In 1979, I was 11 years old. I was in fourth grade until the summer, & started fifth grade in September (or late August) of the year. My family had moved, the previous year, to an apartment complex called Villa Cordoba, which is now called Garland Oaks Apartments, located 2900 S. 5th Street, in Garland, Texas. It's a shithole now, & there's no reason to believe it wasn't a shithole then.
We lived in those apartments for maybe five years. It would be the longest I lived anywhere in my childhood, although we lived in three different apartments in the complex (if I remember correctly, apartments 30, 18, & 47, in that order) during that time. In 1979, we lived in apartment 18, which was in the back of the apartments, on the northeastern corner.
Thanks to the magic of Google Maps, & the fact that the apartment complex backed into a Lutheran church, I actually was able to find a (not great) picture of the apartment in which my family lived in 1979:
(The picture is taken from the street view of First Street. An alley connecting the streets, running past the church on the left & a school on the right, also served as part of the apartment complex's driveway area, & parking spaces sat in front of the apartments, whose doors looked out, & still look out, on all four sides.)
Apartment 18 is the one on the corner. The window on the second floor was the window in my & my little brother's bedroom. We would sleep with the curtains open so the rising sun would wake us. I remember people I knew in middle school (which I would start the next year & which was actually right next to the apartments) telling me they could see me sleeping when they went to the church. They were probably being mean; I was just embarrassed.
I seem to remember it being puke-pink. It had a little fenced-in "patio" in the back. The patio is important because all through my childhood I - like every other kid in the world - wanted a dog. My mother simply told us we couldn't have one; she never gave us excuses about apartment rules or pet deposits, maybe because she didn't want us to know how poor we really were. But she did get us a rabbit, which I named Sunny, although later someone told us he was a she, so she became Sunshine. Sunshine lived a terrible life, even for a domestic rabbit. We had no idea how to care for her, & when we discovered she wasn't the most playful thing that ever lived, she became just something that lived in a shabbily-constructed little home in our patio, which had no cover, so she was constantly exposed to the Texas heat. The patio, with its stucco or adobe walls that only went into the ground so far, had little dirt areas (nothing would grow, of course) that Sunny was constantly digging through - she must've escaped half a dozen times. I wish she would have, because dying of a car accident or something else sudden would have been better than her sad, sad fate.
It should be noted at the outset that, as children of a single mom who worked a lot, & overseen by a sister in the prime of her teen years, my little brother & I were mostly left alone & not really watched or disciplined. In fact, we might have turned out much, much worse if we hadn't been raised by my particular mother. My mother is terrified of the world, & every other thing she said out loud to us was some superstition or other awful thing that happened to people who weren't paying suitably afraid & wary. With a different parent, my little brother or I might have left the confines of the apartments & gotten into real trouble; with my mother's constant tales of the world's terrors, we rarely ventured far from home.
Despite that, we were doubtless brats. Certainly we were enough bother that my sister Karin resents me (at least) to this day for being someone she was forced to constantly watch. She will tell me, even now, what a "pain in the ass" I was, & I am always a little baffled how I am to respond. I was a child. I had a mother to whom I was still pretty attached, whose love I competed for among seven children (& which competition, as I've noted before, my mother actively encouraged). Winning favor with her was everything. My little brother would snitch on me, I would snitch on him, & of course we both would tell our mother anything we knew about whatever illicit things (usually involving boys) my sister was doing. There was certainly no malevolence involved - how could there be? But boy did my sister & my sister's boyfriends (& boy friends, of which there were many) dislike me. One of them, who I remember looking like a kind of goatroper Frankenstein, even once came close to actually striking me.
That resentment came to a head in the middle of 1979, when my sister Karin dropped out of school (she would've been, I guess, in eleventh grade), & fled to Albany, Georgia, where my oldest sister & her husband had recently relocated.
There are two things I want to note about this action by my sister:
1) It was a ballsy thing to do. It was not something any of my mother's sons would have even considered doing. The Dickerson boys, by virtue of being nurtured by their fearful mother, are at heart cowards. (& yeah, I include myself.) My sister did have sense enough to go somewhere safe, which may have been influenced a little by my mother's constant world-dread.
2) The dropping out thing was a 70s phenomenon. I guess it still happens with sad regularity, but in the 1970s it was a kind of a statement. Certainly in my family, it was something that probably wouldn't have been done without the lingering effects of the 1960s. There are seven of us, & only four of us graduated high school. My sister was the third to drop out, after brothers number 2 & 3, respectively. It will perhaps warm your heart to know that all three eventually did get GEDs.
I have only vague memories of my mother's reaction to my sister's escape. The apartment had three upstairs bedrooms, & my sister's, in the middle, was a windowless room whose door was always closed. I remember the door to the room being strangely open after my sister left. But I don't really recall a lot of my mother's reactions to things; I assume she was upset about a lot of stuff, because she's still like that, today. But if she ever really freaked out about things like my sister running away, her children dropping out of high school, or even those rare times my alcoholic father would come by (when she was at work) & take us somewhere, I don't have a clear memory of them.
Unfairly, using evidence gleaned from paying attention to her for the last two decades, I might say she was simply looking out for herself. My mother's narcissism & selfishness surely couldn't have risen, fully formed, in the last act of her life. But in the interest of being a little more understanding I might say that she was simply too busy trying to provide for three children to allow herself to worry to a crippling extent.
In early summer 1979 - school had just ended, & I was looking forward to the laziness & freedom of the school break - my oldest sister & her husband came to town very early one morning - there's a photo somewhere of me looking stupid because I had been awakened around 5am - & whisked us away to spend the summer with them in Albany, Georgia. I have no memory about being told this would happen, & it was certainly a surprise for me. We were out the door before the sun came up.
I bring up my rabbit & her sad fate because it was difficult to leave her to spend the summer in Georgia. Because my little brother & I were taken there not as a vacation, but (spoiler alert) as a place to stay while my mother visited her family in Germany. My younger sister was already there, with my older sister & her husband; my brother Eddie had a wife & lived elsewhere; which left my two older brothers. My brother Steve (brother number 2, child number 3) may have gotten married by then (my sister seems to think so). Which left my brother Ralph (brother number 3, child number 4), who had lived with Steve & so now was abandoned by marriage, to be the caretaker of apartment 18 - & poor Sunny.
Boy I had a lot to write about 1979. I'll write about my trip to Georgia & the return tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment