Christmas, 1954

At the end of 1954 I was severely depressed. If I were 5 years old and that depressed now I'd probably be put on Wellbutrin, instead of being 58, and on Wellbutrin. In those days you didn't treat kids' depressions by giving them pills, you treated them by telling them it's their own fault they're depressed. You were depressed because deep down inside you hated Jesus, or because you were too lazy to be cheerful ("Don't you know smiling uses fewer muscles and takes more work than frowning?"), or because you were trying to put something over on people. "You don't want to play with the other kids and have fun, because you're selfish." This was just about the time that the term "maladjusted" came into vogue. I wasn't maladjusted yet, but that was only because I hadn't yet been diagnosed.

For my own part I blamed the depression on the move and missing the House in Shirley. I especially missed the old retired farmer who owned the house and took care of me periodically.

That's my best explanation for the fact that as Christmas neared I wanted a farm. That, and Roy Rogers had a farm. And I believed at the time that both my Grandfathers had farms. It turned out not quite true about Grandfather Browning, but he did raise fruit and vegetables, chickens, and rabbits.

I couldn't have a real farm. But the Christmas Wish-Book, i.e. the Sears catalog, had pictures of plastic farm sets with plastic sheep and cows and horses and farm house and fences to play with.

My parents were freaked out by my single-minded insistence that a farm was all I wanted. They took me to a store Santa in Worcester in the hopes he could squeeze out other clues. The Santa, who scared the daylights out of me, said, "If you're going to have a farm aren't you going to need a wagon to haul your supplies around?" I nodded yes in the hopes he would be satisfied and let me go. He did, thankfully.

My Father later complained about all the trouble he took setting up the farm under the tree for me to find Christmas morning, only to have me lose interest in the set within an hour.

My two favorite presents were the red Radio Flyer Wagon, which replaced the red Dixie Junior Wagon I'd had that got left behind in Hawaii, and an easel one of my aunts gave me. The easel had a scroll of butcher paper that was about two feet wide and I don't know how long. Fifty feet? A hundred feet? All I know is it took me months to use it up.

Every day I'd set the easel up in front of the TV. As commercials came on I would write down the words that flashed on the screen. I learned to spell a great many new words that way, and was able to add them to my vocabulary. Colgate and Palmolive were two of my favorite new words. I also drew pictures in crayon on the easel, sometimes inspired by the pictures on TV, sometimes not.


For several months the red wagon followed behind me from room to room and went outside with me wherever I went. I haven't been able to find a picture of it. The one I had featured a zig-zag design on the side, instead of the framing ornaments of the one pictured above. It hauled toys, always including the precious muddy tennis ball, and it hauled George, the invisible ghost. George liked to go for rides.

My Father was done with photography but my Mother insisted that it was time I be photographed, so right after Christmas a professional photographer was hired to do it. The guy they hired did house calls. He set up a portable curtain in our living room. He got on my bad side by asking me right off what I wanted to be when I grew up. I despised adults who started off with that question. The underlying premise was, you're not worth anything now, how are you going to rectify that? I shocked my parents by announcing for the first time that I wanted to be a fireman.

My Mother said, "WHAT?! Just the day before Christmas all you wanted in the world was to be a farmer. Before that you wanted to be a cowboy. Where did fireman come from?" "I want to help people." "God help us all," she said.

I then found out that the whole reason the photographer asked was so he could guess which props he should pull out of the case he dragged in. He heard "cowboy" so he pulled out the cowboy props, a toy horse, toy pistols, and cowboy chaps. The scar from the first birthday head injury was prominent at this age, but you can't see it because the photographer was explicitly instructed to airbrush it out. He forced me to say cheese against my will. What's wrong with people these days, that everybody has to be smiling in pictures. Where did that addiction to a graphic lie come from? My great-grandparents never had to smile for their pictures. Why don't I get to be myself?

The Black Snake

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

It was late Spring 1953 when my parents and I arrived in Massachusetts. I recall an arrival through the gates of Fort Devens while it was still light, and a stop somewhere on base to check in briefly. Then we were back in the car driving for miles. I didn't understand. If that was our destination, why weren't we staying there?

Of course, there's never housing on base right away. There's always a waiting list. We had to find a motel to stay at while looking for a house to lease until on-base housing materialized.

Fort Devens lies between two towns, Ayer to the East Northeast, and Shirley to the West. Neither was very large. Ayer may have had a population of 3,000 then. Shirley was smaller. I don't believe either town had a motel in those days. But if there were they had no vacancies that night, and we ended up near Clinton, about 12 miles away.

We stayed there a week or two, with no place for me to go and nothing, literally nothing and nobody to play with. Then one day my parents loaded me and everything else in the car, and I thought maybe were we giving up and driving back to Hawaii. I asked if that was what was happening. My father yelled at me. He said I was an idiot, and told me to shut up and never ask him a stupid question ever again. Especially while he's driving.

We ended up on a beautiful country highway, with a forested hill to our left and farm land with occasional lines of woods leading away from the highway to the right. I now know we were traveling west on Leominster Road away from Shirley toward Leominster, and the lines of woods followed streams leading from culverts. A couple of miles from the town the road itself was lined with trees. We turned right and north into a driveway. The driveway bent softly right just until the highway was lost behind us in the trees, then it turned back north.

It was a private 800 yard driveway to a two-story cinder-block farmhouse for a farm that was no longer being cultivated. The owner, the farmer who had worked the land, was by then retired. He was there when we arrived to hand over the keys. Later I learned that he lived in another farmhouse on the other side of the highway beyond where we turned in, altogether a quarter mile away. Our next nearest neighbors were a half mile away, the other direction.

The house faced west to the driveway. There were woods behind it, and overgrown grass stretched out before it. It had a flat roof. We found out later just how shabbily built it was (the first time it rained). To my parents it probably looked like a dump. To me it looked like a palace on the edge of a mysterious forest in a magical kingdom.

As the farmer left us, my Mother strode toward the front door to be the first to go in. I was right beside her, having already inched to it while the adults talked. Just as she stepped onto the first of two steps up the porch a shiny sleek four-foot black racer shot up from bushes from the left, onto the porch in front of her, and darted across her path and off to our right.

My Mother screamed bloody murder. I squealed with utter delight. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous and so purely alive. Pure concentrated life poured over the porch of that house! The place WAS magical!