his blog School Days. It wasn’t much different in Pittsfield. In addition to the usual fire drills in school, we had air raid drills, marching in single file to the basement level. We were told to be quiet, very quiet, during these drills. I wondered why we had to be so quiet. Would we make so much noise that some enemy would be alerted to our presence?
We also practiced what to do to protect ourselves if there was a sudden flash while we were in our classroom. I understood the idea of crouching under the desk. The desk seemed sturdy enough over my head but I never understood why I also had to cover my head with my arms. My arms? Really? I look at my arms. They seem quite insubstantial compared to any kind of bomb, never mind an A-bomb. What protection would my arms offer? This confuses me. I never speak to anyone about these concerns. I have decided teachers don’t take kindly to my questions. They have all the answers but only to the right questions. The questions that occur to me are not the ones they are prepared to answer. I had evidence of this.
One time the previous year I arrived at my classroom early. Just casually walking around the room, I stopped by the globe. As I turned the globe, I asked the teacher. "Look. Do you think Africa would fit here in this space near South America?" The teacher looked at me and said, "Virginia, that is the silliest thing I ever heard." Now I know this was years before tectonic plate theory would prove me partially right, but her response was so unnecessarily negative. In fact, some times when I relate the story I have her saying, "Virginia, that is the stupidest thing I ever heard." As an adult, after telling that version to a friend, he commented, 'It is hard to believe a teacher would say such a thing." It made me pause. Perhaps the words “silliest” or stupidest” were not exactly what was said. However her comment made me feel as if that is what she said. In any case, she didn’t commend me on my curiosity or say, "I can see how it might look that way but scientists who have studied this haven’t proved that." No matter what the teacher actually said that morning, what I heard was, "Stop thinking. Just listen to what I tell you." I had two mental lives. What I was supposed to learn in school was one. Parallel to that were my own thoughts. The term parallel is appropriate. Rarely did my interior thoughts and the school knowledge I was gaining intersect.
Another case in point was the time my class went to a play. I was in second grade. This was an unusual event. From our own schools we were taken by buses to Pittsfield High School, a huge building set back from the street with several sets of cement stairs leading to a plaza in front. The auditorium was directly across from the four sets of front doors. Each class had been assigned certain portions of the rows in the auditorium. There were at least six or seven schools of grade school kids in there.
A traveling children’s theatre group was performing The Emperor's New Clothes. I hadn’t read or heard of it before. I enjoyed the experience but was bothered by the story line. The king was being conned by a couple of tailors who convinced him they had a special cloth which would make him more grand than ever. Trouble is, the cloth would be invisible to anyone incompetent or stupid. The king did not want to appear stupid in front of his ministers while the ministers did not want to appear incompetent in front of their king so everyone went along with it nodding as the tailors held up their empty hands, not a stitch of cloth to be seen.
On the one hand, I got the moral of the play. The king and his ministers were too vain to expose the con artists. However, if the premise was true and there was a special cloth that stupid people couldn’t see, wouldn’t the king object that the special clothes would make him naked to all the stupid people in his kingdom? Whether he could or couldn’t see the cloth himself, why would he agree to such a plan? No one else around me seemed to notice this oddity. Hans Christian Anderson wasn’t there to ask. It was another example of my interior musings not being shared by others. I stored this thought away for years, expressing it for the first time here, some sixty years after it first occurred to me.
Sometimes events in school were confusing but not in the way that might have been intended. In sixth grade we had a series of visiting science teachers. Some weeks it would be a lady from the bird sanctuary with a nest or a live bird or a film-strip about beavers. As you can imagine, least popular was the film strip about beavers. Other weeks, someone would come from the GE with booklets about transformers and other wonderful electric devices. While we may not have found this particularly exciting, it was the livelihood of most of our parents. At least some of the booklets featured cartoon characters. Not that I ever really knew what a transformer did.
One week, the lesson was more personal. I can picture this very clearly. The visiting teacher set up a table in front of the teacher's desk. She placed three buckets on the table. She asked for a volunteer and at the same time pointed to me. I do not remember volunteering! As instructed, I stood facing the class, the three buckets in front of me on the low table. She had me place one hand in each of the two outside buckets and describe what I felt to the class. I told them the water in the right bucket was warm, the bucket on the left had cold water in it. After a short time, she asked me to take my hands from the outside buckets placing both in the middle bucket and tell the class what was happening. I was shocked. One hand told me the water was warm, the other indicated it was cold. All I could think was, "My body is lying to me." Suddenly I couldn’t count on my senses to tell me the truth. I don’t know what I said to the class, but I do recall sitting down in utmost confusion. If I couldn’t expect my own body to be accurate, was there anything I could rely on? These thoughts remained unvoiced as the others in the class were more interested in the science of the lesson, that sensations are relative, and not in my own personal revelation of the implications of this experiment.
I wondered a lot about how my body worked. There was the day I felt off my bike hurting my arm. Once my mother determined it wasn’t broken, she gave me aspirin to reduce the pain. I knew my mother took aspirin for a headache. I wondered, "How does the aspirin know where to go?" Does the arm send out signals in some way? I imagined cartoon drawings of an arm with jagged lines emanating from it with a sound bubble saying, "Ow." Perhaps this would let the aspirin know not to go to the head but the arm. What if I had a headache and a sore arm? Would I have to take two aspirin?
