Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong (5 page)

I
AM A
certified, bona fide, dyed-in-the-wool child of the seventies.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, of course. Kids rarely look around at the landscape of their youth and think,
Whoa. This is awesome! I’m so glad I am alive during this particular stretch of history!

But looking back, I am oh-so-grateful
 
—especially as a mama in the twenty-first century, where there’s a tendency to bubble-wrap children as infants, add padding and armor for elementary school, and then unwrap them very gingerly when they turn eighteen.

If their delicate self-esteem can withstand this big, bad, mean ole world, of course.

(I’m really not trying to be critical.)

(We have an increasing tendency to make our kids very aware of their
specialness
.)

Back in the seventies, however, parents were less concerned about how
kids felt and way more concerned that kids stayed out of their hair. Nobody had a clue about genetically modified organisms or the dangers of high-fructose corn syrup or the benefits of organic produce. You just ate your Cheetos and drank your Coke from a bottle and then topped off your snack with the recommended daily allowance of Pop Rocks.

That’s why mamas in Myrtlewood were perfectly content to stand in the middle of the Winn-Dixie and visit while young’uns would run all over the store
 
—sometimes without shoes. (To be clear, we did have shoes in Mississippi
 
—OH GOOD GRIEF, AMERICA, I PROMISE
 
—but sometimes in the summers we opted not to wear them because it was ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-TWO DEGREES outside.) If we exhausted our options in the grocery store, we’d walk to Howards Rexall or the T. G. & Y., both just down the sidewalk from the Winn-Dixie. Howards is where I first developed my love for browsing in drugstores; there was always something interesting to try (samples of Love’s Baby Soft, anyone?). And Miss Maida, who worked there from the time that Moses was a child, always called me by name and asked how my parents were doing.

Once the grocery shopping was finished, mamas would round up the kids (sometimes by checking in with Miss Maida or a clerk at the T. G. & Y.), throw paper bags full of groceries in the backseat of a gigantic sedan with scorching-hot vinyl upholstery, and then instruct an older sibling to hold a younger sibling in the front seat on the way home so that the mama’s hands were free to smoke a cigarette with the windows rolled up. It was usually just a matter of time before the younger kid would break free, crawl in the backseat, and lie down on top of the speakers in the back window. The mama wouldn’t say anything because she was too busy listening to “Music Box Dancer” on the 8-track player while she flicked a succession of inch-long ashes in her car’s convenient, built-in ashtray.

It was a simpler time.

And for me, the nonhelicopter vibe was in full force at home, too. My next-door neighbors and I rode go-carts without helmets, we ran around in the woods all by ourselves, and sometimes, when our parents needed to run errands, they’d tell us to hop in the bed of the pickup truck and tag along. You don’t really see kids riding around in the beds of trucks
anymore
 
—I’m sure it’s been proven too risky by four or nine government agencies
 
—but back in the seventies our parents weren’t walking around worried that something terrible was going to happen to us. They gave us a pretty wide berth of freedom.

One of my favorite perks of that wide berth (now there’s a phrase I haven’t once uttered since I waddled my way into a delivery room eleven years ago) was that I got to ride my bike pretty much anywhere I wanted. Granted, I wasn’t going to go
too
far, because I was a little bit of a homebody and DISTANCE CYCLING, NO THANK YOU, but the bike enabled me to make the trek to my friend Kimberly’s house if the weather was decent. There were about three miles that separated my house from hers, and even though there was a side road a little ways from my house that provided a detour from the bulk of the traffic, the last part of the bike route to the Clarks’ house required me to ride my bike ACROSS A HIGHWAY
 
—a fact that fills me with no small amount of fear and trepidation now that I’m a mama myself. All I can figure is that my parents were either totally laid back or totally tired. I’m guessing that it was more of the latter, but either way, there really were some good lessons from that level of independence.

(Even if I wasn’t wearing any sort of protective headgear when I rode my bike ACROSS THE HIGHWAY.)

(AT THE AGE OF ELEVEN.)

(And fist bump to your parental courage, Mama and Daddy
 
—you daredevil rascals, you.)

The Clarks lived in a charming Cape Cod–style house that basically looked like something out of a storybook. The white clapboard siding always stood out against the backdrop of trees behind the house, and the shutters were the perfect shade of magnolia-leaf green. In the midseventies, Kimberly’s daddy decided that he was going to start a rose garden, so to the left of the driveway
 
—beside the garage that looked more like a carriage house
 
—there were at least twenty rosebushes. They’d start blooming in the spring and last through the early part of fall; it’s almost impossible to think about their house without picturing that explosion of pink and yellow and coral blooms.

As an adult, I’m all too aware that roses can’t grow like that
 
—nothing can
 
—unless there’s some mighty fertile soil.

