Following My Father

The old brown-shingled house on Main Street had some fascinating features. The dingy laundry room at the back held a wringer washing machine. I loved to watch the sudsy water swish the clothes around. When the clothes were clean and rinsed, I pushed them through the wringer, then pulled them out the other side. Mom and I shook them out and loaded them into a basket to take outside.

"Watch your fingers! You do not want them crushed by the rollers," cautioned Mom.

I assured her that that was the last thing I wanted to do.

I helped Mom straighten the sheets and held them as she pinned them to the clothesline. I loved how the clean laundry flapped and snapped there, like sails on a ship. They smelled so good and fresh!

When the laundry dried I helped Mom fold the sheets. My arms were not very long, so I had to work hard at it.

Bevy and I sometimes dared to open the rickety door to the dilapidated shed at the back of the yard. Once we saw, or thought we saw, a black widow spider. We hightailed it out of there, screaming at the top of our lungs.

One afternoon I heard a godawful squealing from the backyard and ran out to see. Two dog were apparently stuck together and rotating in a circle.

"What are those dogs doing? Look, he's hurting her!" I screamed.

"They are mating," said Mom.

I wondered what that meant, but sensed I did not want to know.

Dad had boxes and boxes of books. They came with us wherever we moved. While he unpacked them in the tiny cottage at the side of the house, I moseyed around that musty space. Dad did not do much with us at home -- he never played games or romped around like many dads of other friends did. We spent time with him in quiet activities -- watching TV, reading, sitting on a bench in a park. I spent many hours of my childhood simply hanging around to watch what he was doing.

Dad bought an old red jalopy to fix up. He parked it on the other side of the house. Everything was rounded, from its exterior shape to the dashboard made of smooth, glossy, polished, golden brown wood. The clock was round, the gauges were round. The rumble seat was rounded, too.

Dad said there was nothing like the sound of those old car radios.

While Dad worked on the car, I played inside or climbed into the rumble seat and pretended the car was moving along a country road. I could almost feel the wind blowing through my hair. I waved my arms in free jubilation.

The interior smelled fusty with a peculiar odor from whatever mold grew in the cloth upholstery.

We moved again before Dad got the red car running. I guess he sold it, one of the many projects left unfinished through moving over the years.

My family often spent weekends hiking on Mt. St. Helena or walking in San Francisco. Dad led us on long treks that covered miles of or countryside or city streets. My weary legs and and my saddle shoes or sneakers followed along.

In San Francisco we loved to end up at Fisherman's Wharf where we sometimes ate at Scoma's or another seafood restaurant if Dad felt flush. More often we walked up a block or two to an Italian buffet with red and white checked oilcloth-covered tables.

Across from the restaurant stood Cost Plus, a huge one story, flat-topped building that held wonderful objects from all over the world. We might spent an hour in there looking at, and sometimes buying, the exotic dishes, cups, teapots, vases, brass pitchers, wood boxes inlaid with pearl or abalone, ethnic cottons, wool carpets, and rush mats. None of these things was available anywhere else, except for Chinese goods available in Chinatown.

Along the wharf were huge steaming vats of Dungeness crabs. Just the smell made me long to eat one! Mom and Dad often let me pick out a hot crab for the man to wrap up in white paper and tape. Along with the crab, they bought a round loaf of San Francisco Sourdough and little glasses of shrimp cocktail for us to take home.

On the walk to the car was a shop that sold nautical equipment, souvenirs, and gifts. Colorful glass balls, floats for fishing nets, hung in the windows. Tiny ships, steins, and anchors were among the souvenirs. Brass lanterns, compasses, and bells, intricate model ships, glasses with nautical symbols or Fisherman's Wharf etched on them made for fascinated browsing.

Up the hill from Fisherman's Wharf lived Winnie's opera teacher name. She was a buxom retired opera singer who whose white mansion had a view of the bay from the spacious living room. Her students gave their recitals there.

Winnie studied singing for several years. Even as a teenager, she had some trouble finding the right pitch. Years later we discovered that she had a profound hearing loss! How could she have even kept a tune at all when she could barely hear? She also did well in school. We just thought she was dreamy.

Sometimes Mom and my sisters and me put on dresses, hats, and gloves -- what proper ladies wore to go downtown. Dad nearly always wore a suit, so he didn't look any different than usual.

We'd feed the plentiful, strutting pigeons at Union Square, walk down Powell Street to browse in bookstores and eat at Tad's Steak House, or return to Geary Boulevard to eat at the Haufbrau.

Sometimes we took the cable car from Fisherman's Wharf where we parked the car, and returned the same way. I loved sitting at the side of the cable car with my father holding onto me. I loved the ding, ding, ding of the bell as the conductor warned that he was about to take off or when about to cross intersections. I loved the clackety clack as the sprungs of the cable underneath the street caught. We laughed when the conductor told us all to lean one way or the other to help the car climb one of the steep San Francisco hills.

We often enjoyed plays and musicals the the Geary or Curran Theater. Dad parked our station wagon in a multi-story lot down Mason Street. When I was five I followed a man I thought was Dad out of the elevator. My terrified parents thanked him for keeping me safe when the elevator returned quickly to that floor.

Other excursions to San Francisco led to the zoo, the Cliff House, Golden Gate Park or Sunday concerts at Stern Grove. I was a lucky girl.

Chinatown was a favorite destination. We usually got there in the afternoon after we walked from Fisherman's Wharf. Phew! That's a long way for a little girl.

The shops in Chinatown offer many wonderous things. There is a large population of Chinese people in San Francisco, ones who descend from coolies brought over to do hard labor on the railroads over the Sierras and beyond and from others who came over to pan for gold during the Gold Rush. There are others who are recent or fairly recent immigrants. Chinatown is the largest enclave of Chinese people outside Asia, and the oldest in the United States.

Many Asians are in import/exports businesses, which makes for a ready supply of goods.

Immigrants from China feel it's important to convey their culture and sustain it throughout generations. A friend in school in San Francisco, where we moved to after St. Helena, was named Helen Wong. She had long, black hair and a petite stature, and was very smart. After school she took the bus to Chinese school , where she learned the language and culture.

We stayed and browsed in the Chinatown shops for hours. I especially loved the tiny dolls and figures, houses, and animals. I enjoyed the silk wall hangings with steep, steep mountains painted on. The huge vases puzzled me. I wondered where people put such things.

In the evening we ate dinner in a red vinyl booth at a Chinese restaurant off the main drag. I developed a real taste for Chinese food, green tea, and learned to use chopsticks at age seven.

I barely remember driving home for the two hours to St. Helena in the dark. I slept most of the way. I made every effort to stay awake to see the Golden Gate or Bay Bridge and the bay beyond, lights on Alcatraz and in Tiburon or the east bay sparkling in the distance. If we took the Bay Bridge, we passed the Folger Bros. factory. "Good to the Last Drop" was painted in huge letters and a giant tilted coffee cup stood on top. The aroma of coffee enticed our senses. It was quite overpowering.

Back in the Napa Valley, our excursions often took us up Mt. St. Helena, former haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson and his new bride. Our hikes ended at a fascinating old barn with its layer of artifacts from the distant past: portraits of couples dressed in Victorian finery in cracked metal filigree frames; coins from the nineteenth century; even glass vases were among the items to be found. We never took anything, and left the objects for others to find, too. Sadly, the barn burned down a few years later.

To get there we hiked down from a dirt parking lot at the side of the highway. There was no trail, so Dad led us down steep hillsides and over huge boulders next to eroded crevasses. I learned to put one foot on each side of them as I made my way down the slope.

This was long before cell phones and 911. I wonder how Mom and Dad would have gotten help had one of us gotten hurt. If it were me that was hurt, Dad would have carried me back up to the car and driven like a bat out of hell to the hospital at Angwin, I'm sure. But, what if one of them got hurt? What would they have done?

Sometimes instead of hiking we just rode along country roads. The Valley of the Moon, made famous by Jack London, that rowdy, hard-drinking novelist, journalist, and social activist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, served as one of our destinations. The road rises and falls and gently curves along rolling hills amidst forests. Old stone walls add interest and charm.

We often visited Sonoma either by driving up the steepest mountain road I ever encountered from the Napa Valley; by taking the long route from Calistoga to Santa Rosa, then south along Highway 12; or by heading south from St. Helena, past Napa, and then west through what was then rolling farmland, now vineyards, and north again into Sonoma.

Sonoma's downtown centers around a park, or plaza. Along the sides of the plaza sit shops and restaurants, a hotel, and historic buildings in the Spanish style, such as General Vallejo's home. After watching squirrels in the park and visiting the sites, we ate in a Mexican restaurant before heading home.

The summer we lived in St. Helena I lived with Bevy and her dad and brothers in her grandmother Emma's grand, but dilapidated, Queen Anne. On Main Street, it had a row of hydrangeas under the front windows and a loquat tree in the front yard.

Dad took a small apartment in the city, where he worked. Mom took a trip back east to see her brother, sister, nephew, and best childhood friend in New Milford. Sylvia lived in the big old house by herself.

By then our families knew each other very well, having eaten Sunday dinner many times seated around Emma's dining table. The table was large enough to fit my family, Bevy's dad Loren, Emma, and Robert, Gary, and Bill, Bevy's brothers. Ten or eleven in all, depending upon whether Winnie was there. She attended UC Berkeley, so only came on the occasional weekend.

Emma grew up a hard-working Swedish farm girl and cooked hearty, stick-to-your-ribs food. Sunday dinners included roast beef studded with cloves of garlic, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls and butter, a side vegetable, soup, and salad. Every meal ended with a heavy dessert. Emma told us her deceased husband insisted upon eating dessert first. He worried he might get too full to enjoy for it after eating dinner!

For Sunday breakfast Emma made French pancakes on her massive, wood burning stove. These were rolled up and covered in cream, then sprinkled with powdered sugar. That summer I gained weight, for sure.

The only meal we were on our own for was lunch. Bevy and I learned to make our own sandwiches, which we usually either ate in the yard or packed along with an apple and a drink to take on our long bike rides.

Clean up was shared between Bevy and me and Gary and Robert. Robert scraped the dishes and set them on the counter. Gary put the chairs up and mopped the floor. Bill went to college, so wasn't there.

After meals Bevy and I washed the dishes. We filled one large sink with soapy water, the other with rinse water. I remember how slimy the dishwater became, and how soapy the rinse water did -- a far cry from how I wash dishes now. Bevy and I took turns washing while the other one dried with one of Emma's large white cotton dish towels embroidered with the days of the week.

Emma was a seamstress. Although she didn't sew much by then. She was in her late seventies and too busy to take care of four kids, cook and shop for groceries, and sew as well. She just made Bevy's clothes, and perhaps some of her own. Her huge sewing room was a glassed-in porch at the back of the house. Its machines and collections of thread and fabric fascinated me.

A rickety screen door banged shut whenever Bevy and I ventured into the backyard. The yard was just a shady, barren bit of ground with stepping stones leading from Loren's workshop and garage. An unpaved alley lay behind the fence.

Bevy and I arranged blocks of wood to make a life-size board game. When we finished, we stepped from one to the next to proceed as pieces in our game. It was sort of fun.

Sometimes Robert, Bevy and I slept in the side yard to escape the heat in the house. Robert supervised us girls. We would have been afraid to be out there by ourselves.

The house next door was a large, well-kept structure painted white, with lots of windows. I imagined it was elegant inside, with a big kitchen at the back. I wondered what it would be like to live there.

One the other side was a strange house with a dome. I never saw anyone go in or come out. The place felt eerie to me.

