Protecting Bliss

I was only two when the Riots began in Detroit. At that time and in my own little world, my biggest problem was trying not to stub my toe when I rode my bike because I was too impatient to put my shoes on. At the end of the driveway was a patch of torn concrete curbing that had been chipped away to allow street traffic into the drive. It was rough, jagged and I always stubbed my toe running too fast across this danger zone. What I knew of danger zones was so small.

The US Army didn't have convoys patrolling in our little city. None of the buildings in my neighborhood looked like third-world war zones. The tension level wasn't palpable. But I knew they and these conditions existed in places my family could and did travel to get to in a short time. In the neighborhood my grandparents lived in. For as much as they tried to accept diversity, my parents were simply more comfortable in their isolated suburban community.

It's sad really. But ignorance has provided us with the bliss we so hope for when contests happens within our proximity. If ignorance is bliss then the converse, 'knowledge is hell' must be true. It is, seeing people fighting, getting injured and being suppressed or oppressed hurts even when you're just two. You know something is wrong because everyone is tense. Nothing is easy and people don't spend time doing anything except being at home. They can't even remember to put shoes on their children's feet.

Growing up in Detroit, we learned very quickly and from a very young age that people can say one thing and believe another entirely. "People are all the same - but you stay on your side - or we'll make you." It was so wrong. Everyone worked so hard to protect the bliss that they worked so hard to establish. Would it be so hard to agree to disagree? But this is nothing new. Detroit certainly didn't have patent rights on sectarian beliefs or ethnic division and the corresponding attempts to maintain it. These type of fights have been happening throughout history. Detroit was just another mark on the racial timeline. But it was the first mark on my timeline.

I still don't understand why it happened. I don't understand the level of hubris that would be necessary to support the belief that it would ever be okay to dis acknowledge one rational person's beliefs for another based on the outward ramifications of tiny alterations in DNA.

My Bliss doesn't look anything like this picture. I don't understand how any one's definition of bliss can look like this.

No Dogs Allowed

Halloween . . . there were some good ones and some not so good ones. The costumes were great, but were not always what I would call ethnically sensitive. So many years later, they are almost humorous if you have really poor taste and no decorum. At the time, nobody thought too much of it - at least nobody in our little white bread (white-trash would be more accurate), homogenized middle-America community.
They started out okay and got progressively worse. I can't imagine that my Mother ran out of characters to emulate, but my Mom was in charge when it came to sewing. She always had to push the limit - but that applied to everything. Not just costumes. My sister made such a cute Little Dutch Girl. Of course the costume was recycled when it didn't fit her any longer and I wore it while she graduated to Aunt Jemima. Seriously! Look.

Somehow I think I knew this was questionable - even then. We got other costumes that were equally questionable. My brother was Fu Man Chu one year. My sister dressed as a Geisha Girl.  Normalcy was a Raggedy Ann and a big fat pumpkin. These weren't so bad. I love that she painted my white baby shoes green. I wonder if these were the same pair my brother wore after I grew out of them.

I never understood why I had to dress up as something that we never came in contact with except to destroy (the pumpkin). Honestly, carving them was the slimiest task. I hated it. In years when we weren't diligent about bringing our Jack-O-Lanterns inside after dark the hoodlums that lived behind the fence would smash them across the front lawn and leave pumpkin shrapnel smeared everywhere before you could say, "Boo." Sometimes our artwork didn't even make it through Devil's Night. So disappointing!

One year my Dad tried to roast the pumpkin seeds. We collected the seeds, rinsed, soaked them in saltwater and toasted them for what seemed like hours.I think it worked, but eating them didn't bring the same holiday sentiment that it had before. It just wasn't the same. Somehow when you illuminate the mystery behind these childhood rituals, they're ruined forever. Pumpkins seeds taste better at Halloween. It's a fact.

One year we made popcorn balls. They weren't as good either. I'm pretty sure they ended up in a Teacher's Lounge somewhere. I swear, that place was like a black hole for left-overs.

The worst Halloween was the year that I couldn't go out. I got really sick a few weeks before Halloween - Tonsillitis. I missed school and the doctor told me that my prescription was to chew gum! I was so excited, but it really hurt. My entire jaw ached all the way to my ears. Once I was feeling better, surgery was scheduled. But I had to stay inside until after I came home from the hospital. Such a shame because I had the BEST costume! A beautiful, floaty, sparkly, yellow fairy costume complete with a wand and halo. And I couldn't go out and show it to anyone.

The best part about Halloween might have been the candy. Candy was never off-limits as a kid because my Dad had (has) a serious sweet tooth. It was the sheer volume that was so blatantly exorbitant. Then there was the matter of protecting it from a mysterious transportation to the black hole, aka Teacher's Lounge, for disposal under the premise that we had too much. It would rot our teeth. Did our Dad honestly think we didn't know that he worked in the same building as the black hole? My Dad was ever the one to give away possessions - even stuff that wasn't his - like our hard earned candy. As long as we got to sort it first, I don't think it mattered that much. We didn't really eat it, the quest that was what made Halloween so much fun. We went out with our wolf pack of neighbors and ran as fast as we could from one house to the next. No parents and all the candy we could get our hands on. A true raid of sorts. I don't think we wouldn't have cared what our Mother chose to dress up as so long as the end result was the same. But seriously, what would have been wrong with dressing up as a ghost or a dog?

