Homes I've Lived In-#3!

December 2014

Enough time has passed since i wrote the Homes I've Lived In-#1 & #2. i'm ready to continue the story!

in December of 1962, my sister patsy was married, living in Tolleson, AZ, and expecting her first child. my parents decided to make the trip down to visit her and to leave me with her to help with the baby. by this time, the last of my siblings had graduated and moved away leaving me the only child left. so we drove down in my folks' Nash Rambler station wagon, which was remarkable because the seats would lie totally flat!

i think we took three or four days to drive down there, staying in motels and eating in restaurants along the way. and one of those days was a sunday because we went to church at a Church of the Open Bible. there were quite a few black people in that church, but my, could they sing! i liked that a lot!

while we were stopped in Amarillo, TX, my dad bought me a souvenir. it was a Navajo doll with a pink dress with red rickrack trim and she wore beaded moccasins and had long black straight hair. i named her Amarillo Jane.

so eventually, we got to my sister's. they only stayed a little while, long enough to enroll me in Tolleson Elementary School before they headed back home to Iowa leaving me behind. i was thirteen years old. i remember being rather difficult to be around so i don't blame them for taking the opportunity to have a "vacation" from me!

i don't remember the address, but it was a rather small two-bedroom apartment with a medium-size living room and a smallish kitchen. i don't know if i was any help to my sister. my nephew Trent was born the end of April. it was like having a real live doll to play with!

i mostly remember attending school and making all new friends. Rosie Quesada was one. Another one was a girl named Theron. she had a leather belt that she always wore that had her name branded on the back side of it. she was a rebel and i wanted to be like her. And i had a huge crush on James Newell. i don't think he knew i was alive. and i also had an enormous crush on my teacher! he was married with two little girls, but i didn't care... he could divorce her and take me away with him, you know!

i was in marching band and remember a trip we took to Wickenburg, AZ, to march in some kind of a parade. my friends and i were goofing off afterwards and i fell into some cactus! i don't remember who my friends got to help me up, but i remember leaning over one of the seats in the back of the bus while a nice lady spent quite a long time tweezing cactus spines out of my bare backside!!! i was so embarrassed! i would have just skipped that, but as it was, i couldn't even sit down!

gradually over those six months, i got a very dark tan, the first tan i ever had in my whole life. my skin is quite fair and my hair is reddish, so i never expected to be able to get a tan.

i remember when it was time to fly back home, my sister took me to the Phoenix airport. i was wearing my two-piece pink dress that i loved that she had helped me shop for. there was a huge painting of a phoenix bird rising from the ashes in the lobby of the airport. when my daughter jill and i flew into that same airport over forty years later, i couldn't see the painting anywhere! so i asked an old man who wore a maintenance uniform what happened to the painting? he directed me to look up... and there it was, almost concealed behind some new construction that was going up. you could only see a small part of it. it made me very sad.

so i lived there in tolleson for about six months during the second half of my 7th grade year. it felt strange to come back to my old school friends that next fall. i felt like a world traveler! and by my birthday in october, my tan had faded away.

i would change my address again in just three years... but only for a month. my brother ken lived in new york city and my cousin mary beth and i lived with him for the month of august in 1966... but that's a story for next time, "Homes I've Lived In-#3"