I honestly can’t remember a time when the Clarks weren’t a part of our extended family. When Kim’s mother, Evelyn, was about twenty years old, she became friends with my mama, Ouida, and my mama’s sister, Choxie. Evelyn and Choxie were actually roommates when they were single and working for a local bank; they rented the top floor in a house not too far from Myrtlewood’s main park, and I can only imagine how sassy and stylish they must have been. In my mind they must have been just like Doris Day in
That Touch of Mink
or
Pillow Talk
: lots of pencil skirts, cropped jackets, modest heels, fur stoles, and pillbox hats. I picture them clocking out at the bank and going on a double date to one of Myrtlewood’s better restaurants
 
—a place where they’d order chopped steak and a baked potato, maybe some green beans in a bundle on the side
 
—before they enjoyed lemon icebox pie and coffee for dessert.

(I have no idea why these completely pretend details are so important to me.)

(Apparently I am a person who needs a lot of concrete information. Even if I have to make it up.)

Mama and Daddy were already married when Evelyn and Choxie were rooming together; eventually Evelyn married Bill, and Choxie married Joe. The marriages only strengthened everybody’s connections. Mama and Evelyn had their first children
 
—both girls
 
—within a year of each other, and well over a decade later, they both delivered what were considered “late in life” babies. That’s when Kim and I arrived on the scene. I was born in October, and Kim was born the following March; Mama and Evelyn no doubt spent the next twelve to eighteen months commiserating about how exhausting it was to add another baby to the mix when you’re almost forty.

Kim and I like to think that we kept ’em young.

They would probably beg to differ.

By the time Kim and I were old enough to ride our bikes to each other’s houses, we were more like sisters than friends. Our families took trips together, shared meals together, and celebrated holidays together. Evelyn and Bill were the only two adults I got to call by their first names
 
—no
“Mr.” or “Mrs.” required
 
—and their house was almost as familiar to me as my own. I knew that their milk would always be in a glass bottle instead of a paper carton since Evelyn believed it tasted better that way. I knew that Bill kept his collection of Kenny Rogers and Dottie West country music albums inside a console in their dining room. I knew that Evelyn’s tuna salad was way better than Mama’s because Evelyn didn’t put chopped celery or apples in hers. I knew that Bill would always play baseball with us if we begged him long enough
 
—and I knew that after the game Evelyn would serve us iced tea so sweet that it might qualify as syrup. I knew that they kept the Planters peanuts and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the kitchen cabinets to the left of the stove, just below the spot where Bill kept his cartons of Benson & Hedges 100s and Evelyn kept her cartons of Virginia Slims Lights.

(By the way, I just looked up a picture of an old Virginia Slims ad so that I could make sure I had the brand right.)

(The ad features a woman who is wearing tennis clothes
 
—and holding a lit cigarette.)

(Apparently the early eighties were a time when physical exercise and cigarette smoking were not considered contradictory activities.)

(Game, set, match
 
—and
smoke, y’all
.)

Evelyn and Bill were both hysterical
 
—quick witted, fun loving, and easygoing. They loved to laugh with Kim and me, and from a young age, I noticed that even my parents laughed more when the Clarks were around. Their house was the site of all manner of celebrations
 
—birthdays, New Year’s Eves, Friday night dinners
 
—and I guess that sort of leads us to the next thing I knew about their house, though at the time it was not nearly as significant to me as the location of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: at the Clarks’ there was always a jug of Paul Masson Chablis in the refrigerator (and I don’t mean bottle
 
—I mean JUG)
 
—along with six or twelve Old Milwaukee beers. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal, really; it was just part and parcel of being at their house.

Sure, Evelyn and Bill drank more than my parents did, but that wasn’t
necessarily saying much. Mama has always contended that she’s allergic to alcohol (I know. You just have to take her word for it and move on.), and while Daddy enjoys an occasional glass of wine, he has always been way too self-disciplined to habitually indulge in anything. In fact, Daddy’s commitment to sensible, upright living prompted Bill to give him a nickname that has stuck for more than fifty years: “The Reverend.”

Bill’s high regard for nicknames was a source of endless entertainment to all of us. If he loved you, he refused to call you by your given name, which is why Kim was Kimber or KC (and the Sunshine Band), her sister Margaret was Mae, my sister was Suza, Mama was Sugah (not sugar
 
—SUGAH), Choxie was Choxah
 
—I could write a list so long that you’d need a scroll to contain it. Even the Clarks’ cat, Pizitz, had a nickname: LePew.

And just in case you’re wondering, my nickname was Soap. For a while, at least. Because when my friends christened me with the nickname “Sofa” in high school, Bill followed suit with his own name for me.

He always liked to be on track with the trends.

I never really analyzed why I loved being at the Clarks’ house so much
 
—I didn’t have a big need to escape life at my own house
 
—but I imagine that part of it was that Bill’s outgoing personality guaranteed there was always something extra fun going on. Plus, since Evelyn and Bill were like second parents, they treated me like one of their own. Bill couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but would serenade Kim and me with the song of our choosing whenever we asked. Evelyn let us play in her makeup and dress up in her clothes, and if Kim and I got a wild hair at ten o’clock at night and decided to bake brownies or cookies, Evelyn would stay up with us, rocking in her chair by the kitchen fireplace while she read her latest Harlequin Romance and simultaneously put the hurt on a pack of those aforementioned Virginia Slims Lights. Evelyn and Bill both loved Password, Sorry!, and gin rummy, and the four of us spent countless nights playing games on the floor in their den.