Dim Light In The Kitchen 4.

I didn’t make it to Cowboy Day. For some reason I hadn’t been sent to school that day. I couldn’t have been all that sick. I was in the back yard playing when Pammy came by, herself in Cowboy regalia, to ask if I was ready. Lois was the only larger person at home just now and though I protested that this was the foremost day of the entire school year, she defaulted to NO, having heard nothing prior on this subject. Pam went on without me. Though I missed a lot of school toward the end of the semester because of our out-of-town guests, I don’t think this was what interfered with Cowboy Day.

The last major project I can remember from kindergarten was a Christmas centerpiece with a candle. We started with a cottage cheese lid, (metal in those days,) and fitted into it a precut circular piece of Styrofoam. Mrs. Walker, our teacher, punched a hole in the center of each piece of Styrofoam with a hammer and a sharpened piece of pipe, and then a candle was fitted into the hole. We pinned some greenery to the Styrofoam, around the candle and the whole thing looked quite attractive, at least to me. This in spite of the fact that my lid was Carnation and not Lucerne. We recall that Dad was a Safeway driver and staunch Union Man. I and my teddy bears all wore black and yellow Teamster buttons with their double horse head and wagon wheel logos.

Sometime before Christmas, I’m not sure how long, guests arrived in our home and stayed for a number of days. I’m going to be very careful not to reveal the identities of these folks because of something that happened two days after Christmas, 1959. At the risk of sounding overly melodramatic I will refer to them only tangentially except in the case of their daughter, who was most directly involved in the event I am about to describe, as My Guest.

My Guest and I appear to have been playing together amicably enough. I recall several times electing to skip school in order to stay home and continue playing with her. My Guest’s mother brought me a new box of crayons and a Cheyenne-coloring book. Cheyenne was the name of an itinerate cowboy/lawman currently in vogue on TV. I believe I also got a storybook about Rin Tin Tin, the heroic dog of Fort Apache and his faithful boy sidekick. Chris got a pink, plastic telephone which at 19 months, she immediately dialed and began talking into the handset.

Christmas was approaching. That was the reason for our visitors being in town. I went around the tree, looking at myself in the different glass bulb ornaments, amused at how my reflection looked in various colors.

Christmas was on a Friday that year and we had a houseful. Lois and I always got an orange in the heel of our stocking and there was usually a yo-yo too, perhaps a ball. I don’t recall getting much candy in my stockings though there were candy canes on the tree and ribbon candy sitting around in dishes. This year I got a pack of blackjack licorice flavored gum, my favorite flavor. I also got a new, toy razor. I liked to take my razor in the bathroom in the evening and shave along with Dad. Mary Magnus had somehow broken my wind-up razor with the fake suction-cup plug-in. This one was powered by a little battery and made a realistic humming noise. I found a deck of cards further down, along with a tiny present, about the size of a nickel, done up in a scrap of Christmas paper and cunningly tied with a shred of red ribbon. The package was from Ruth Johnson.

Ruth had been in the habit of buying for Ron and me a product quite new in those days and popular for several years thereafter. Fizzies were tablets which, when dropped into water, would both flavor and carbonate the glassful along with an impressive color change. Jimmy Magnus and I loved to make these drinks, as did Ruth’s son. Finding she had one tablet left, Ruth had wrapped it and added it to my stocking. I also got a penlight flashlight with which I was especially delighted since Jim and I loved to go bravely into dark places, armed only with our trusty flashlights, even switching these off momentarily so as to be in total darkness for split seconds.

This year I’d asked for a Maverick suit from Santa. When I found it I scarcely recognized that I’d done so, since it came with a badge. I’m not sure why this was included. Both Maverick brothers and their cousin Beau were basically good but were more likely to be on the wrong side of the jail bars than keeping shop. There was a white shirt/vest combination, meaning a white shirt with a picture of a brocade vest on it. There was a pair of black pants and a black ribbon bow tie. As soon as I finished opening my other presents, I hurried off to my bedroom to change.

I received a plastic, battery-powered machine gun; double-barreled and actually looking like an artillery emplacement. It was called a Pom-pom gun and I was told it was used by the British during World War II.

Notably among the other gifts I received was a colorful plastic train with engine, two boxcars and a caboose.

While Dad was with Safeway we went almost every year to the Safeway Employee’s Association Christmas party. This year was the exception due to our out of town guests. The problem with this wasn’t in missing the fun and the extra chance to remind Santa what you wanted, or the bag of fruit and candy we’d each get. Each employee’s child was given besides a wrapped present, selected from a huge pile of presents, according to age and sex of recipient. I usually got to open mine before Christmas too so it was like a preview of things to come. One year I’d gotten a wind-up submarine. One year a truck, one year an airplane. This year Dad sent in to request that gifts for Chris and I should be mailed to the house. Somehow I got tagged by the party organizers as a five-year-old girl.

I received a sewing kit with needles, thread, pins, thimble, several pieces of material in different patterns. There were also flat cardboard girl and dog dolls for which I could make clothing. I was delighted with the gift! Ruth had taught me to sew along with everything else and I couldn’t wait to get started with my own supplies. I felt downright betrayed when Mom, without consulting me, gave my gift to My Guest.

We put in for a replacement gift, one suitable for a five-year-old boy. Eventually it came, a set of tracing toys. These were flat plastic animals in various colors. You laid one on a piece of paper, drew around it, colored the result and cut it out if you felt like it. Cutting edge stuff--. I wasn’t impressed. We had a pink plastic elephant around the house till I was a teenager I think.

Christmas was a big affair that year with several families together in our house at one time or other. Jimmy was over and we pilfered blocks intended for Chris to build barricades in my bedroom. I ran an ambulance across the floor while Jim fired my machine gun. When he saw the red cross on the roof of the ambulance he was supposed to stop shooting.

I don’t know if it was just from the excitement of the day or if I’d eaten too quickly at breakfast because I also threw up on this occasion. It was the first time I could remember doing so and all over my new Maverick suit too! It couldn’t have been all that serious because I was up and about once more after a short stay in bed to calm down. I couldn’t be Maverick again though until my suit had made a trip through the washer.

On Sunday, two days after Christmas, My Guest and I were sitting on the living room floor, in front of the TV, with our toys about us. My Guest began assembling my plastic train and said she was going to run over me. I said she was not either and we went back and forth with her trying to join the cars together and I pulling them apart so they would not constitute a train with which to run over me. At one point My Guest had the train fully assembled and I tore it apart again in a particularly energetic manner, and in order to foil her further, threw the engine across the room.

My Guest jumped up to retrieve the plastic toy, springing off the floor with her palms planted and kicking up her heels as she did so. A heel caught me in the eye, causing pain and making me cry I’m sure, but a few minutes later I felt okay. Mother took me in the bathroom, examined my eye, asking over and over if I was really all right. After the initial shock of being kicked I soon recovered and insisted that I wanted to go back out in the living room and continue playing. I did so and the rest of the day proceeded normally.

Next day, which was Monday, My Guest and her parents left for their next destination and I’ll be cagey about this too. Chris had enjoyed having company for so long and tried to run after their car as they pulled out of our driveway.

That evening at dinner the light seemed a little dim in the dining room. We had one light near the table and another in the kitchen, which we usually left on during evening meals. I just assumed that for some reason, Mom had decided not to turn on that light. (Who understood why parents did things anyway?) It didn’t seem like that big a deal.

On Tuesday things evidently went along okay during the daylight hours. I don’t recall any trouble until dinner time came again and this time there was not enough light. I asked why didn’t somebody turn the light on. "Both lights are on," Mom said. I told her I could hardly see anything. She asked if I could see what Chris had in her hand. I said no.

She said, "It’s a glass." and she held up a blue plastic glass. When she held it closer to me I could see what it was.

I recall essentially nothing about the next few days. My mom’s version of this time is that I ran into somebody in a grocery store one day and at this point she and Lois realized that I was having trouble with my vision. Perhaps this happened. It may have been that the dinner exchange didn’t convince anyone and further proof was needed. For me though it started on Tuesday, December 29, 1959. As previously noted, my right eye is plastic and My Guest had kicked me in the eye which still worked to a reasonable degree.

I don’t know on what time schedule things happened next but it couldn’t have been more than a few days following the accident that I was in the office of Dr. Walter Topinka. I’d been seen by him before. Dr. Topinka was the Johnson’s eye doctor and they thought very highly of him. He was a quiet but dryly humorous gentleman, good with children. I’d been frankly frightened of my previous eye doctor whose name needn’t be mentioned here.

The examination indicated that extensive damage had been done to my eye. There was also the question of whether the damage had gone further than the eye. Our eyes are visible and specialized extensions of our brains. Processes, which damage the eyes, carry some potential of damaging the rest of the brain. There was at least some reason to suspect that I might have sustained brain damage and perhaps could even die.

Dr. Topinka said that if a member of his family was to undergo the kind of brain surgery he suspected I might need, there was only one surgeon he would trust to perform the operation. This was an individual who was practicing in New York. I remember hearing that I might go to New York on the train but I didn’t really know why. Dr. Topinka suggested that my parents sell our house if it turned out that we needed to make the trip back east.

Years later Mom said that at this time she was so grief-stricken and worried about me, she was having great difficulty talking to me. I don’t remember this circumstance but perhaps it is a contributor to the blank in my memory following a quite eventful Christmas and the accident two days later, which I recall fairly well. Dad was able to talk and joke with me and carry on as if nothing very much had happened. Inside though, I wonder what he must’ve been feeling. He had seen his little brother die slowly as a result of brain trauma and his boyhood was largely shaped by the economic aftermath of that tragedy. Dad and I never discussed this matter. As it turned out, my brain was working away just fine.

I don’t know if this fact was discovered as a result of surgery or if it had been determined previously, but I was hospitalized for ten days in Burien General Hospital, wearing my cowboy hat and guns. During this time an effort was made to deal with my loss of vision.

I had a fair sendoff at the Magnus’s house. Claudette, who was a cousin of theirs from Great Falls, Montana and who had taught me how to frost and decorate cookies, now presented me with a tiny capgun, with silk holster and garter. She’d worn this while performing the can-can, a high school production of some sort. I was given pep talks around, on how nice the nurses in the hospital were and how good the food would be.

