Fields, Motels, and Gideon’s Bibles

Join me again tonight for the second part of a little series I’m developing. I’ll attempt to start each one with a little intro, a little refresher of the previous tale, and at the same time, develop this in such a way that each step stands on its own. Tonight’s entry is a revisit and modest revision of this previous posting…Fields, Motels, Gideon’s Bible, Marines.

There once was a girl who grew up in a really small town, really far away from much of anything. As you might assume, that girl was me. I started this little humble series with the intent to see what would happen when I walked back down the streets of my childhood – would I see how things had changed or, in reflection, how much my own perception has changed; have I taken note of what has been lost to progress and the decay of youth; who were the people and places I’ve left behind and if I remember them, does the telling shed light on who I am today. Consider, if you will, that this is an evening constitutional in the cool night air that circulates in the back of my mind.

When I was a child, I owned a field. It was a vacant lot, actually. Covered in wild golden dry grass and pocketed with blackberry vines, this field of mine was no more than 100 feet by 100 feet. But it was a vast and uncharted place to a child of five or six or eleven, and so I took it over.

I spent the years between the ages of two and eleven living in a motel.  We had a small two bedroom, one bathroom house attached to the south of the “L” shaped motel. The motel was, and still is, right in the center of uptown Bandon, Oregon – the LaKris Motel, now La Kris Inn, fronting the four lane highway that is Highway 101 on the Southwestern coast of Oregon.

My field was next door, just to the south of our motel, and I spent my summers and after-school hours there, on my belly crawling like a boot-camp recruit, worming and tunneling pathways through the grass. I created tiny directional signs that I posted at the intersection of each matted grass trail. I had the time when I was a kid to lie out in my field and gaze at the clouds on a mostly sunny, always windy Oregon coast day, sheltered from the near-constant wind by the tall grass of the field. Nearing nightfall in the summer evenings, I’d lie out and look at the stars and imagine that I could re-arrange them into brand new constellations, and that I alone would name each one and no one else would learn the names. The stars would them be mine.

I had my field, and my paths, and my brambly den that I had burrowed into the blackberry bushes clustered near our property line. I dug a pit and stored all sorts of treasures in a wooden box in that burrow.  Bottle caps with guaranteed prizes etched inside, multicolored Necco candy rolls partially eaten, spicy cube-shaped cinnamon flavored suckers wrapped in wax paper (there were no plastic sandwich bags yet that I can recall), pads of paper from the motel stationery and pens with the words “LaKris Motel, Bandon-by-the-Sea” etched on the side – these were lifted from my mother’s motel inventory.

Sometimes I’d make quick friends with kids from the families who stayed in our motel. I would welcome them onto my field – I called it the “jungle”, and we’d play combat soldier creeping between clumps of grass in the field and attacking from stations behind the blackberry bushes, or we would be hoboes with sticks that had handkerchief sacks attached. The sacks would usually contain little packaged soaps from the motel, maybe a Gideon’s bible filched from their room, or animal cookie boxes if we were really lucky and were allowed to run across Highway 101 to the McKay’s grocery store for treats. My fast and transient tourist friends taught me that it’s possible to design big adventures with folks you might know for only a moment and then never meet again.

When the grass got too high towards mid-September, and after school had started, my father would go over and mow it down for the winter. I never minded, as long as I was able to retrieve my treasures. The grass would grow again next spring.

Hours could pass, days could pass, and for a few years I think I never got any older. I remember wanting to grow older, as I lay on my back to watch the clouds. I thought getting older meant that one would gain respect from others. I felt like I was never being listened to. That happens when you are the child of older parents and you spend your time around only adults. You develop speech patterns and vocabulary unsuited for use around peers of your own age. I did, and I know other kids thought I was a bit off because of it. I always seemed to say the right thing to adults (though I believed the words I spoke weren’t actually listened to, just “heard”) but I was overly polite, and that is suspect behavior to another, less polite, more normal child.

I wore polyester clothes made by my mother in the sixties, when other kids were wearing cotton jeans and shirts. Polyester was the miracle fabric to my mother – and it was, in the 1960’s to a parent whose first children were born during the Depression. But to the kids of my generation, alternative and rebellious ways of dressing – wearing natural clothes, eating vegetarian, not wearing a bra, even wearing pants, or …gasp! 501 blue jeans to school as a girl – were the marks displayed by those just slightly too young to be hippies in the 1960’s and early, early 1970’s, but old enough to know that dressing rebellious and casual was starting to become chic. I was jealous. I was a child of establishment parents. I wanted to be older. I wanted blue jeans.

I wore glasses, too, four-eyes – the hated harlequin type – now so much in fashion. It was a big step up to my second pair of glasses, which I secretly plotted for and acquired by losing my original ugly ones. These new ones were so much more in vogue because they were hexagonal in shape, though in reality, little different from the cat’s-eyes tortoise shell frames I despised.

I was an outcast, in a homely way.

I had a few fine friends then. It wasn’t easy for a kid who lived in what was a commercial district in the middle of a small town, when everyone else lived more or less in a neighborhood or on a farm in the country.  There was Linda or “Winnie” as I called her though I don’t remember why I had a different name for her than everyone else did. She was the first friend I had sleepovers with and we played Monopoly with her younger sisters and ate potato chips until we got sick.

There was Billy, a younger man (he was 7 when I was 8) and he was the son of the principal of the elementary school. We rode bikes with banana seats and high bars all afternoon long for many days one summer.  We used to pretend there was lava flowing all over the playground and we would try to jump from swing set to merry-go-round to slide without falling in the lava. I look back now, so many years, and realize how very little it took to make me think I was scared or frightened and how exciting that fear could be.  Billy taught me that friends can cause you pain; about a month before he was to move away from town with his father, who had taken another job at another school far away, he got angry with me over some made-up reason and stopped talking with me. At eight, I learned that sometimes people consciously create a divide with the people they will miss too much when they’re gone. It’s a lesson I’m still learning at 49.

There was Doris, my friend from fifth grade through about seventh grade, whose dad was a school bus driver and a dairy farmer. As a bus driver, he was hated by all the kids. As a dairy farmer and just when he was Doris’ father only, he was a nice man. Doris introduced me to Jethro Tull, boys, makeup, and sleazy books. We were friends until the year I lost my dad when he drowned in the course of his job, and Doris lost her brother a few months later when he drowned in Woahink Lake in the Suislaw National Forest. I think the double agonies we should have shared, pushed us farther apart.

Somehow you’d think a common experience would have bound us together, but for reasons I’m not certain of, we let the friendship fizzle. The fabric of their family life changed – more in an atmospheric way, and I think, we were both profoundly affected by unacknowledged grief.  My personal family dynamic shifted as well. I was in a single parent family now and this fact made others my age uncomfortable in a small town where most kids lived with both parents, dysfunctional though some or most of these families may have been.

I have children well beyond the age I was when I first owned my field. My field is now a parking lot for a bakery and some kind of novelty store. They put up a parking lot. My field wasn’t paradise, but it is still my field.

For the first essay in my series, see The neverending story: there once was a girl. Thank you for your indulgence.