Me at two or three years old with Arthur (my brother) who must have been one. We are in front of the original house on the old ranch property on the Williams Fork.
Showing posts with label I Remember. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I Remember. Show all posts
10/19/2008
1956
Me at two or three years old with Arthur (my brother) who must have been one. We are in front of the original house on the old ranch property on the Williams Fork.
8/28/2008
So. I asked my mother
by Carol Valera Jacobson 2008
So.
In a round-about way, I asked my mother if she would be my oral history partner,
and she agreed without hesitation.
I was surprised by how quickly she responded in the affirmative.
* * *
“A timeline,” I asked her, “Could you please write me a time-line of your life; say, including the years we lived in California. 1960 to 1970.”
Mom smiled her shy smile; remembering, I think, what she was doing then. She had four young children; I was 10, Arthur was 8, Thomas 6 and David was a wee four years old. I had finished 4th grade at Sunset Elementary in Craig. Mother was 31, still young and curious and leaving a conventional marriage.
She’d bought a 24-passenger school bus, had it painted a desert sand color, removed nine rows of seats, loaded everything she thought she would need in the back and threw us kids in on top, and drove to Palo Alto, California where she hoped she find relief from her fatigue. After a while, she started attending Foothills College in Los Altos Hills. We rented a house three blocks from Stanford University. For a long time, she used that big bus to go to the store, church, school. Then she parked that bus in the back of the driveway and bought a VW bus to drive us around
We attended Mayfield Elementary, then we went to elementary school on the Stanford campus. Film strips, chalk dust, noisy, happy children. I went to class with the young sons and daughters of the Stanford faculty. Bright children. I was eleven. The same age as Harriet the Spy.
* * *
“Don’t you remember,” she asked, “the marches I took you to . . . the civil right marches?”
We went to a Unitarian church in Palo Alto. We ate marzipan and raw almond/cashew butter, sunflower seeds, oatmeal and fresh figs from the trees in the back yard.
1965. I started 5th grade. My mother was going to school, living on child support and a social revolution was swirling around her, sweeping through the county, to create a more liberated society.
Hippies are defined as: a young person, especially in the 1960s, who rejected accepted social and political values and proclaimed a belief in universal peace and love. Hippies often dressed unconventionally, lived communally, and used psychedelic drugs.
* * *
When I try to remember her in those years, my impression was of a thin woman, with long black hair, hiding her teeth with her lips just a little bit when she smiled. Shy. She wore cotton: simple shifts and straight dresses without binding, tight waistbands. Practical, functional, even funky clothes when all the other mothers she’d known in Craig were wearing straight skirts with their arms bound in tight sleeves, tottering on pointy-toed shoes with too much heel.
So.
In a round-about way, I asked my mother if she would be my oral history partner,
and she agreed without hesitation.
I was surprised by how quickly she responded in the affirmative.
* * *
“A timeline,” I asked her, “Could you please write me a time-line of your life; say, including the years we lived in California. 1960 to 1970.”
Mom smiled her shy smile; remembering, I think, what she was doing then. She had four young children; I was 10, Arthur was 8, Thomas 6 and David was a wee four years old. I had finished 4th grade at Sunset Elementary in Craig. Mother was 31, still young and curious and leaving a conventional marriage.
She’d bought a 24-passenger school bus, had it painted a desert sand color, removed nine rows of seats, loaded everything she thought she would need in the back and threw us kids in on top, and drove to Palo Alto, California where she hoped she find relief from her fatigue. After a while, she started attending Foothills College in Los Altos Hills. We rented a house three blocks from Stanford University. For a long time, she used that big bus to go to the store, church, school. Then she parked that bus in the back of the driveway and bought a VW bus to drive us around
We attended Mayfield Elementary, then we went to elementary school on the Stanford campus. Film strips, chalk dust, noisy, happy children. I went to class with the young sons and daughters of the Stanford faculty. Bright children. I was eleven. The same age as Harriet the Spy.
* * *
“Don’t you remember,” she asked, “the marches I took you to . . . the civil right marches?”
We went to a Unitarian church in Palo Alto. We ate marzipan and raw almond/cashew butter, sunflower seeds, oatmeal and fresh figs from the trees in the back yard.
1965. I started 5th grade. My mother was going to school, living on child support and a social revolution was swirling around her, sweeping through the county, to create a more liberated society.
Hippies are defined as: a young person, especially in the 1960s, who rejected accepted social and political values and proclaimed a belief in universal peace and love. Hippies often dressed unconventionally, lived communally, and used psychedelic drugs.
* * *
When I try to remember her in those years, my impression was of a thin woman, with long black hair, hiding her teeth with her lips just a little bit when she smiled. Shy. She wore cotton: simple shifts and straight dresses without binding, tight waistbands. Practical, functional, even funky clothes when all the other mothers she’d known in Craig were wearing straight skirts with their arms bound in tight sleeves, tottering on pointy-toed shoes with too much heel.
7/26/2008
Blue Beads
I remember….
Ten minutes.
Go.
I remember the blue cut glass antique Austrian bead necklace breaking just as I crested the bridge on 10th Street over Fortification Creek in Craig. I felt the release, like a kiss on my collarbone; then the beads began moving in all directions. I felt them fall against my skin and slide across my chest, cool, like a kiss. I remember that I stopped the bicycle because, of course, I was riding my bicycle, and picked up as many beads as possible. Bright, shiny blue against the gray asphalt. I probably missed a few, but it was fun to hunt for them.
I remember the time the red cut glass antique Austrian bead necklace broke as I was exiting a metro bus on 15th Street in Denver. In front of the Woolworths there on the corner. I loved that store. The classic epitome of a big city drug store was like. With the smell of people and popcorn, hot streets, sweat, rain, cheap perfume. I grabbed for my the beads sliding across my chest, hot under a sweater. I didn’t’ find as many but I saved some.
Then, I remember riding a metro bus with three small children, a thin woman with three little boys, one just a wee babe in arms. He fussed; she raised her blouse and tucked him into her breast with a loose cloth for modesty. She held on to that nursing baby and to the overhead bar while admonishing the other two little boys to stop fooling around, hang on, don’t tease your brother, etc. that litany of mother-talk.
Ten minutes.
Go.
I remember the blue cut glass antique Austrian bead necklace breaking just as I crested the bridge on 10th Street over Fortification Creek in Craig. I felt the release, like a kiss on my collarbone; then the beads began moving in all directions. I felt them fall against my skin and slide across my chest, cool, like a kiss. I remember that I stopped the bicycle because, of course, I was riding my bicycle, and picked up as many beads as possible. Bright, shiny blue against the gray asphalt. I probably missed a few, but it was fun to hunt for them.
I remember the time the red cut glass antique Austrian bead necklace broke as I was exiting a metro bus on 15th Street in Denver. In front of the Woolworths there on the corner. I loved that store. The classic epitome of a big city drug store was like. With the smell of people and popcorn, hot streets, sweat, rain, cheap perfume. I grabbed for my the beads sliding across my chest, hot under a sweater. I didn’t’ find as many but I saved some.
Then, I remember riding a metro bus with three small children, a thin woman with three little boys, one just a wee babe in arms. He fussed; she raised her blouse and tucked him into her breast with a loose cloth for modesty. She held on to that nursing baby and to the overhead bar while admonishing the other two little boys to stop fooling around, hang on, don’t tease your brother, etc. that litany of mother-talk.
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