Mom, Dad and I were met at the hospital by Mack Kraft, one of Dad’s work buddies and his wife Thelma. They gave me a toy plastic gum machine with a couple of hundred gumballs and a sack of pennies. "This is to pay off your hospital bill," they told me. (As it turned out, the Teamsters did a handsome job of paying all my medical expenses.)

I was desolate, having to spend so much time away from Mom, Dad and other familiar persons. There were visiting hours of course but life went on outside of the hospital. Still, I could not have asked for nicer nurses, doctors and orderlies. I was awakened on the first morning of my stay by Knowla, one of my nurses. She helped me brush my teeth and fed me my breakfast. She was accompanied by Barbara who I believe was either an L.P.N. or a student nurse. In time they learned that I could feed myself and I wasn’t going to try and climb out of the bed like some of the other children.

For the first few days I was in a double room with a boy named Jonny. He was about eight and had a badly broken leg. Jonny said he had some money and was going to the store to buy some candy. He looked one way before crossing the street, but not the other way and that’s from where the car that hit him had come. If I’d needed any lessons on pedestrian safety, this was an excellent one.

Jonny could be a bit of a brat. Sometimes we had good enough talks. Sometimes he ignored me. We had a TV in our room but his parents had paid for it so he decided most of the time what we would watch. Being able to watch my programs in those days held coequal importance with breathing and going to the bathroom and far superceded eating. Jonny was a great talker though and I at that age and considerably thereafter, was touchingly credulous. He told me he had a space suit and a rocketship which I believed. He then went on to relate how he’d rescued a guy who was trying to get back into his flying saucer, having I guess, been locked out of it.

Mack and Thelma had lent me a phonograph with a number of story records and a few musical singles as well, to use while in the hospital. We played these a lot. I especially enjoyed a version of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Tin Soldier. I never since have found a version, (including the original) that I liked as well.

Somebody or somebodys, had given Jonny quite a lot of candy. We snacked on this quite a bit. He wryly remarked that this was the reason he went to the hospital in the first place.

Jonny’s mom and dad were very nice if perhaps a bit overindulgent. His mom played records for us, read out of magazines or storybooks, went through the contents of the candy supply so we might choose, or just talked with us. She said she wanted to get me a present, though I wasn’t sure why. She came in a few days later and presented me with a charm shaped like a football and a 45-RPM recording of the Maverick theme song.

Who is the tall, dark stranger there?

Maverick is the name.

Riding a trail to who knows where,

Luck is his companion.

Gambling is his game. ...

I had these things till I was eleven or twelve, but I fear the attritioning of time has long since gobbled them.

Jonny’s dad was with us less often since he had to work during the day and visiting hours in the evening were limited. He asked if he could play with me and my playdough sometimes though. I made an Indian with a very fat feather and he made a puppet which really could bite, or at least mouth.

A priest came to visit Jonny one day and they were praying together. I’d never heard of people praying outside church when it was neither dinner or bedtime and the Good Father was soft-spoken. In mid-devotions therefore, I launched out with some western theme song or other. My mother, who happily was present, shushed me.

After they were finished the priest came over to my bed and asked if I’d known that Jesus was going to be with me during my operation. I said no, I hadn’t known that. He assured me that Jesus would be right there, in the operating room. I was very impressed. I’m sure I imagined Jesus would take corporal form and would be standing there right next to Dr. Topinka, possibly conversing while they operated. Of course my mother was highly embarrassed by the exchange.

As I’ve hinted before, it was determined that there was nothing wrong with the rest of my brain that hadn’t been wrong with it before. My retina had been detached and scar tissue had built up inside the eye. I’m not sure what sequence of events occurred during my first stay in hospital. I remember early on, Mom saying "there’s nothing for you to do but rest for the next week." I’m assuming therefore that I had surgery early on, then another operation later. The retina was reattached successfully and every day Dr. Topinka showed up, requiring me to point at his flashlight as he moved it around. I had light perception still and perhaps a bit more but most of the time I was required to wear patches over my eyes.

The hospital, being another world to me was fascinating to me, if scary sometimes as well as lonely. The food was quite good if I were any judge and nurses would honor most reasonable requests. They asked me to sing for them frequently and I complied as long as they stuck to theme songs I knew. They found me paper, pencils, rubber bands and other play items, mollifying me when I had to get a shot, by giving me the plastic syringe sans needle to play with. These very useful items could be used to extrude playdough worms while in the hospital and following discharge, would become pocket squirt guns.

A somewhat elderly nurse named Mrs. Goodjohnson, taught me how to take shots with minimal pain. She instructed me to hang on to the bars of my bed as tightly as possible while making my butt muscles relax. I had eight shots that trip and two finger sticks so blood counts could be taken. Nurses and Drs. alike bought gum from my little machine.

Though three years or so older than me, Jonny had some rather perplexing problems in the elimination department. When one of us needed to go to the bathroom, the drill was to pull the cord next to your pillow. This rang a bell and flashed a light down at the nurse’s station. The nurse would in time show up and you could make your wants known. It wasn't acceptable to use the bell unless the reason was an important one and going to the bathroom was usually the cause. For boys, if you wanted to urinate only, the nurse would fetch a metal urinal, which she would hold in place, standing by your bed, while you got into whatever position your state of surgical progress made possible or expedient. The urinals were always cold! Alternatively, a bedpan could be brought.

I never had any sort of mishap in this area. Jonny however seemed to have to push the envelope by waiting till the last possible minute before yanking on his cord. Nurses are busy creatures and can’t always drop everything to answer an eight-year-old’s bell except hopefully in the ICU So oftener than not, by the time the nurse had arrived, Jonny would already have soaked or otherwise fouled his bed. Jonny didn’t start out any too popular with the nurses. He had a smart mouth and was often uncooperative in other ways and the matter with the bell was more than enough to push things over the edge. Rebukes ran from mild, though cranky to downright strident until one day a particular nurse grew downright sick of changing Jonny’s sheets and underclothes, (this at a time when neither of his parents were on deck) and she diapered him.

Jonny was discharged shortly thereafter so I don’t know if his bathroom behavior had been altered or not. I was moved into a ward with four beds in it. Two of the children with me were girls. One little girl was asked who her favorite friend was in the room and she said I was. Even at the time I thought this was very sweet, but I don’t believe we’d exchanged more than a dozen words.

For ten days I’d been looking forward, (through gauze patches) to going home. Now in some ways, the hard part was about to begin. Evidently, there was danger that any sudden or energetic movement could dislodge my retina again. My Dr. kept telling Mom to keep me Quiet. I thought at first this meant I couldn’t say anything, but it was explained to me that I must remain still. That meant many days, perhaps a month, laying on our gray living room davenport, wishing I could do Anything!

I continued to listen to TV with someone narrating for me what was happening on the screen. Mom and sometimes Dad read to me. Mom and I played a game we called Billygoats Gruff. We’d take turns with one person’s arm being the bridge and that person making the voice of the evil troll, while the other went triptrapping across the bridge, being first little, then middle-sized then big Billy goat Gruff.

I don’t recall having to learn to dress myself all over again though I probably did. I think I was seven or eight before my mom stopped dressing me for school or Dr. appointments.

Chris, still with us, though not formally my sister yet, helped me a good deal in the days before I relearned my way around the house. Even during my recuperation I was only allowed to walk as far as the bathroom or the dining room table. I’d put my hands on Chris’s shoulders and tell her where I wanted to go. She could only speak in baby sentences but she waited nearby for me to finish, then unerringly took me back to the couch. Borrowing a line from young Jimmy Carter in the book Follow My Leader, I called Chris my two-legged eyeglasses. Mom didn’t approve of this. Jimmy used the term Four-legged eyeglasses for his guide dog.

Ruth and Bill Johnson came and visited fairly often. This was unusual for them. They were fairly hard to coax away from home except for excursions in the country or camping trips. Ruth read me stories then being serialized in one of the Seattle papers, called The Teeny Weensy. These were small people about insect size, who lived in a fascinating toy world. When I complained about my confinement on the couch, Ruth said "One of these days Dr. Topeka will say, Davy you can get up and play now." This was all well and good, but When!?

Eventually though the day came when the Dr. said my eye had healed sufficiently for me to play normally. I never was much for rough and tumble sports and now I was no longer able to follow freely after other kids as they ranged about the neighborhood. I could still see light and my vision seemed to wax and wane almost daily. One morning I could see almost nothing. Another morning I could see the red stripes on my pajamas. Never though was the vision very useful. Dr. Topinka said there was a hole in the scar tissue which clouded my eye and the scar tissue moved. Sometimes more light would be let in than others. Perhaps, he said, the eye would just get better. Possibly more surgery would be needed.

Mom and Dad borrowed a very low bed from the Magnuses, doing away with the need for me to climb out of my crib and minimizing the danger of my falling out of bed. I learned my way around the yard fast enough, even rode a tricycle or my tractor a bit. I wanted someone to keep hold of the handlebars though and steer for me so I wouldn’t pedal off the edge of the sundeck. Fritzie from across the street liked to tease me by taking her hand off the handlebars and saying, "you’re doing good, David." I’d yell at her to take hold again.

Neighborhood kids generally took things well enough in stride with me, I guess. The girls probably tried a bit harder to include me in things than the boys did. Pammy, Fritzie and Vicky from next door came over almost daily to keep me company on my swingset. Pam Blodgett walked me places, she walking backward and holding onto both my hands. I said it was like she was dancing with me. She gave me candy and brought baby puppies and chicks to show me.

Pammy and Fritzie thought I should have lots of flowers to cheer me up. They brought me pansies by the panful. I’m afraid though they rather over estimated my love of flowers. Soon they were attempting to use pansies as a bribe to tell on Mike for instance, who had, the girls claimed, peed onthe sundeck.

I think it was about this time that thoughts of marriage began to occur to us. Fritzie declared one day that she was going to marry me. The next day she’d promise to marry some clod named Danny. Danny would sometimes come into the yard and take everyone away, except me. This showed me for the first time what it felt like to be left out of things because I could no longer see.

Growing weary of Fritzie’s fickleness I approached Pammy. "Pammy" I said, "I’ll marry you."