Once a week Bevy and I walked down to Emma's boyfriend's place, a small apartment on the ground floor. We liked the man very much. He gave us his big glass soda bottles to take to the grocery for refunds and let us keep the money. Our proceeds we used to buy candy. I had a terrible sweet tooth. Chewing so much bubble gum undoubtedly was a contributing factor to my abscess.

On Saturdays we were given quarters so we could go to the movies. I know my parents gave Emma money for watching me that summer, so I imagine my quarter came out of that fund. Dad and Mom, being professionals, earned a lot more than Loren did or that Emma had. Loren was a carpenter. A lot of tract houses were built south of St. Helena in those days. Bevy and I saw him at work one day when Emma took him his lunch.

Emma had to be frugal. And, she came from an era when people used what came their way as much as they could. We wrapped our sandwiches in the waxed paper around frozen vegetable boxes. Frozen vegetables came that way in those days, before our destructive, rampant use of plastics for every damn thing.

I always wondered why Loren let Emma's house gradually fall into disrepair. The linoleum floors were chipped and cracked, the house went unpainted. He lived in her house, after all, and was rather stingy when it came to the kids. Gary, the middle brother, and Bill worked from the time they were young teenagers at a coffee shop down main street. They turned the chairs upside down on the table and mopped the floor, wiped down the counters, took out the garbage, and generally did whatever the boss told them to.

On Saturdays we kids all did chores. Bevy and I vacuumed the staircase and cleaned the bathrooms. I never did housework before that and became exhausted by the time we finished.

Loren took the huge living room for his bedroom. I felt it was selfish of him. We all crowded into the room between the dining room and kitchen to watch television in the evening, we kids crammed together on the twin bed that served as a couch.

Loren also had a fancy, expensive stereo set that he set into the walls of the foyer. Granted, it produced great sound. He used to dance with us sometimes, our small feet on top of his big ones. He played music I never heard at home -- big band from the 30s and 40s and popular dance music from the 40s and 50's. I've loved that music ever after, and later learned how to ballroom dance. "I Get a Kick Out of You," "I Get Sentimental Over You," and "I'll Be Seeing You" were some of my favorites.

Loren was strict and not very nurturing. Although my dad was not physically demonstrative, he was kind to me and interested in my development. I never experienced a household with strong discipline and was not comfortable with that aspect of my time there.

Loren did one really nice thing for Bevy and me. He took us on a backpacking trip to the Trinity Alps, which is almost to the Oregon border. He and Gary carried our supplies along the trail on a contraption Loren devised. It consisted of two long pipes attached to a frame and was rolled via a bicycle tire. Quite ingenious.

We drove to a parking lot in the forest, where the men unloaded the truck and loaded the supplies onto the contraption. From there we proceeded up a narrow trail toward our destination, the top of a mountain. It was a long, hard climb, but Bevy and I were troopers.

I loved being out in the wilderness. Backpacking was a new experience for me. My family never went camping. I loved the smell of the campfire the men cooked our dinners on. I was fascinated by the fire, and watched the orange and yellow flames for long periods.

One campsite we stopped at had the funniest thing: a toilet seat suspended between two trees in full sight of everybody! My embarrassment kept me from using it. I was not about to expose my bottom to my fellow hikers!

We came to a large pond. Never having seen a pristine pond like that, I was awed. Logs floated in the water. Frogs jumped and croaked. Insects buzzed. The sun reflected on the glassy green water. Reeds grew far out into the pond.

Perhaps it was its very pristine nature that caused me to feel afraid to swim in there. Being hot, I would have loved to feel that cool water caress my body. I imagined it was silky. But I wondered what kind of life lived under the water. Would a snake slither against my legs? Would a fish bite me? We moved on.

At the final slope was a log cabin at a campsite filled with picnic tables. Instead of a campfire, Loren and Gary cooked on a grill at the top of a pole. I wondered where the ranger was and who else came there.

Bevy and I ventured to climb up the gray slope, and struggled over the large, sharp boulders. It was slippery work, and we often slid down on the gravel. I didn't like it all that much. I kind of wondered why Loren picked that unattractive spot to come to.

