I think my brother’s birth came as quite a surprise to my parents and it appeared as if it was an unplanned event. Still he was loved just as much as the rest of us were and I found myself not to be so fascinated with the facts that another baby was to soon arrive. By this time I had gotten over my fears of being flushed down the toilet and had gotten somewhat over my apprehension about going down into the basement by myself.After all the light switch was at the top of the stairs so there didn’t seem to be anything to worry about. I had been hiding a fact from my parents-for some time now I had been experiencing a dull throbbing pain on my right side.It would do a little thumping thing and then go away. I had been spending time out on the Purple Rock trying to forget about it by focusing on the things in my world but eventually even that did not seem to work and the pain got to where it was more frequent and began to last longer. I didn’t want to burden my parents with any of it and thought it would go away on its own or that I could possibly repair myself by willing it to go away.My father had begun to talk about making some improvements on the house and finally getting to a point where it he might be able to afford doing certain things to the house. He painted the house a light lilac purple and had told me he did it because I liked purple.Whether or not he did it for me,I am unsure of,but just the same I believed him when he told me so. I had not gotten to the point where I realized that my father made mistakes or was ever wrong so the thought never occured to me that he would decieve me in any way. During these years I remember waiting for him by the porch and when I would see him far off in the distance walking.Sometimes I would wait for him to get half way up the hill and I would run down there and jump up on him-I remember the distinct odors of his working day and the scents of the street and the smell of his cologne. When he died I went into our closet and saw his overcoat hanging in the closet on a hard wooden hanger. I allowed the coat to remain intact taking notice that the coat had last been worn by him and had been hung on the hanger by him for the last time. Not wanting to disturb the scene in hopes of preserving his final act on the coat,I slipped under the coat after carefully closing the closet door and stood there in the dark with the coat enveloping me and closed my eyes in the dark silence taking in the scent of him-it was the only comfort I could find in not wanting to accept the fact that he would never return to me again.
Back to the painting of the house…the family automobile was a very deep blue and I called it ‘another color of purple’ and the car’s name that I had for it was Purply. It was a 1952-2 door Chevrolet with the old style baby moon hubcaps on it and the Chevrolet hood ornament.The insignia in the center of the steering wheel was one of those red ruby inlaid logos that glistened whenever the sun happened to shine its rays upon it and the effect of such an event produced a reddish reflection in likeness to a prism effect. I remember this year specifically 1957 and thought it was the best year of my life because that was the year that the lisence plates in the State of Illinois where we lived had produced those plates in my favorite color-purple! What more could I ever hope to ask for-everything was perfect-purple rock,purple house,purple car,and now the lisence plates too? I imagined that life could not be any better.One of my hobbies was going to the pet store and buying a single tadpole.I would bring it home in the little plastic bag and place it in my 5 gallon fish tank and watch it transform into a frog.
I would let the frog go out in the wooded area next to our house where there was a small creek.After placing the frog into the little creek there and watching it hop away I would walk back to the house feeling that I had done something good by releasing my friend and imagined how many frogs would be in the world some day just because of my efforts. Of course every frog had its own name-quite a few were named Tad which was short for tadpole.But I was thoughtful enough to add a number to the end of each one so they would have a personal name that was their very own.
The plans for the house were on my mind and I knew that my parents were excited about it from observing the enthusiasm in their conversations. I decided to hide my painful thumping in my side not wanting to ruin their plans for the improvements and continued to distract myself by my visits to the Purple Rock.
In the space between our house and the tree line at the end of our backyard was a nice sloping grassy area that stretched from the edge of the house and crawled over a small hilltop down to the tree line.At the end of the yard was a 30 foot high weeping willow tree-then off to the right of it about 30 feet to one side and another 10 feet back was the Purple Rock. On the hilltop was the place where my father and I had laid out at night and looked at the stars.He had pointed out all of the different constellations to me and we had talked about everything-space travel,comets,the origins of life. I had not thought about the fact that another baby would soon be inthe coming or even thought about going to school when the summer was over-this was a time of quiet for me-I had not even thought of the bleating of the pain that was in my side and for now it seemed to have gone away.