"Okay," she said. I don’t recall that she ever wavered. I was going to ask Santa for a large wagon with a cover on it like I’d seen in the Sears Wishbook. We’d live together in that. It wouldn’t be too much trouble for Mom to bring over something extra for us to eat.

Two other girls became especially important in my life at this time. One was Marilyn Magnus. One was my not quite cousin Susie, Katherine’s daughter. Marilyn began calling me on the phone while I was in the hospital and we’d talk about the nurses, my experiences there and imaginary adventures I was going to have when I got out. There was a flying buggy/car I was going to build I believe and perhaps a submarine. Sometimes we just talked about stuff.

WE continued to talk on the phone when I was out of the hospital and when one of us was at the other’s house. Jimmy was still my main reason for coming over to the Magnus’s house but Marilan delightfully filled in those times when Jimmy was too busy or tired to want to play. Marilyn liked to comb my hair, putting Two dabs of brille cream on it (which according to the ads made one irresistible to females.) She lotioned my hands and even put a drop of her perfume on me once or twice. Marilyn gave me a dime store bracelet to add to my paper crown when I was being King Arthur.

It seemed that Marilyn always felt called upon to grow up as quickly as possible. I never knew her to use bad language or do anything else that I would at the time recognize as "naughty", but she appeared to have a curiosity I hadn’t yet met in girls and particularly in Big Girls.

Once when I was three or four I was left at the Magnus’s for part of a day. I was wearing a blue sunsuit with those troublesome shoulder straps which must be released in order to drop the entire outfit. I didn’t get zippers until later. Mom instructed me to go ask Bertha to unhook my straps when I needed to go to the bathroom.

I did so at the appropriate time. Bertha delegated the task to her daughter, who helped me as requested, but stood watching me urinate and asking questions such as where did the pee-pee come out from? I think I was mainly concerned because the bathroom process was being dragged out longer than necessary and I didn’t think she should say pee-pee. When Mike Blodgett said that word he got a spanking. Nice people said Wee-wee or sometimes tinkle.

Mom said often that Marilyn was "flat as any boy" which would have had no significance to me. I heard very early on however, that Bertha bought Marilyn foundation garments when she was only twelve or so. Girls at that time and in our circle got bra, girdle, nylons and high heels at the time of their Church Confirmation, considerably before that event evidently. Marilyn was walking around in stretch garments she couldn’t fill out by herself and even resorted to stuffing her underclothes with toilet paper in order to make things stay in place. She would dissolve into tears and run to the bathroom at the suggestion that she needed yet to grow into her bra and girdle.

In addition to the issues over clothing, Marilyn seemed to be encouraged beyond her years in her relations with boys. Bertha drove her and preteen boyfriends to the movies and elsewhere, leaving the young people to be picked up later, thus sanctioning their dating at this young age. Mom said Bertha was pushing her daughter into growing up too fast. Why she was doing so, (if so,) I don’t know. Sometimes the difference between pushing and merely allowing is but hairbreadth. Whatever the reason, Marilyn married about as soon as she could legally and I believe unhappily as well. She soon had two daughters of her own, was divorced then remarried. Somewhere along the way she worked for a time as a dancer at a nightclub and little doubt as to what sort of dancing she was doing.

At age five though and newly blinded, Marilyn seemed to me like another big sister, one who didn’t see me often enough to get irritated with me. She seemed very well equipped to deal with a child who could no longer see, acting as if nothing really significant had happened, yet standing always ready to supply whatever might otherwise have been wanting. Marilyn encouraged me to go on coloring and always complimented me on my work, whatever it actually looked like. She read to me from poetry and storybooks. The Highwayman was among the things she read me. She helped me make paper houseboats and other fun projects and bought me candy and other presents from the store with her own allowance.

One evening Marilyn playfully called me a little devil. Then she asked me if I knew what the Devil was. I admitted that I didn’t and she told me the Devil was a terribly evil person who, if you were ever unfortunate enough to fall into his clutches would hit you, kick you, cut and burn you and cut the ends of your fingers and toes off with scissors.

"Yeah," Jim supplied helpfully, "and he makes you walk on needles too, for miles and miles!"

I asked if The Devil could hear us talking about him like God could and Marilyn said "Oh yes. The Devil’s listening, but Jesus is too and he’s saying Go away Devil. I hate you."

I carried this dire information to Fritzie Kensler and she said that was all true except you weren’t supposed to call him The Devil because that made him feel bad. You were supposed to call him Saint Nick.

Marilyn made up somewhat for scaring hell out of me by also telling me about Jesus who would hold me on his lap and hug and kiss me and say I love you David, and he’d give me candy and not the hot cinnamon kind either.

Having been excused from school for the time being and again in my cowboy regalia I asked if I could wear my guns in Heaven. Marilyn said that they’d take all my clothes off and put me in this pretty suit. Normally people didn’t wear guns in Heaven but if I really really wanted too, perhaps an exception could be made but I couldn’t shoot or point at anyone with them, not even in pretend. This information, combined with the story of Noah and the Ark, which had recently captivated my imagination and I’d been making Mom read over and over to me, constituted the total of what I understood about the Great Hereafter and of religion generally.