Some of my father’s comments were also a puzzle to me. On our trips to North Adams to visit my grandparents, we passed the North Adams cemetery. Every time we did, my father would say, "People are dying to get in there." I would look at the gates expecting to see a line of people, wondering why this place out in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of town would be so popular. There was usually no one there. I never noticed anyone trying to get in. It was several years way too many before I understood his joke. I don’t know if anyone in my family ever realized I didn’t get it. We all groaned when he said it. I joined in. My mother and brother were groaning because he had said it so many times. I was groaning because it was a puzzle I hadn't yet figured out.
Sometimes my father would teach me jokes I both understood and was able to tell other people. Many evenings after dinner he would announce, "I am going for a walk." Looking in my direction, he’d ask, "Do you want to come?"
Usually these walks were really just trips to the store to buy wine or cigarettes, but they were always called walks in my house as if they were something healthy to do. On the way he’d tell me a joke. We’d practice it on the way back. He'd play the straight man. As we practiced, he would offer advice about how long to pause or when to look up at him. Once we got home, we’d do the joke for my mother. My father would feed me the lines.
Ginny: “It’s raining cats and dogs outside”
Father: “How do you know?”
Ginny: “I just stepped in a poodle.”
Ginny: “My sister married an Irishman.”
Ginny: “My sister married an Irishman.”
Father: “Oh. Really?”
Ginny: “ No, O’Reilly.”
My mother would laugh uproariously as if she had never heard these before. To this day, if anyone utters the phrase, "Oh really," in my mind I respond, "No, O’Reilly."
I wasn’t the only one who thought like an eight-year-old in my family. When my younger brother was actually eight my parents moved from Montgomery Avenue to Lenox Avenue, a house just around the block. I had graduated college and was married, so I was no longer living with them. The backyards of the two houses involved in this move abutted each other. While there was a truck to carry large items, there were also many trips back and forth carrying boxes off the back porch of the house on Montgomery, across its back yard, into the back yard of the house on Lenox Avenue, onto its back porch and finally into the new house.
The first time my brother made this trek, my mother called out to him, "Watch out for the German Shepherd in the yard next to ours." Each time my brother crossed into the other yard he would look around carefully heeding his mother’s warning. Years later he told us he wasn’t looking for a dog; he was looking for the kind of shepherd in the picture from my grandparents' house. He always wondered why he had never noticed such a person in all the time he had lived in this neighborhood. He had never seen a man in knickers carrying a crook. I don’t know when he realized a shepherd was also a dog, but it was long after the move. For him, the term shepherd conjured up that picture from my grandparents' house.
Sometimes it took a few years for things I heard as a kid to click. When I was five, the Berkshire Eagle, our local newspaper, printed brief announcements a few weeks before the annual Halloween parade about sightings of a dragon named Pitt. The dragon was moving toward Pittsfield to reclaim his field. As my father read me these notices, I felt excitement about the prospect of the parade featuring a dragon float. I knew dragons weren’t real. I accepted the intention of the news articles to create a sense of excitement and anticipation.
A few years later I reflected on the phrase "Pitt’s field." It made me realize names of places often had significance. The city I lived in was on land originally given to William Pitt by the King of England. I started looking at maps to see what I could notice. Williamstown, a town belonging to someone named William? Springfield, a field with springs running through it? Westfield, a town to the west of Springfield? North Adams, a town north of the town of Adams!
In all the times I went to North Adams to visit my grandparents, I accepted the name without thinking it might have meaning. It never occurred to me that place names might indicate something about the history or geography of the town. It was wonderful to be an eight-year-old and have this insight.
My mother would laugh uproariously as if she had never heard these before. To this day, if anyone utters the phrase, "Oh really," in my mind I respond, "No, O’Reilly."
I wasn’t the only one who thought like an eight-year-old in my family. When my younger brother was actually eight my parents moved from Montgomery Avenue to Lenox Avenue, a house just around the block. I had graduated college and was married, so I was no longer living with them. The backyards of the two houses involved in this move abutted each other. While there was a truck to carry large items, there were also many trips back and forth carrying boxes off the back porch of the house on Montgomery, across its back yard, into the back yard of the house on Lenox Avenue, onto its back porch and finally into the new house.
The first time my brother made this trek, my mother called out to him, "Watch out for the German Shepherd in the yard next to ours." Each time my brother crossed into the other yard he would look around carefully heeding his mother’s warning. Years later he told us he wasn’t looking for a dog; he was looking for the kind of shepherd in the picture from my grandparents' house. He always wondered why he had never noticed such a person in all the time he had lived in this neighborhood. He had never seen a man in knickers carrying a crook. I don’t know when he realized a shepherd was also a dog, but it was long after the move. For him, the term shepherd conjured up that picture from my grandparents' house.
Sometimes it took a few years for things I heard as a kid to click. When I was five, the Berkshire Eagle, our local newspaper, printed brief announcements a few weeks before the annual Halloween parade about sightings of a dragon named Pitt. The dragon was moving toward Pittsfield to reclaim his field. As my father read me these notices, I felt excitement about the prospect of the parade featuring a dragon float. I knew dragons weren’t real. I accepted the intention of the news articles to create a sense of excitement and anticipation.
A few years later I reflected on the phrase "Pitt’s field." It made me realize names of places often had significance. The city I lived in was on land originally given to William Pitt by the King of England. I started looking at maps to see what I could notice. Williamstown, a town belonging to someone named William? Springfield, a field with springs running through it? Westfield, a town to the west of Springfield? North Adams, a town north of the town of Adams!
In all the times I went to North Adams to visit my grandparents, I accepted the name without thinking it might have meaning. It never occurred to me that place names might indicate something about the history or geography of the town. It was wonderful to be an eight-year-old and have this insight.
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