For anyone who doesn’t know, the header photo at the top of this page is a rollover image. Just mouse over it and see. It’s always that way, with different pictures when I feel like it. Case in point, the current image: Johnny on great-uncle Herbert’s cow, somewhere in New Hampshire in about 1948. That’s Mrs. Ebsworth, his housekeeper, behind us.
On the rollover is me in Middle River, MD a little later that same year, I think. What a great attitude!
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I envy you your Maryland and New Hampshire family antecedents and time spent as a child in Virginia and Long Island – to name just a few of the places you’ve written about. For me the end-all and be-all for 18 years was West Texas. I never physically went beyond the borders of the state itself until 1963.
This thought brings me to a reflection – and a query, if you’d care to reply. You write with real conviction of the messed-up life of a child who gets hauled from state to state, country to country, in a military family. I don’t doubt any of what you say about that experience. But to those of us who knew nothing but the life in places like Abilene, your life – the life of the “base kids”, as we called you – seemed pretty glamorous. You stood for knowledge of the world. That knowledge (which you had and which I, in my own eyes, didn’t) made me seem like a hayseed. How did this look from your perspective as one of those long ago “base kids”? Did you see yourself as a sojourner amidst hayseeds? I don’t think you’ve written about this. I think it would make an interesting subject.
As for me, when I finally got to Chicago it was a big question – you could call it a chip on my shoulder – whether I would be able to cut the mustard. Would I be stigmatized by Northern and Eastern kids or, at best, patronized by them on account of accent, cultural deficiencies and suspected racism? That may not have been baggage you carried for the reasons aforesaid. But none of us is spared a challege or two. Whether we begin as hayseeds or sophisticates (identities which are in any event highly exaggerated in the minds of youngsters embarking on life) doesn’t register much in the end on whatever scales the challenges of life are weighed. All things real and imagined contribute to the weight. Baggage becomes destiny. If you’re lucky you manage to poke your head above the top of the heap from time to time.
It all seems so long ago.