Birth Day

Just Walk Away: a recollection of people, places and things

When I look back on my life it seems that I was always leaving something behind.

I was born in Chicago, Illinois on October 13. It was Friday the thirteenth, the day I was born, which is unlucky in the eyes of the superstitious. Later on, when I became aware of the superstition, I decided that Friday the thirteenth was lucky for me. I decided that everything that was unlucky for everybody else was going to be lucky for me. That’s my superstition.

This is 1738 N. Park St. in Chicago, Illinois. My mom and dad brought me here after I was born. .

Sweet Home Chicago

After I was born, we lived in the cheap, bohemian, artsy fartsy part of Chicago. My mom called the place where we lived “Bug House Square.” She said at night, with all the lights on in the kitchen, she would plug up the cracks below the doors and spray bug killer. Then she would turn out the lights and slam the door behind her. In minutes she would hear scuffling at the bottom of the door and in the morning, upon opening the door, would find a giant pile of dead cockroaches that had tried to flee the poison.

At first mom had her teaching job and dad went to art school. In his free time, he would golf. My dad would have loved to be a professional golfer. Maybe it was my arrival that made him give up this dream. But he didn’t give up golf. Oh no, he golfed all his life, chipping practice balls in our back yard and going off to the golf course every chance he got. In Chicago it made mom sad and angry that he would go off to golf because he sometimes would go off and golf with women he met somewhere. Mom had to stay home with me. This made her resent him at the time, and this resentment continued all the time they were married. I believe that my Dad did not think anything was wrong with this behavior, but I know my mom felt betrayed because she told me this when I got older. She wanted to be the center of his world, but he couldn’t because he was essentially a self-centered person even though generous at times, and this was too bad because mom was a pretty sweet catch which he should have appreciated more. On the contrary I think he thought that he himself was the catch and that she was the one who should appreciate. This dynamic eventually led to divorce thirty years later. He wanted to be the center of the world and she wanted to be the center of his world. When two people have that kind of dynamic a good marriage isn’t going to happen. After I married and my own husband started to behave this way it caused the same kind of resentment in me and eventually, we split, too. When two people meet to give, both get 100%. When two people meet to get, no one gets anything. This seems to be the state of affairs with human beings. Hardly anyone meets to give. Most meet to get, or there’s an uneven split. 60/40. 30/70. I wish I had understood this better when I was young. My own relationships with men would have been a lot better and certainly different.

But in the beginning in Chicago and maybe even for a few years in Marshalltown they got along well enough and more often than not things were harmonious. The full blown rancor came later.

Mom

My mom was born in Illinois to German farmers and educated people who were preachers. People who could come up with a unique sermon for the congregation every week. She told me that when she was young, she was a very energetic person, that she ran everywhere. She had a strong personality even then and I’m sure she got this from her mom, my grandmother Frieda who was a house ‘a’ fire and then some. For example when my mom’s younger sister LuVerne was treated unfairly by a teacher in the one room schoolhouse where they attended school my mom stood up for her and bawled out the teacher. Imagine the chutzpah in the mid 1920s.

From left: Gram’s sister, mom with the dark brown Buster Brown haircut, blonde Uncle Kenneth, grandpa Bernhard, grandma Frieda in the kerchief, red-headed Aunt LuVerne, great grandma Tina, great grandpa William.

I only knew mom when she was an adult. Who knows their parents any other way? This is a sad state of affairs to my way of thinking and part of the reason I am writing this. This is so all the people who might have only known me as an adult might know a bit about me in other ways. Like when I was young. It’s the only control I have over time which is really no control at all.

As an adult my mom was an art teacher and book illustrator. She was a very creative and frustrating person to me. Maybe she was frustrating because she was so creative. I don’t know. I do know that she was not like everybody else I knew. Other people might have been boring, but my mom was not boring in any way. She was a combination of fear and courage for one thing. She couldn’t or wouldn’t do some things and I guess it was because she wasn’t confident but on the other hand, she was vivacious and fun, full steam ahead. Yes, she was complicated. She was not easy. Looking back, I can see that her life must have been frustrating for her, too. She could have been so much more, and yet, I can say with certainty that she did the best she could with her lot in life. When she got older and I looked at pictures of her I thought, “That person looks like they have had all the life sucked out of them. That person looks deflated.” Is this what happens to us? Why do some people still have vitality as they age? Why don’t other people? My mother lost her vitality as she aged. It was so strange because when she was young, she was a hot potato, a bottle rocket with zing! Some days I think I know what happened to her. Some days it’s just a theory. But I can relate because I was full of vitality when I was young and, now, I’m just tired out.

