I was born in Kansas City, quite a distance from the little coastal town of Maine that I call my hometown. My mother loves to tell the story of how she used to make all of her own maternity clothes, and would make little outfits for me at the same time. My mother and father married after having met and dated in high school. I have seen the pictures of them all dressed up for the prom, with the long pastel gown and the frilly tuxedo shirt. There are also photos of them feeding each other cake, surrounded by friends and family at their wedding so long ago. My father had enlisted in the Marines after high school and ended up being shipped out to Vietnam shortly after. My mother discovered she was pregnant with me just about the same time. She was 19 years old, a newly married military wife, and a soon-to-be mother. I always remember the story she told about how I was born at shift change and how all of the nurses crowded around me in the nursery to take a peek before going home.
I don't remember my mother and father splitting up, as I got older there was a lot of he-said, she-said. It's all summed up in the fact that my father came home from Vietnam with a ready-made family that he didn't quite know how to deal with. My mother moved in with my grandfather, her dad, while she went to LPN school. I spent many afternoons toddling around the back yard while he weeded and pruned the strawberry bushes along the fence and his beloved peach tree in the center. Some of my earliest memories are of my grandfather's house, and of spending time with him. As I grew older and went to preschool and later to kindergarten, it was always still within the general area where my grandfather seemed to be the center.
My mother remarried as I turned eight. Her new husband worked in the same hospital but was originally from the northeast. Suddenly my world was changing. My mother was going to have a new baby, a little brother for me. I had a new dad who talked funny and had a big moustache, and we were moving to New England where there was snow and an ocean. I remember that when we moved to Bangor, Maine the kids all teased me because I talked funny. It was so amazing when the snow was too deep for me to walk through it. I wonder what my life would have been like if I had not moved from the Midwest. Would I be using "y'all" and "purdy"? Would I appreciate a lovely spring day the same way if it wasn't following a brutally cold and snowy winter? I wonder if I would have met my husband if we hadn't lived in the same small town here in Maine, or if I would have had my four wonderful children? I wonder how my life would be different, and what would be the same. It makes me wonder sometime, what little things in my life have made me who I am?
There are fine things in all three grafs: grandfather, peach tree, regional accents, photographs, frilly tux shirts, etc.
ReplyDeleteAnd you give a brave shot at the end to arguing that the little things add up to 'who I am.'
But actually, I read it the other way around. The big things made you who you are. Remember week 2 of 162 where you were supposed to talk about yourself in history and how everyone had conniptions at that crazy assignment?
But I see this as a continuation of that assignment. This is Big Things making you who you are, starting with the Cold War which required a huge military and engendered Vietnam and there went your daddy off to a foreign land, part of history.
And his return to a world where divorce was not the nearly unheard-of thing it was just a few years before.... And your mother a single mother making her way was also not something that common a few years earlier--everyone knew a woman had to have a man!
Blended families, also a fairly modern phenomenon as were people migrating to follow jobs and lifestyles--you guys were living poster children for huge social changes!