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spazfosho

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My grandma didn’t have a very ‘exciting’ childhood if we were in her shoes, but for her, it was normal. She lived in a one story house with three bedrooms, with her parents, and seven brothers and sisters. When she was a baby, she slept in a crib in her parents’ bedroom, three kids had one bedroom, and two shared another. And she had two uncles sleeping on roll away beds in the living room. That was when she was a baby and there were only six kids. Then the other two were born, her uncles had moved out, and now her parents had a room, she shared with three other kids, and the other four had the other bedroom.

                She was born in what she now calls ‘the ghetto’. That’s what she seriously calls it. But back then, it was the old Harrison hospital in Bremerton Washington.

                When I asked what her childhood was like, she said, “It was a very crowded, tiny house with lots of love. My grandma was like, the head of the family and we all bowed down to her.” When I asked her who her role model as a child was and she said, “My older sisters Laurie and Lucille, and my older brothers Craig and Al.” I remembered that she said she was the sixth child and not the fifth, so I asked about her other sibling. “That was Vonnie,” she said, “she was only four years older than me, so we didn’t get along to well.” She said that she worked as a ‘chick magnet’ for her brother Al, that he would always take her with him to get girls to talk to him because everyone thought she was so cute. When I asked about her older brother Craig, she said, “He didn’t need it. He was fighting off girls with a stick.” She paused and thought for a second and said, “I didn’t know why though, I didn’t think he was that cute.”  When I asked her about the most disappointing moment in her life, she said, “well, because I didn’t know where like when I was five since I was never around them, I thought my brother Joe would be born already being my age and ready to play tea party and dress up with me.” Well imagine her surprise when he was just a baby and he couldn’t even do anything like that. When I asked her what her favorite hobby as a kid was, she said, “I didn’t exactly do anything, but I liked to read, sew, and play outside.” I thought about how her house was so small and asked her if she ever had to move very far. She said, “Just from the east side of town to the west side. So no.” then I remembered a story she told me one Christmas, and asked her to tell me again. It was about how her and her sister Vonnie were outside planting flowers one day, and their brother Joe being about three years old, slips and hits his head on a shovel, leaving a big cut on his face. The story he told his mom was that Vonnie had picked up a shovel and slapped him with it, then that she picked up a wheel barrel and hit him on the head with it. The final story was that she had picked up the whole house and hit him with it. By that time, everybody knew the truth so it was no use for a three year old.

She wanted to tell about her favorite vacation place so I asked her and she said, “I liked going to my grandma and grandpa’s farm.” When I asked why, she said, “Because it was a farm! One year, when I was about four or five, the night we got there, a calf was born. And I got to feed that calf with a bottle the whole time I was there…then the next year we ate it.” When we were talking about TV programs, she said, “Because when I was growing up, we only had three channels…or was it four? The shows I liked to watch were Romper Room, JP Patches the clown, Brakeman Bill, Captain Puget, the Mickey Mouse Club, the original Superman, Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best,” but I had to stop her there because the list was getting a little long, “well all the nice kids talked all polite on TV, and all the bad kids talk like all the good kids nowadays.” I was a little confused, so she straightened it out a little more, “like Hannah Montana for instance,” she said, “how all the good kids talk all like sassy little know it alls, setting a bad example, well that was our bad kids.”

                I asked if anything tragic ever happened to her, and she told me that one of her best friends from high school killed herself when she was thirty, they never saw it coming, and they had no clue why.

                And when I asked her what her most memorable moment in her life was, she said, “the day you were born because your mom wasn’t given any drugs except for a big pain shot in her back that made your dad faint. He ended up sitting in a rocking chair in the bathroom the whole time.”