When I was young, I sometimes needed to ask her advice like any daughter would. Much to my chagrin she would come up with an impossible and outlandish idea to what I thought was a reasonable question. Her answer, if executed, would have been truly amazing, but was going to be absolutely impossible for a teenage kid like me or for almost anybody else for that matter. Me: “Mom, I need an idea for how to decorate the cafeteria for the prom.” Mom: “How about an ocean cruise theme where the cafeteria is decorated with portholes and set on hydraulics, so it rocks back and forth like ocean waves.”  Was she not taking me seriously or just trying to drive me crazy? I’ll never know. More about my mom later. This is just an introduction.

Dad

I have been told that my dad was an art student when my mom met him in Chicago. He was on the GI bill going to the Chicago Art Institute and he had already studied at the Nottingham School of Art in England after World War II. Mom told me that she married him because she didn’t want anyone else to have him. What a funny reason to get married! And I hope and pray that she actually loved and respected him, too! But I’ll never know now. After he got his art degree, he became an art director at a big heating and air conditioning company in Marshalltown, Iowa. He had a disdain for the corporate world. In Chicago at a job where he worked he went in to ask for a raise. “We just had a baby girl so I need a raise.” The next day they let my dad go. This made him very angry and he never forgot it. This was in the day before you could do something about discrimination. In those days you just had to suck it up. 

Like my mother he wasn’t ordinary either. Never boring. Ordinary people had landscape reproductions and prints of Jesus on their walls, but my mom and dad had real paintings done by them or by people they admired. My dad could sing and dance and tell jokes like there was no tomorrow. No, neither my mom nor my dad were boring. Maybe that was part of the problem. Some days I wished they were a little more boring. They kept our home in a tumult. All I wanted was a little peace.

My dad was a practical person, too. My mom’s vivaciousness, which was probably exciting to him at first, got to be tiring as the years went on. He also caused her to feel insecure and jealous. He thought she was being hysterical and unreasonable when she wanted to know where he was going or what he had been doing and with whom. He gave her grounds for wanting these questions answered. She wasn’t hallucinating or fabricating stories. This was my dad’s narcissism. I’ll talk more about his background later on but for now suffice it to say she was smart in a way that probably intimidated him. He was blue-collar and he painted what he saw in a realistic way according to the norms of the day. He approached painting like a tradesman or a carpenter. He would say, “I’m going to build a painting.” But he was adept enough that he was never pedestrian. He inserted elements of impressionism and abstraction into his paintings. But in his heart he was a tradesman. He approached life the same way. And he wasn’t as educated as she was. He would say, “Marge, you have a college education and you can’t even cook a hamburger.” What does that say to you? I think it says he felt not as good as her. After all he didn’t have a college education. It seemed that what he really wanted was someone to cook good food, keep house and have kids. He was not ambitious. He did what he had to do and didn’t aspire to anything more.

Scenes from Early Life

Even though there was tumult in our house there was an element of average even though it was a very small element. My mom had a domesticity that was efficient and warm. There is a picture of me in my highchair cramming tiny fistfuls of my mom’s homemade noodles into my mouth. My face is covered with noodle debris. Dad called me The Noodle Kid. When you looked at our household from a 20,000 foot level you would say we were a pretty average Midwestern family making ordinary food and doing ordinary things. My dad golfed and gardened. My mom cleaned and cooked and planted flowers.

But we were not average. Mom and Dad chose dark brown to paint our house when everybody else had some pastel shade. Mom planted corn and castor beans around our house while everybody else planted petunias. Mom played the oompah piano and dad sang along. Dad played the “Marriage of Figaro” by Mozart on the stereo system he built. Mom played Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel. Nobody else enjoyed the kind of music they did. We had backyard picnics and ate hamburgers, yes, and boiled corn on the cob with potato salad and cole slaw like everyone else but that was a nod to the Midwestern way of life for them. They aspired to more. Dad hunted like other dads but instead of a rifle he used a bow and arrow. Nobody else I knew did these things, so I felt different and set apart from our neighbors. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out exactly how different we were. You have to get away and see how other people live to get perspective, and I did, and this feeling has stayed with me all my life.