Marilyn was I think, six years older than me which made her indisputably a Big Person, at least so far as I was concerned. Still she wasn’t so big that one couldn’t come to her with a kid’s problem. One such was my dislike of wearing pajamas. I preferred to sleep in my underwear and did so most of the time I was growing up. From time to time though, Mom would go on a P.J. vendetta, like when I was going to the Magnus’ to stay overnight. With Mom it was mandatory to wear an undershirt under one’s pajamas, but forbidden to wear underpants. As to why, only God and she knew and neither of them was letting on.

If I could wear my shorts under my pajamas it was sort of like not wearing pajamas. I shared this with Marilyn and while she agreed this was a secret we must keep, she helped me avoid the scrutiny of her parents in keeping on my drawers under my P.J. bottoms, even shielding me from view in the bathroom. It is now a thing of doubt to me as to whether anyone should have cared about this except Mother perhaps, but it felt good to have an older confidant.

Susie, Aunt Katherine’s daughter, though much different from Marilyn, was another person who made this time much brighter for me than it otherwise might have been. Susie and her brother Bill had been left to run wild pretty much, through the streets of a one-horse Montana town, while Aunt Kate cooked and tended bar by night. They’d had a very abusive dad whose last name was Henry. He had disappeared long before I met any of them and Katherine had remarried.

Relocated in Seattle now, both kids had been in trouble for stealing bicycles and other infractions of the law and of common custom. Much later I heard how Susie had climbed through the window of the boy across the street one night and tried to crawl into bed with him. Susie was about twelve then. The kid had screamed for his mother who had phoned Aunt Kate around one in the morning, demanding that she come get her whore of a daughter.

Like Marilyn, Susie was also very concerned with growing up as quickly as possible but unlike Bertha, Aunt Kate saw no reason to let her do so. She was incensed one day coming home for lunch unexpectedly, to find Susie, not only skipping school, but "flitting around on the living room floor, wearing her mother’s dress, high heels and nylons.

I believe Susie did a stretch at Grand Mound, a girl’s reform school, before she was sixteen. In spite of all her own problems though, she always had a soft spot for me. I was her Little Boyfriend she said. She never did anything inappropriate to me except taking me to the store while she was grounded, then getting me to promise not to tell on her because after all, she just did it to get candy for me, (not true.) She spent a lot of time playing with me though, sharing her dolls with me, taking me to meet neighbors or to look at any car wreck that might be near at hand. Sometimes she called me Francis Marion too, because I was currently fascinated with the multi-episode Disney series, The Swamp Fox about the famous Revolutionary War Officer. Katherine and Lyle modified this some and still were calling me Swamp Rat when I was twenty.

Susie gave me a stack of glass 78 records with fables of Aesop on them. She read to me from the Arabian Knights and of Jack in The Bean Stalk, a story to which I was absolutely addicted. I’d always enjoyed being read too, but after the accident this desire became an almost physical need. I was more successful in getting teen aged girls to read to me than anyone else and I think I wore out every adolescent female I knew with Jack and his mother, the Giant and his wife and Fee-Fi-Foe-Fum. Oddly enough, my daughter had a similar passion for this story, which I always recited for her from memory, and with embellishments of my own.

Once Susie and Marilyn met at my house, possibly at my Sixth birthday party. They staged a jock fight over to which one of them I belonged.

Like Marilyn, Susie married early and against her mother’s wishes. The marriage didn’t last long. Before it ended though, she had a son, Michael. When I was about nine I think, Katherine and Mom found Mike, lying in a bathtub, filthy and crying. Katherine took him home, without protest from Susie, and raised him as her own child.

Susie drifted from relationship to relationship, finally moving in with a black man. To her family, this was about as low as a white woman could descend. Supposedly, no white man would ever touch her again. My family and relatives were very big on predicting ultimate doom for those who displeased. I have had a taste of this more than once myself. Susie lives now in California I believe and I sincerely hope she has found some kind of peace. She never seemed to have much of it in her early life. Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the precious things about being blind is that one is sometimes privileged to see into the secret pockets within some people that are generally kept well hidden from others. I’ll have more to say about this in later chapters.

Marilyn and Susie were young women who showed me their very best sides. There were others, babysitters my sister and I had later on. Claudia, Jan, two Gails and Lois too. I will speak more of them at the proper time. Recently I wrote this poem to express in part, what I felt about these really very remarkable people.

My Sisters, My Friends

Girls’ voices, rereading endlessly

A Favorite story book,

Refurnishing my sightless world

With Picture magic.

Crowns of paper, diamond-holed and

Crayoned yellow.

Deep fragrance of hand lotion and

Occasional wrist drop of perfume.

The feel of brush and comb ministered to

My wisping hair.

Through imagination’s castles

And dreams of life stretching far ahead,

Should I be Lawyer, author, scientist?

You listened to my childish musings and made me feel

That you believed.

Then came the day that I should destin

From the world of girls grown womanward

And so it seemed awhile.

But the panoply of acetate and lace,

The Practicing in petticoats

Drew me widdershins to reclaim

That piece of me that you had nurture fed

And somewise, made to see again.

