Tell me a story...

I have been wanting to blog; to write something, but I kept coming back to the season in which we find ourselves. No, not fall or Halloween, but ELECTION. Oh my, and this is an intense one, but I promised myself I would not go political because, let's face it, there is plenty of that to find on the web right now.

So, while talking to a friend today it occurred to me to simply start writing down stories. Not fiction, but memories of things that remain, for whatever reason, in my heart and mind. Not that they are in any way special or overly fascinating, but they are mine; some shared with others still around to read them  (and discount them :) and others in which I am the only player still alive to recount. That sole survivor thinking is why I am writing these memories down.

Stories shape us. Family stories provide links to the past  that help define who we are and how we perceive the world. My family used to tell a story every Thanksgiving about a relative who was returning to the States from Sweden with her young daughter but missed her connecting ship in Southampton because of a coal strike. That was in 1912 and the ship was the Titanic. We always got quiet (no matter how many times we had heard it before) because of the implied consequences had our great-grandmother (who was still four years from giving birth to my grandfather) actually made her passage. She was not wealthy and so would have ridden, at best, 3rd class and we all know what happened to most of them. Now, it should be said that I have looked over oodles of records for the doomed ocean liner and was unable to find any note of my great-grandmother being booked, so it is likely that it was another ship, with a much less dramatic fate, that she actually missed. Whether it was "factual" or not, over time, became moot. Instead, it was what that story represented; strong women traveling without their husbands (in 1912!), knowledge of our origins, gratitude for the life we have, a spirit of adventure -I am sure it meant different things to each of us, but it was still important to our family or it wouldn't have been repeated so often.

Personal stories also help us develop our bank of wisdom and experience. Stories define who we are as a society; what is of import to us and what we revile. So, I write these down hoping, at the very least, that my only child will one day find them interesting and useful to understanding who her mother was and is as an individual above and beyond being "Mom".

When I was really young, and I don't know exactly how young because little kids have an envious relationship with time; they don't really get it. Nora gets so frustrated because in her mind she has no real sense of what 6 weeks feels like yet. Time is unimportant to little kids, except when they wants something. Anyway, when I was quite young we lived in a town in California named Altadena. This city sits in Los Angeles County in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. We lived near what was, at the time, the end of the road; to get higher, you hiked. I remember our house pretty well but it was in itself unremarkable. As the only child of a single mother, I had my own small room and we had a dog (Butterscotch) and a cat and a yard. My Mom worked a lot and she was not a "garden goddess" at all. In fact, she claimed she could kill ivy if she tried to nurture it. We also had neighbors.

Mr. and Mrs. Williams lived to the north(?) and though I remember them as nice, it was our neighbors to the south I will never forget. Howard and Ginger lived in another unremarkable house except that it was the stereotypical hippie pad of the late 1960s, early 1970s. There were beads hanging in the doorways, colorful rugs and posters and bright pillows and fringe. They had two enormous (remember, I was little) malamute/husky-type dogs named Dharma and Zeno. Ginger can only be described now as looking like Cher (during the "I Got You Babe" days), with long dark hair and bangs. Howard sits in my memory reminding me of Ringo Starr; scruffy hair, mustache and soul patch (in his Sgt.Pepper days). And, close your eyes kids of you wilt easily, they smoked a lot of pot. Additionally, they grew their own. The thing is, if the cops were to come down the street looking for the ganja growers, H&G would be their first stop; they just fit the image, especially to the police in those days.

Meanwhile, my poor mother had tried and failed miserably to grow a small vegetable garden in our backyard. Nothing extravagant; just some tomatoes, carrots and lettuce. Whether too much water or too little, crappy soil or too many pine needles from the tree behind us, or too much or too little sun, those plants didn't even come up and if they did, they suffered a wilty and sad death. My Mom was so disappointed. Her sister could grow hibiscus from a rock, her thumb was so green. One day, though, Mom went into the back yard and saw little plants coming up in the rows she had planted. Encouraged and assuming they were just late risers, she carefully put little fences around them to discourage wildlife (squirrels? rats? rabbits? peacocks?) and tended the plants faithfully.

TOMATO plant

You can see where this is heading, can't you?

Sure enough, one day a knock on the door found two policeman informing my Mom that there had been a report of someone in the neighborhood cultivating marijuana and would she mind if they had a look in our back yard. My Mom obligingly let them in figuring she had nothing to hide. What those officers found was a neat little pot garden complete with protective fencing and a hose sitting close by for easy watering. As the officers looked at her with skepticism, my mother nearly fainted away, she was so mortified. She desperately explained her situation and her heretofore inability to grow plants. The police just started to laugh. My mother was the least suspicious-looking person on the block (except the Williams'). Rather than hauling my Mom off to jail on drug charges (can you imagine the call to my grandparents?!), they pulled up the plants and suggested she learn what plants look like before she decided to help them grow.

NOT a tomato plant

Later that evening Howard and Ginger came to the back gate as Mom was cleaning up the last remnants of her garden. They were abjectly apologetic for getting her in any possible trouble. They figured (not all together incorrectly) that nobody would ever suspect my Mom of growing weed, so they used her as a "surrogate" to allow their small crop to thrive. They also assumed that their plants would blend in with Mom's veggies and it would be relatively danger-free. They didn't know about my Mom's destructive garden inabilities.

Years later we ran into Ginger. We had all long since left the neighborhood and she and Howard had divorced and gone their separate ways. She was a "respectable" career woman living on her own in Pasadena. However, we all laughed as she and my Mom recalled the short period when my Mom was a pot farmer.


My Mother died in 2002 of Inflammatory Breast Cancer. She could always laugh at herself and would be pleased to see I remember these "little moments" in our lives. XOX Love you Mom.

Mumsy 1961 HS Senior pic