My First Memory

My first memory of Adrienne is her as a newborn from the hospital sitting in the bouncy seat on the table while we had steak and french fries for dinner. I think I remember lifting out of my seat over and over to get a peak at her and I remember getting passed the bone with the marrow in it because I was the only one who liked it. What was I thinking.

My first memory of Erika is not really of Erika, it is of a blue travel crib blocking the door to the living room in the trailer. I wanted to shove it out of the way, but someone (probably Mom) said, no you'll wake the baby. Baby, when did we get a baby was my thought. I wasn't too bright at four.

My first memory of Gretchen is the same memory as the blue crib--she was standing at the blue crib to try to crawl past and was stopped. I also remember that I tattled on her for not eating her soup and then I got a spanking. I remember because it was pea soup and I really didn't want to eat mine, but I was told that I had too. So when Gretchen wasn't eating hers, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Here I was helping my parents out by letting them know that Gretchen was wasting her soup and I got in trouble. After I got a spanking, I was asked if I knew what I had done wrong. I have a vague recollection of almost admitting that I didn't like pea soup, because that seemed like the bad thing I was doing, but I just said no, and I think that earned me another swat. Again, I was not the brightest child around.

My first memory of Karl is playing on the raised bed in his room in the trailer--we were playing house under the bed and on top of the bed and I remember that he was a bit wild, but I hadn't thought about using the bed as the house in addition to under the bed, so I was impressed with his creativity. A duplex.

We used to have a blue boat on Navy--it was a wading pool, but we used it as a boat. The alley behind the house sometimes would flood and I remember riding in the boat across the alley. Karl was the orchestrator of this endeavor, but I felt very rich indeed to have been a part of the adventure.

Gretchen and Erika and I shared a room on Navy and at the beginning we shared a great big bed. We folded our blankets (the two or three times our room was clean) in half to section off our part of the bed. Unfortunately I often had to take the middle, because both Gretchen and Erika wanted to touch my foot at night so they wouldn't be scared. I felt very inconvenienced at being in charge of "not being scared at night" for them--I mean I didn't want my foot sticking off the bed in case the boogiman came to chop it off any more than they did.

On Christmas eve, Karl would sleep in our room too. We would try to stay awake and see Santa Claus on the Howard's roof. We stared so hard at the bright snow covered roof, I thought my eyes would burn out of my head, but we never saw Santa. That guy was very cagey.

When Mom was pregnant with Adrienne, she wasn't feeling well one day and came home from work early. She sent Erika to stay with Marcel and Pat (Erika "ran away" from home by hiding between the garages so that she wouldn't have to go and the Fritz's told us they saw her up on Vernor Highway--omg). Karl, Gretchen and I were admonished to be quiet and not bother Mom, but no one else was home. We were out of cereal and so we knocked on Mom's door (probably waking her up) and said we're out of cereal. So she gave us four dollars and said go to the cornor store and buy a box and don't wake me up again. I guess I was eight, Karl was six and Gretchen was five. We only ever got Cheerios and Wheaties as our cereal, but we saw commercials for other cereal. When we got to the store, we all kind of gravitated to the Lucky Charms. They are supposed to be "magically delicious." I wanted cheerio's, because I hated wheaties, but Karl and Gretchen held out for Lucky Charms and let's face it I secretly wanted Lucky Charms too. We could only afford the small box. We didn't even make it home before all the marshmellows were gone, then we sat down to have bowls of cereal (even though it wasn't breakfast or even dinner time) and probably within 30 minutes of receiving the four dollars the cereal was gone. Oh, oh, now we had to wake Mom up to tell her we still needed cereal. She was pretty mad. I have no idea why we thought we had to tell her at all, but we did.

Starlight, starbright, we're going to see a ghost tonight. What a cool game that was in the twilight with a big crowd of kids. Our house was the house to play that game, because our back yard was full of hiding places and you could even go to the alley and cut around the block if you were really adventurous. You could hide in the stairs down to the celler--no one would look for you down there. And looking for pennies on the floor after the card parties--some times a kind adult would drop a nickel. And racing across Grandpa Beauregard's basement in our stocking feet. How rich were we!