If my friendship with Jimmy Magnus had been important before, it was supremely so now. I haven’t even a glimpse of memory as to what occurred on our first meeting when I could no longer see. I know though that such an event took place before I went into the hospital. Jim was one of those who saw me off on that expectant, troubling evening. He and I continued our tramps through the woods with me holding to him or he to me. It wasn’t long before we were out playing with my pedal tractor, usually with me peddling and Jim walking alongside, controlling the steering wheel.

Our games became more structured I think. I would virtually commit entire episodes of Texas John Slaughter or Hawkeye to memory and would insist upon following the scripts. There also came to be a great content of pure fantasy in our play. Jim was always an imaginative person. His creativity in constructing hideouts, contriving games or coming up with funny things to say made the time spent with him exciting as well as pleasant. Now I was unable to move unaided through unfamiliar places. Even places I had previously known were often found unnavigable. My imagination must now furnish me with that which I’d formerly gotten from picture, TV visuals or just plain observation.

I found that Jimmy had a way of describing things that made them come alive. The things didn’t even have to be there at the moment or exist at all for him to describe them. If we were walking through the woods and Jim reported that he’d spied a haunted castle, the castle was for then and for me, really there. We might flee in terror or stand and battle the evil witch with our capguns.

Jim’s trip to Disneyland included meetings with the real Peter Pan and Wendy. Among his acquaintances were people who owned pirate ships or who lived in log cabins deep in the woods, Too far to go there today. Perhaps nexttime. Sometimes Jim would make the voices of people I’d been wanting to meet, The Princess Snow White, Cinderella Peter and Wendy, the evil Captain Hook.

In those days, eating an apple was for me nearly an all day chore and I’m still not fond of Red Delicious. Jim knew of an apple tree that wasn’t too far to reach and which grew kid-sized apples, sweet and juicy, a pleasure to eat. He had a footlocker in his room, which he claimed was a pirate chest he’d dug up on the beach. Inside was a can, containing money. Gold, silver and copper, Jim claimed. He gave me a copper piece to keep and even Dad had to admit that it was indeed a penny.

Kids at Jim’s school always seemed to get away with a lot more then they did at mine. The teacher had fallen asleep one day supposedly and one of the kids had taken all of her clothes off of her. What the other kids might have been doing while this was in progress wasn’t mentioned and didn’t need to be. The story was enough in itself. The stories budded and flourished. The meetings with Wendy often included seeing Wendy naked and more.

As in Chapter 2, I am going to go into Dangerous Paragraph mode for the next three paragraphs. I’m not going to report anything which I perceive to be all that unique among children but it will disturb some and similar experiences will have been suppressed in the memories of others.

DP1. Ever since I can remember, Jim and I had thought it was great fun to pee out in the woods or in convenient tin cans or pretty much anywhere outside of the house, where we weren’t supposed to. I was told early on that doing such a thing in the yard or in the shed say, would invite a spanking so I never owned up to doing such a thing. Just about as early, Jim and I showed one another what we had, not competitively I think but probably just to see if each of us were growing in the manner we were supposed to. Jim said he was doing this with other boys and claimed to be doing it with some girls as well. Once he had shown me Mary, his sister, with her panties pulled down and explained to me that she didn’t have a Wee Wee, because "Somebody sawed it off."

DP2. Somewhere along the line the activities got more tactile. I think we started by touching our organs together and suggesting entry elsewhere. Eventually Jim said we should take turns taking each other in our mouths. I’m sure this was his idea. Though I’d imagined seeing people naked or in their underwear, my imagination didn’t go much beyond that, at least by age five or six. I was pretty naive. Nonetheless, a son of the Smithsons, friends of my parents, had shown me his penis and asked to see mine. He was about seven years older than me and for a while I thought that all big boys did this sort of thing when they got together in private.

DP3. The oral thing just seemed to be something we did once in a while, but by the time I was six and Jim was Nine, it seemed to be happening oftener. Jim started to press me in a half-embarrassed way, to do it. I don’t recall too many details about these experiences but I’m pretty sure Jim was never erect and the feeling for me was negligible either way. Sometimes Jim failed to bath as often as he might and the experience was more objectionable than usual. Once another boy named Willard was playing with us and I found at this time that Jim was playing these games with other boys. Willard was given a choice of having me take him in my mouth, or Jim. He chose me, which seemed like a sort of acceptance I guess. Jim and I stopped this activity when I was about eight. We talked it over and decided we were too old to be doing that sort of thing anymore. Over the years though I’ve wondered, in view of Marilun’s curiosity as well, whether there were dark secrets in the Magnus family or were the children perhaps coached by some older friend or relative. Years later I found that their next door neighbor, a middle aged woman, liked to call persons of all ages on the phone with the object of having sexual conversations.

Okay, we’re back again. As time passed, our families grew further and further apart though this hadn’t started to happen yet in the time before I’d yet entered grade school. Through most of my early life I thought that Jim and I wold grow up to be life partners, comrades in arms, fellow trailblazers. Our imaginary vehicles ranged from stagecoach to to covered wagon, to submarine to yacht to spaceship. But through it all I thought of us as blood brothers.

There were two grandmothers in my life at this time though neither of them were, really. Grandma Plassman, whom I liked well enough, I nevertheless met only once for a few days and hadn’t gotten to know very well. I saw her with some regularity when we lived in the Midwest, but this was to be years in the future.

