Just Walk Away

A memoir

Tomorrow I am three-quarters of a century old. Yeah, you heard that right. Seventy-five years old. Can it be? Seems like just yesterday I was messing around in the back yard at Fifteenth Avenue in Marshalltown, Iowa playing with my sister and brother. In honor of this momentous occasion here’s an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir. In a week or so I will post anther excerpt.

Beginning

I was born in Chicago, Illinois on Friday, October 13, 1950. Friday the 13th is supposed to be an unlucky day according to superstition. Later when I was older, I made up my mind that Friday the 13th was lucky for me and that everything that was unlucky for everybody else was lucky for me. I could walk under ladders. I could break mirrors. I could step on sidewalk cracks and not break my mother’s back. I could own all the black cats in the world, and nothing would come of it. Just about as silly as the superstition but, oh, well. It doesn’t matter really, does it? Neither one of those things are true, but you know how people like to make things up and I’m no different.

I was the first kid, and when I was born my mom and dad lived in the Bohemian artsy part of Chicago. Our first home was 1738 N. Park St. in the area known as Old Town Triangle. Mom called it “Bug House Square.” She said at night, with all the lights on in the kitchen, she would spray bug killer up and down and all over. Then she would turn out the lights, slam the door behind her and immediately stuff rags at the bottom of the door. In minutes she would hear scuffling and, in the morning, upon opening the door, would find a giant pile of dead cockroaches that had tried to flee the poison. Such was our existence and because I was a baby I knew nothing of this. Too bad I wasn’t older so I could remember it first-hand. It makes a great story.

In the early days my mom and dad still liked each other. You can see in the picture an easy familiarity. Mom liked being married. I don’t know about Artie, but he probably did, too. However, it didn’t take very long for discord to rear its ugly head. Then my extraordinary mom felt that she might have married in haste only to repent at leisure.

At first Mom had her art teaching job at the University of Illinois at Navy Pier and Artie went to school at the Chicago Art Institute. Mom was a little older than most girls who were already married. She had been going to school, gallivanting around New York City and Philadelphia having a career that wasn’t a schoolteacher, secretary or nurse, the only jobs that was acceptable for a woman to have in those days. But she was in her late twenties and was feeling pressure to get hitched. Here came Artie, suave, confident, handsome, funny. I’m pretty sure he swept her off her feet and since she was getting older, what the heck.

After they married Artie got a job somewhere, I don’t know where. In his free time, he would play golf because he would have loved to have been a professional golfer. He was pretty good at it, but he didn’t have that ambitious fire in his belly or maybe he felt that his duty lay elsewhere. He didn’t pursue it. Maybe it was my arrival that made him give up that particular dream, but he didn’t give up golf. Oh no, he played golf all his life, chipping practice balls in our back yard and going off to the golf course every chance he got.

The unfortunate part for Mom was that in Chicago he would play golf with women he met somewhere. Somewhere respectable, I hope, but I don’t know where for sure. Mom stayed at home with me because she wasn’t into golfing, but the fact that he would invite other women to play with him made her pretty darn mad and jealous. She kept her mouth shut and didn’t complain but boy was she building up resentment. Wouldn’t you be mad? I would! He kept on doing it and they never came to a suitable understanding about it. Years later when I was almost grown, she complained to me, so I know how she felt about it.

Because I was a baby I don’t remember anything about all this. Instead, I was told later, Mom took me to nearby Lincoln Park and North Avenue Beach to get away and have some peace. Everybody said I was a pretty baby, and Mom must have thought so too because she took me to audition to be a Gerber baby. She got nervous when they said let us take her into the next office to show the boss. You wait here.  I didn’t get the part, but I came back to a very much relieved Mom. My uncle Bob watched me as I slept and called me a “real sack artist”.