This was to be the last summer as it was for me and I often reflect back upon those days and refer to it unto my ownself as the ‘Tranquility’ chapter in my life. A time period passed and it seemed a blur to me and next I knew my brother was in a crib in the other room. He was always a happy baby.He had a big round pudgy face and blond hair and blue eyes when he was young. Later on in life his eyes changed to green and his hair became brown. I didn’t pay as much attention to him as I had with the birth of my sister. He would try to go outside when I would go out the front door to play and would begin to cry at the screen door because it acted as a barrier to him. He would push his hands and bow his head into the screen door trying to butt his way out-sometimes I would thump him on his forehead through the screen and he would plummet onto his hind end with the look of suprise on his face. The screen actually had indentations where he had placed his hands and his forehead and tried to push his way out. Eventually my mother caught on to the head thumping I was giving him and warned me against doing it any longer-that meant check before you do it and make sure she is not in the kitchen where she could hear my brother hit the floor. Just the same he seemed to grow a bit rapidly and got past the stage where he was so helpless. Now he was at the stage where he could go outside and I was the one who had to watch him. The improvements to the house never took place and my father had decided to look for another home that was a bit larger than the one we currently lived in.The pain in my side began to bother me again and eventually I could not hide it any longer-my father caught me bending over out by the Purple Rock.When he tried to touch me in my groin area where the pain was I would laugh because it tickled. After a few of those events I was taken to the family doctor and it was determined that an hernia was the cause of the pain.
Simply enough I ended up going into the hospital and having an operation to repair it and that was that. The first solo memory I have where I experienced something with my mother and my two siblings was an event that always stuck out in my mind. We were all out in the backyard at mid day and it was during the summertime. All three of us were around my mother who was sitting on the ground and we were playing with her. My sister had begun to make a necklace out of dandelions for my mother. Seeing this my brother and I began to pick up stray dandelions and bring them over there to the place where my mother was sitting. The rest of the world did not exsist and it was all focused in the group-occassionally I would look into the tree line but this was an unusual event-I was actually focused on what was taking place around the little space. I watched my mother make crowns for all of us out of the dandelions,she made herself one and then necklaces for all of us,bracelets….I was moving from one place to the other so that I could see what my mother looked like at different angles in the sun. This habit of mine in observing my mother was nothing unusual-I was fascinated with her,the way she looked and smiled,and every pose she took was something for me to behold. To me she was the most beautiful person in the world and I was concerned that everything was good for her. I made a remark how beautiful the flowers looked in her hair and she responded after laughing a bit in her girlish tone that the ‘flowers’ were not flowers at all but were actually weeds. After disagreeing with her and not wanting to accept that the dandelions were weeds she explained the difference to me. I recall that the sun ceased to shine and I bowed my head looking first at my shoes,then at the grass around my feet and seeing a small growth of crabgrass (already knowing it was a weed) I remarked to my mother,”why those dandelions are no better than that crabgrass is”…I then proceeded to pull up the crabgrass by its roots as I had observed them doing when out and about in the yard and in the garden we had. I attempted to stop my siblings from offering her any more dandelions.
I threw the dandelion jewelery from myself onto the ground and took the necklace and the crown from my mother who tried to prevent me from doing it. Weeds! I didn’t want my mother wearing weeds. Play time was over for me and my mother knew the revelation she had given to me had rocked my little world. My last observation as I walked to the house alone and looked back was my mother trying to continue playing with my brother and sister but distracted a bit without the full smile on her face in knowing what effects her teachings had done to me. For the split second I caught her glimpse on me from the corner of my eye as I slammed the screen door at the back of the house. There would be no straightening this out until my father came home and I remember laying in my bed thinking about how I had watched my mother put those weeds into her hair and around her neck….weeds! Those things that are no good,where bugs and ants crawl-butterflies even hate them and they are the enemies of the garden too! My father knew something was amiss before he got within 50 feet of the house-I was not there to greet him or jump up on him-I was in bed thinking about my experience and remembering the time my mother had murdered two wasps in my windowsill and told me that they wasps were taking a nap,fearing the truth would upset me if I knew they had crossed over into the other world prematurely.