That night deer came to visit us. We made sure to stay quiet, whispering our pleasure at the sight. The deer were so lovely! We saw no stars that night because tall pines towered over the campsite.

After breakfast, we began our trek back down the path. Bevy and I ran gleefully much of the way, flinging our arms wide and shouting.

The summer I stayed with Emma speaks to the times and small town life in the early 1960s. Bevy and I were free to take off on our own for wherever we wanted to go in the valley.

Usually we headed across along country roads and over stone bridges to Silverado Trail. We rode south along that two-lane highway, past Sylvia's friend's house, to the slaughterhouse. We stood and leaned on the wooden fence, and looked down into the pens and chutes. We never got there when there were cows, but it was easy to imagine. Too young, I guess, to feel sympathy for the cows' terror, we simply felt engrossed.

Shortly before the road leading to Conn Dam, we stopped our bikes across from my friend Anna's house. Her family came from Germany, raised pigs, and lived in an old stone farm above the highway.

Anna was a beautiful girl, with thick, long, blond hair worn in two braids with wispy hairs that curled up along her brow. Her mother dressed her in homemade, elaborate dresses with full plaid or flowered skirts and white pinafores.

After a while we made our way back to Highway 128 via another country road, and over the bridge that spanned the creek where Sylvia and her friends went frogging.

Riding back along Highway 128 was pretty scary. As traffic whizzed by, although tired, we pedaled as fast as we could through the dust, past vineyards and orchards. When we reached Charter Oak Avenue I knew we were nearing home, despite the long blocks still remaining.

On the days Bevy and I stayed home, we practiced our tap dancing routines in the slant-floored screened-in porch at the side of Emma's house. Our ambition? To enter the Calistoga Talent Show at the end of summer.

We choreographed two classic American cowboy songs, "Home on the Range" and "Don't Fence Me In."

We swayed and tapped while singing, "Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day," and "Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above . don't fence me in, let me ride through the wild open country that I love, don't fence me in !"

The two of us only took one tap dance class at an old hall on a side street, so our repertoire consisted only of the basic buffalo step that involved a shuffle and a few taps with some turns and kicks and hokey hand gestures thrown in.

I doubt either of us ever worked so hard on anything before, and so felt confident of our success.

The kudos we expected were not exactly what met us at the talent show. We were dismayed to find that our competition was a professionally-trained troupe of dancers from San Francisco. We were beaten before we even began. We endured watching those kids sing in chorus while performing their fancy moves. Our hearts not only sank, but rose in our throats.

Following their rousing applause via honks from the audience parked in the dusty parking lot of the air strip, we set up our little kiddy record player and began our routine. Stumbling and hesitant, Bevy and I braved through, but the worst thing was the complete silence from the cars, all except for Emma's. She honked long, loudly, and loyally.

We sat in teary silence on the drive home through the dark night. In bed under Emma's homemade silk patchwork quilts and the slanted eaves, we suffered through our confusion and sadness.

The experience did not deter me from my interest in drama, dance, and song. When we moved to San Francisco a year later Mom enrolled me in any number of classes at the recreation center. Those stories will come later.

That summer held lots of new experiences for me in addition to the traumatic one at the talent show. Bev's brother, Robert, was fourteen. When he was out we sneaked into his room and borrowed comic books -- Superman, Archie and Veronica, and Mad Magazine. My favorite was Superman and the drama of the romance between him and Lois Lane, and the suspense when his arch enemy, Lex Luthor, threatened him with kryptonite.

Archie and Veronica's romance did not appeal to me. Alfred E. Neuman was too ugly and weird for my taste.

Shortly before Robert came home, we rushed to put his comic books back exactly where they belonged. Robert was a fastidious, quiet boy, who tragically developed PTSD from being drafted and going through boot camp even before he was shipped to Vietnam.

Robert went AWOL and disappeared for months until he showed up at Loren's. Loren remarried and moved to Napa following Emma's' death. Robert became an alcoholic, began acting unpleasant and weird, and eventually died from the disease while living in Loren's rear cottage.