Change

"Things change." It's such a hard thing to learn at such a young age. Just like, "Nothing stays the same." My older sister is resigned to accept the idea that things change. She was the oldest. She'd been through it before. I'm upset, but not hysterical. The middle of the learning curve. My poor little brother is just beginning his initiation into the cruel world of "Grown-ups Rule Disappointment" and "Fun Doesn't Last Apathy." As I said, it's really much too heavy a lesson for such a small person. I suppose it's good most people don't remember the lesson, but learn the rule.
For me, I didn't forget the lesson - not one.

Some of them I embraced. As a percentage of the whole, hardly any, I believe that I remember more of the pleasant times than the bad ones. Or I might also say that I'd rather remember the pleasant - so I tend to dwell  on those as opposed to the latter. Who wouldn't?
There were plenty of hard lessons that were no fun at all. Why concentrate on those?

On the day this photo was taken, my brother, sister and me - along with some neighborhood kids, set up our own flower stand. You know how most kids construct lemonade stands? Well, we made a flower stand. We got empty peat planting pots and used plastic flower flats from the barn and filled them with dirt. We picked Dandelions and packaged our own flowers. We sold Pussy Willow Trees too. We also set up a table at the street so that people could buy our lovely flowers. In retrospect, I don't think we actually believed anyone might. We were just playing a game. We were little entrepreneurs. We had no idea that our hard earned business, our precious time and our spectacular merchandise would have to be summarily destroyed when it was time to come in for the night. We hadn't learned yet that things change. But that's how our Dad was. He probably told us to clean up and come in and we probably didn't want to. So, he helped. Granted his way of helping was to accomplish the task as quickly and with as little discussion as possible. He dumped out our flowers, stacked the containers, folded the table and everything we had worked so hard on was gone in less than a minute and without the slightest apology.
We hadn't yet learned that 'Things Change.' We did that day.

Happy Cars

As I eluded to earlier, we drove a lot as a family. We drove everywhere - all summer long - every summer and every point in between. Day trips, weekend trips, month trips. No distance was too far.
This was my brother's standard position on most trips. (Yeah, I know. I don't think our car even had seat belts.) His other favorite was the same, but with his arms around my Dad's neck - practically shoking him without understanding.
My spot was lying down up on the ledge between the rear of the back seat and the back window. My Dad had built another 'bed' out of plywood that fit over the drive shaft hump on the floor in the back seat. Technically, my brother was to lie down on the floor, I got the window ledge and my sister got the bench seat. But my brother preferred lying on my Dad's shoulder.

For most of my Dad's career, he taught kindergarten. Not always, but always elementary school in some capacity. Because of this, we always had games to play on these long rides (or maybe he taught kindergarten because he was so good at the games). We would guess distances, we would make sayings out of the letters on a license plate, we would see if we could get long-haul truckers to honk their horns for us, we took turns with the coveted task of throwing money out the window into the toll booth basket as he sped through and hoping all the dimes went in. Sometimes they didn't and my Dad stepped on the gas anyway. We were hysterical! Regular outlaws.
My brother's favorite game was one that I never understood. To this day, I still don't know how to play. My Dad got it. My Mom got it. You would have thought they would have explained it to me - nope. On my own inside the group as usual.
The game was called "What Kind of Car?" It was simple really. All you had to do was look at an oncoming car and determine what type of car it was. Something about the way the front end looked made the ditinction clear to everyone except me. They were either 'happy' or 'sad.' The part I didn't understand was the criteria. Some looked 'happy' to me that were categorically labeled 'sad.' The opposite happened too. To this day, I'm sure there were strict rules. My Dad didn't typically enjoy games that were subjective, but he did like tricks and jokes.

View

As I said, I was logical if nothing else as a kid. I am still. For example, I spent the formative years of my childhood believing that all anyone had to do when they needed something was to go to the local credit union and ask for money - they provided it. I believed this because my Dad was a teacher and my Mom didn't work until I was much older. Because of my father's career choice, he was home almost all the time. Early evenings, weekends and entire summers. He was there.

As a result, we spent a lot of time together being separate in proximity. Well, not all the time. My Dad had chores to do which without he failed to thrive. Us kids had showers to inspect or campground stores to examine. My Mother got effectively lost - oh yeah - "exploring" when there was work. She still does that. How does she get away with it? Still, we camped a lot. In fact, I can't remember a time that I didn't know camping would be a part of our summer vacation as sure as the sun would rise. We stayed at a hotel only once in all those years despite that some of our trips might have been improved if we had.

But . . . . this was the way life was in my house. It didn't matter that there were dead fish everywhere. No thought was given to why the fish had died. Or if there might be something in the water that had caused their death that might affect any other species that came in contact. If the fish died, it was their poor luck. A few hundred dead, stinking, fermenting fish were completely inconsequential. You just had to go out into the deeper water - where the bigger fish lived. Or better yet, just don't think about it. -Go play.

Not all the trips were horrible. Most of the time, camping was the only time we saw our relatives - with the exception of one of my Dad's brothers. His wife only "camped at the Hilton." As a kid, I had no idea what this meant. That remark may as well have been in Portuguese. As an adult, I cannot believe that this woman wasn't ostracized to the fullest extent of the family law. She was practically a heretic. I wish I had the nerve to be like her.

We saw so much. We explored. We learned about other places. We thought about what it would be like to be in another place and to think of it as home. We learned about the stories of history that lie in wait all but forgotten in every small town. There is one. You can find it. We saw what was available and how far we could go and we learned how to get back home. Most important, we learned that the view (any view) looks different depending on where you might be viewing something from.