Grandmas with whom I had at least fairly frequent contact were; Grandma Lois and Grandma Seat. Lois Jackson was a friend of the Magnus family with whom they’d lived at one time I believe, or perhaps the other way around. Grandma Lois was as much a part of our family as any of the aunts or uncles, privileged to share Christmas and birthdays, always within the circle of gift giving, staying overnight from time to time when expedient. Grandma Lois was notorious for using too much scotch tape on packages. Whenever a present was received which had on it an overabundance of transparent tape, someone would invariably refer to it as a Grandma Lois Package.

Lois worked for a time as housekeeper for a family who eventually joined a colony of some sort, bound for the Galapagos Islands off Ecuador. This must have occurred in the late ‘50s. Lois didn’t accompany her employer but evidently discussed the process with them. A number of families put their life savings into a common fund in order to finance the establishment of this new settlement. I believe there was a plan to preserve food for passing ships, using a freezing plant, which the colony intended to set up.

The destination locale had evidently not been well researched beforehand. It turned out to be barren lava and economic prospects appear to have been just as bleak. After a short while, the colony gave up and returned to the U.S.

Grandma Lois had been married at one time and had a daughter, Lena, who lived in Mount Vernon, Washington. Dad bought a Model A. Ford from Lena’s husband Bill and I rolled down a hill near their place one-day and ended up full of thistles.

Lois maintained a healthy interest in the opposite sex all the years I knew her. I saw her last when I was about 20. She was living in what she called Low-calorie, (low-income) apartments in Seattle. She told me that 90% of the residents in her building were women and that I’d have a great time living there when I was her age!

As explained previously, Grandma Seat had been married to Mom’s father for a while, then had divorced him. Her first husband was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. When they were married he gave her the choice of a wedding ring or a horse and saddle. Grandma took the horse. She was a frontier nurse in the woods of Northern Idaho. She’d come from Michigan on a wagon train at the age of ten and while still in her teens had been trained by an itinerate doctor as his nurse and assistant.

Grandma’s first husband died of yellow fever on the transport ship coming home from the Philippines at the end of the war. She remarried in 1912 to a man named Green. I still wear the wedding ring she had from that marriage. It’s ten-carat gold, rather hard in the way of gold rings, made for a hardworking hand.

Grandma advanced to Registered Nurse and became a nurse administrator. She was the head of Nursing at the Military hospital in Honolulu, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She led much of the effort to rescue the wounded that remained. Aunt Katherine, then living with her mother in Hawaii, worked all night, making sandwiches and coffee to try and feed the military and civilian survivors.

For some reason I was always special to Grandma Seat. This was true even before I lost my sight, although she had grandkids related to her a lot more closely than I was. We’d visit her on her little farm near Hayden Lake, Idaho and she’d serve us dishes of raspberries, fresh-picked, with fresh cream. She let me pet her cow Susie and when we left, she’d pack milk and cookies in my red and white plastic lunch pail.

She gave me many cunning gifts; a silver button from a woman’s high-top shoe, a large, curved needle for sewing feed sacks, a little wooden ax, carved in cherry wood by a friend of her girlhood. Supposedly belonging to George Washington, it had engraved on its handle "My axe did it." I still have a hand-carved stool covered all over with old-fashioned wooden spools, cut in half and nailed in place. The piece is well over a hundred years old.

Grandma stayed with us several times while I was young. Sometimes for a week or more at a time. She gave me pieces of fresh pear to eat while she was canning, but she wouldn’t let me eat peanut butter sandwiches without jelly. I’d get up very early and slip into the room Grandma was using. It was Lois’s room actually. Lois would be on the couch or sometimes sleeping over at her girlfriend’s house. I brought little cars and trucks along with me. I’d slide in next to Grandma and we’d play together, running the vehicles along the hills and valleys of electric blanket.

Grandma used to let me watch her dress. She was born in 1877 and more than 70 years later, still wore long dresses with petticoats, bloomers and corsets. The process was quite educational and even though I had an idea by now that many people would disapprove of me watching somebody put her clothes on, Grandma was okay with it and never minded when I asked what a given item was or what it was for. When in my twenties I rather apologetically confided to Mom concerning our activities when I was four or five, she said Grandma had been a nurse all of her life. To her it would have been natural to let a child watch her put her things on, rather than making the whole thing a dark mystery. Truthfully, I can’t recall having any impure thoughts about Grandma. She just wore interesting stuff.

When I became blind, Grandma grew even more protective and nurturing of me. A member of the Church of the Nazarene, Grandma grew very angry at my parents for not taking me to see Oral Roberts, to whom she gave a large part of her income. When she learned that we intended to adopt Chris, she said my parents had no right to do such a thing. She said they must devote their entire life "to that blind child."

When I was fourteen and Chris was ten, Grandma stayed with us for a couple of weeks after an absence of some years. Seeing how I’d grown up reasonably normal and this probably due at least in part to having a sister with which to argue and fight, she admitted that it was a good thing after all that we’d adopted Chris. That was one of the few times I ever heard Grandma say that she’d been wrong. After eight or nine years since the event had become a fact, we thought this was very good of her!