In his teen years he was so afraid of asking a high school girl to the prom that he asked me. Thirteen at the time, I traveled up from LA. Sylvia used the silk Dad brought back from an engineering trip to Vietnam to make me a gown. It was peach, with a square neckline and wide straps. It fit me beautifully. My hair was put up in a French bun, very elegant.

When Sylvia fit me in Emma's bedroom, she walked in as I was complaining about her to Bevy -- one of many things I think she never forgave me for. Sylvia held onto grudges, and made no secret of them. Like Dad, she did not directly express her criticisms to people, but behind their backs, a trait I hated from an early age because Dad did it to Sylvia.

Robert was a terrible dancer and stepped on my toes. He could not lead, which made our movements jerky and awkward. For many years my parents displayed our portrait. It must have been one of the many things we lost along the way.

Robert and Bevy got into drugs a year or two later. I discovered this when I met them in San Francisco once. I hated drugs and disapproved of how their personalities changed from it, especially Bevy's, who had been my best friend for so many years.

At eighteen, Bevy got pregnant. She and her boyfriend married and lived in a small apartment in Napa. She stayed home with her little girl until they moved to Eureka and the couple divorced. She got a job as an administrative assistant at a mental health clinic and worked there for several years.

Back in St. Helena, despite our humiliating experience at the talent show, my hopes and dreams revolved around becoming an actress and singer. That was before I developed a hearing loss that slowly progressed in my twenties and thirties and I lost the ability to keep a tune. This is sad for me because I yearn to sing. I subject only my animals to my terrible voice!

The next summer my parents took me on a trip to Lake Delavan, Wisconsin, as I mentioned in an earlier post. We visited many wonderful places. Mom and I played games to assuage my boredom as we drove pat the miles and miles of monotonous cornfields and farmlands. We looked for animals in the clouds, played word games, and she read me stories and sang songs with me.

I cannot tolerate monotony. Kansas, where I live now, is mainly flat, arid land. The boredom of driving through that on trips literally makes me feel sick. On a trip to New Mexico a couple of years ago I could not look out to the sides of the highway for 400 miles!

Our first stop was Yellowstone. We waited for Old Faithful spew. We drove past mile after mile of sulphur pools. We walked down paths and along boardwalks in them.

A very steep path led down to one large pool. On the way back I ran up ahead, opened the car door, and confronted a big brown bear, who popped up from the front seat! He had squeezed in through an opening above the window my parents left halfway down and found the food bag on the floor of the front seat. He must have smelled it before he got in.

Dad heard me screaming and rushed up, opened the door for the bear, who, as freaked out as I was, jumped out and lumbered away. Visitors to the park were not cautioned and prohibited from rolling down their windows or (stupidly) feeding the wildlife in those days. Not that we ever did that.

We left Yellowstone and headed for Mt. Rushmore. We passed through a fragrant pine forest tightly packed with trees. We spent the night at a rustic lodge with an enormous stone fireplace.

Outside, we gazed at the stars in the midnight blue sky. Never again have I seen such a concentration of stars as they twinkled high above. Mom pointed out several constellations, the Big and Little Dippers and Orion's Belt are the only ones I still remember.

Dad taught me about stars, that they are dying balls of fire whose gleam takes light years to reach our vision.

Mt. Rushmore impressed me with those massive faces carved into the cliff. The visitor's center displayed many interesting stuffed animals (poor things), rocks, and other natural objects.

Running back down the steep path and past the people trudging up, like we had, I reached the parking lot way before my parents. Nothing startling happened to me there.

I talked about Delavan Lake in an earlier post, so I won't repeat it and will end this post here.

St. Helena was perhaps my favorite place to live. For once in my life, I lived a small town childhood, had a best friend, knew lots of loving people, and had many fun adventures. I hope you enjoyed reading about it. I will talk about the rest of our time there next.

Until then,

Caroni