The Early Years

I was born in 1955, smack dab in the middle of the Baby Boomer era. This makes me not so special, but more indicative of my generation. For example, the middle of a loaf of Wonder bread isn’t the heel or the smaller pieces near the ends. It’s the best of the loaf, the model, the exemplary piece. According to the US government, I was one of 4,047,295 “slices” born that year, so like I said, I’m “indicative not special.”

My earliest memories aren’t earth-shattering, exotic or prodigious, but provide clues  to whom that bouncing baby girl Mary and Al brought home to 725 Lovers Lane in Akron, Ohio, would become. I’m sure everyone’s first recollection has to be of the closest maternal figure. I’m no different. My mother was not your typical fifties’ housewife. I swear that if she had lived in Hollywood, someone would have discovered her in a malt shop. She was beautiful with dark brown hair, light blue eyes and a shapely figure that turned heads. Her laugh could lift the most somber soul to bright blue skies. She was raised by strict parents and wasn’t allowed to date until her late teens. Her father forced her to quit school in tenth grade to help out at home. If her life had been more social I’m sure she would have found her magic over suitors a boost to self-esteem. My dad was the lucky guy who won her heart though when she was nineteen in 1947. He had been out of the Navy for a few years, hanging around his buddy who bartended at the Italian Center for special occasions. One of these events just happened to be a wedding that my mom and her sister attended. Dad’s friend pointed my mom out to him and the rest is history. I like to think of that moment as the night my dad got the thunderbolt. You know what it is. It’s the thump on the head when you meet your person kind of like Michael Corleone laying eyes on Appalonia in The Godfather.

Seven months after first meeting, they married, and ten months after that my sister was born. My mother confided that they used the rhythm method to avoid getting pregnant right away, but they had it backwards. That will do it. In 1949, my sister joined the duo.

My father worked at Goodyear as an hourly employee and my mom worked for her dad in what she called “The Chicken Store,” a poultry business meagerly launched in the thirties by my grandfather. Her mother babysat her granddaughter and for a surprise baby. Sylvia and Simon’s latest and last human contribution to the world was another son born a year after my sister. At this point in time I would like to thank chickens and the WPA for laying [no pun intended] the groundwork for my entry into the world. My grandfather Simon’s story could be a novella in itself, but as an immigrant with a family to support during the Great Depression, he scratched out a living as best he could. He had a couple of chickens so he sold eggs door to door and then at a farmer’s market to keep afloat. I was told that he even wrote to President Roosevelt during those trying times to ask for help. He got a response and was directed to the WPA. The need for poultry became even more important during WWII, as meat was rationed, so when the mid-fifties rolled in, business was bustling and to my mom’s dismay she was still working there. According to Mary, her first child was already five and she feared she’d never get away from chickens. So I was conceived.

Again, thank you, poultry.

Knowing my mom for 64 years I have come to the conclusion that she really adored working outside the home. This wasn’t too common for a woman with two kids in the fifties. And my father, who patterned his life after his older brothers, wanted his wife to stay home. All the women and sister-in-laws in his life were Italian-American June Cleavers. There were no pearls or housedresses for Mary. She was raised as the oldest of seven and was expected to help with her other siblings, so this woman knew how to raise kids backwards and forwards. Perhaps she was totally blase to the everyday care and feed of children by the time I was born. Looking back on it, she seemed bored cooking, cleaning and taking care of two kids and a husband. There was a third sibling born when I was two, but according to my mom, he died at birth and as she revealed  “it was probably for the best”. According to her, he was even smaller than me (I am 4’9”) and that he would have had a hard life being a short man.

By the way, being a short woman isn’t a breeze either. I still need assistance to grasp some items at the grocery store; a small stepladder to reach the second and third shelves in my kitchen; never ever would I attempt to use the overhead bin on an airplane and lately to my dismay, I require an eight inch stool to snag those little workout socks at the bottom of my top lid washer. I swear if my fingers were just an eighth of an inch longer I could latch onto them.

Anyhow, I’m sure that losing a child at birth was extremely difficult. I have no memory of this family tragedy. All I know is that he was a boy and in Italian lore, was entitled to be crowned king of the siblings. He was born with a golden penis, you see. To add more to her grief, she couldn’t provide her father with a namesake. Naming children after your parent is mandatory in second generation Italian culture. As years passed though, other siblings saved the day, and our extended family now includes two Simons and two Sylvias. At one time, my cousin’s family had five Joes. Ok, some are Joeys; some are Josephs, some are Guiseppes, but nonetheless, five Joes.

By the time I was three, my mom must have been totally over the housewife gig. As an intelligent woman she needed a little more challenge in her life. And as a bright but precocious toddler I was about to give it to her. Mom was mindlessly dusting one day, not really thinking about what she was doing. Maybe she was fantasizing about her next steps in life or rehearsing how she would tell her husband she wanted to take driving lessons or maybe she was just tired, but as she shook the dust rag from the second floor window, it slipped out of her hands. She ran downstairs and out the door to retrieve it.  I ran after her but I stayed inside.

Then I did the unthinkable. I locked the door.

Even as a three-year-old, I was smarter than I looked. I knew exactly what I did and I drank up the power it gave. Here I am, a kid, and I locked my mom out of the house. The human who controls everything in my life from food to poop is now sweet talking me through the screen explaining how to lift the latch. Now who’s your mama, mama?

I don’t think she knew that I locked it in the first place or that I totally knew how to unlock it, but for a few minutes in 1958 the world was mine. And it felt good.