My world began on this date in 1934. Aside from a new life, my birth brought on a few dramatic changes in the lives of the people around me. My four-year-old sister lost her privileged status as the center of our parents’ lives. My dad was allowed to be there for my birth and to see his wife and hold his baby daughter whenever he wanted. My mother enjoyed the comforts and attention of being in her own home for the occasion, to have the immediate attention of her doctor, a midwife/baby nurse and her own mother to look after her family. In those days, it was believed that new mothers must stay relatively inactive for two to three weeks after giving birth, so my arrival was a major change for the whole family – except for me. I slept through most of the excitement, defining me to be “a good baby.”
My dad’s sister Agnes was recently divorced and living for a time in an apartment near our neighborhood. Her birthday happened to be the day after mine and she considered me to be one of her birthday presents. By the time I was a couple months old, Agnes often stopped at our house after work on Friday and “borrowed” me for the weekend so that my sister Dorothy could enjoy her accustomed place as the focal point of the Universe. Dorothy’s resentment of my existence only escalated as I became more active in the family routines and required more attention from the adults. My weekends with Aunt Agnes not only made for a more peaceful home but fostered a strong bond between my lovely and loving aunt, enriching both our lives in untold ways.
While Dorothy was unhappy about having to share her place in the family’s attentions, she did enjoy the superiority of age, experience, abilities and knowledge. As most little sisters do, I longed to be like her and tried to do all the things she did. At that ambition, I was a constant failure. She was confident and athletic while I was timid and awkward. She could climb trees like a monkey, dance, roller skate and talk easily to adults. I could get up a tree eight feet above ground then freeze with fear until Dad was called home from work to pluck me out of the tree. I couldn’t bat a softball or hit a badminton birdie no matter how hard I concentrated, or roller skate over twenty feet without acquiring two skinned knees. It took months for me to be brave enough to let Dad take the training wheels off my bike. I was a good listener around adults only because I was shy about expressing my own thoughts.
In spite of my failures to learn all the physical and social skills that seemed so easy for my sister, it didn’t take long for her to teach me to read, to count to 100, do simple addition, name all the colors in the box of 64 crayons and write my name in cursive; accomplishments which my kindergarten teacher frowned on, saying that I would probably have to un-learn most of those things so that I could learn to do them “correctly.” As it turned out, Dorothy had been a good teacher and I give her credit for sending me off to school with a flying start and a love for learning that has lasted for all these years.
Unfortunately, Dorothy didn’t teach me much geography beyond practicing with the wooden map puzzle of the United States. I could put it together at record speed but that seems to have been due to my strong visual orientation. I learned only a few of the states’ names and am still uncertain about the exact location of most of New England, the southern states and the ones between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. I believed, for years, that there was a state named Dixie. I tend to get lost in parking lots and don’t trust maps, so it may just be that I was born with a poor sense of direction.
One thing Dorothy didn’t teach me was how to draw. She hated the idea that I could draw a picture of an airplane from a viewpoint that showed it had two wings and landing gear, and she couldn’t. That might have been why I was bold enough to major in art in college, even though our school system had offered no art classes beyond elementary school projects like coloring mimeographed copies of Washington, Lincoln, turkeys, Santas and Easter bunnies.
Today, I am aware that my first ninety years has gone by much too quickly – I can’t wait to see what comes next.