A memoir--the very best of my childhood years

My sister and I were wearing poodle skirts in this 1959 portrait.  I was in fourth or fifth grade.

In 1957 when I was about eight years old and in the third grade, my family moved to Madison, Tennessee, for the best of my childhood years. We rented a house way down by the Cumberland River on Berwich Trail.

(As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago when I picked my granddaughters up from “school” at a Methodist Church in Inglewood, I said to them, “Let’s go to Madison [the next town down Gallatin Road] and find the house where Yaya [That’s me!] used to live when she was a little girl.” So we went for an adventure and found the house, looking even better that it did when my family lived there in the late 50s and early 60s.

The present owner had converted the screened-in porch to a Florida room, the attached garage into a dining room, and had built a matching brick garage in the backyard behind the house, but it was far to the right, so that the beautiful view of the river was undisturbed. It was a thrill for me to find that house and an owner who was very happy to share it with me.)

But let's go back to the 1950s, shall we? Let me paint with words this child’s paradise. First, the drive way to the house, as my father used to say, was “the length of several football fields.” The modest red brick ranch house sat way far back off Berwich Trail and to the right of the long driveway. Our immediate neighbor's house was to the left; we both used the same driveway. The big old Cumberland River was in the backyard.

The house’s “two” backyards were filled with tall trees--dozen and dozens of them. I say two backyard because there was the upper yard that at that time had a large brick grill to the right. And there was a lower back yard, which was down a hill, and of course, it butted right up to the lazy old Cumberland River. If you went a few back yards over in one direction to the left, there was a large, deep mud drainage ditch that emptied into the river.

Another really neat thing was that I got to ride my bike to Neely’s Bend Elementary School, which was probably a mile or two away from our house. Every morning biking up the drive way and right at Berwich Trail, I left my sister Lynda standing there, waiting for the school bus, which took her to Madison Junior High School, for she was in seventh grade when we moved there. I went down Berwich Trail and took a left onto Neely's Bend. There was a bike rack right beside the school building, where I parked my bike before I trotted through the back door and down the hall to my classroom.

I loved school. I loved my friends, the teachers, learning, and doing homework projects, and I loved playground and lunchtime. I could feel that the teachers liked me. My reward was that I got really good grades and positive comments on my report cards. In fifth grade, the big excitement was that I got my first male teacher, Mr. Davis.

As a twelve year old in the sixth grade, I was in a talent show, where I lip-synched and danced to a record and won! The song was called “Sweet Old-Fashioned Girl,” but as it moved along, the music got faster and my dancing got more “modern” or 60s, so that one could tell that the expression “sweet old-fashioned girl” was definitely tongue-in-cheek. I also had a boyfriend in sixth grade named Harry. I was just beginning to “bloom” into a teen.

But all that aside, what I remember most about living in Madison was that especially in grades three through five, I loved the great outdoors and couldn’t wait to get home from school or until the weekends to spend endless hours outdoors! My father had forbidden me to go near the river, but I played in all of the “forbidden” places--near the river, in the river, and near that deep drainage ditch. I climbed trees and swung on grapevines, trailing my feet into the river. I sat on the hill behind our house and studied and delighted in all of Nature, the change of the seasons, and the sun going down and coming up, and the moon and stars.

I loved animals, and my sister and I got baby ducks and baby rabbits for Easters. My mom had a parakeet named Luke in a cage, and I got guinea pigs and hamsters for my birthdays. We had a small indoor dog named Jose and a big outdoor black lab that we named Tippy. Daddy said that Tippy was not a very smart dog. One day as my mother, all dressed up in her Sunday finest, stooped down in our backyard to pick a flower, Tippy hiked his leg and urinated on her! She didn’t realize that he had done that until she could feel his warm pee soak through her slip to her skin. I didn’t like that dog, but I did like the little one Jose.

But I loved the hamsters the best; they were so small and warm and sweet. I had a particular hamster that I had named Hampy, who spent long hours in my hand being petted. I loved him especially and had had him for a couple years. Mostly I kept him in my room in his cage, but on occasion, I thought that he would like some exercise (besides his wheel), so I would let him run around the house, or if the weather was nice and I thought that he needed fresh air, I would let him run around on our back screened-in porch. Now the porch had these bottom flaps that lifted up so that you could sweep or hose the porch off. One spring day when I put Hampy on the screened-in porch, I did not realize that the bottom flaps had been left up.

When I went back to get Hampy, he, of course, was gone. I searched and searched the yard for him, and I cried and cried at his loss. Daddy said the same owl who had taken one of our ducks (which my sister claimed was my duck!) had probably swooped down and gotten Hampy, too. As I continued to grieve for him the next few days, one night a big rain storm moved in, and then I knew that Hampy was done for--probably drowned. The next evening as my family was heading out in the big Buick for a rare treat to Shoney’s for dinner, dad backed the car around to drive up the long driveway. He braked rather suddenly and said, “Well, I’ll be damned!” Caught there in the headlights heading back down the drive way to our house was a small, wet, bedraggled hamster. I jumped out of the car and ran to him, picking him up with both my hands, where he snuggled down. We immediately dubbed him, “the hamster who came home.”

The summer came and went and school started back, and I was ten years old and in the fifth grade. That winter was particularly cold and we got lots of days out of school for snow. My friends and I built snow men, had snow fights, went sledding down the hill in my front yard, carefully turning those sleds before they splashed into the creek. Inside the house in the late afternoons, after trying to find pure snow that Tippy had not peed on, we sometimes made and ate snow cream, and other times we drank hot chocolate with lots of fat marshmallows.

We had a tree-lined creek that curved around the immediate front yard of our house. That week the creek froze over solid, or so I thought. Daddy noticed it when he left for work in the mornings and told me never to walk on the ice because it probably wouldn’t hold me and I could drown. One afternoon after my friends had gone home for lunch, I was drawn to that frozen creek like Pandora to her box. Ignoring my dad’s warning, I eased myself out onto the frozen surface. Once I reached the center, very suddenly, I fell down, down through the ice into the freezing water. Luckily, somehow I flailed and flailed and managed to scramble out of the icy hole.

Long I stood and saw the damage that I had done to the creek’s otherwise smooth surface. Then near to freezing and so afraid of my father’s punishment, I went into the garage where my mother’s new washer and dryer sat and took off all my clothes, including my heavy wool coat, and stood there in the coldness of the garage, naked, and scared that any minute my mother was going to come out of the house, when she heard the noise of the dryer, or my father was going to come through the garage door, on his usual way home from work. Neither of those things happened. I climbed back into my warm, dry clothes, acting as if nothing had happened. The whole next week, until the creek thawed completely, I lived in mortal fear of my father noticing the hole in the creek and exacting punishment on me, but he never did!      

The only “bad” things that I recall happening when we lived on the river were when my sister, then my father, and then I had to go to the emergency room, with each incident getting progressively worse. One evening we were having friends over to our house for a barbecue on that large brick grill in our backyard, and my sister was in the kitchen cutting up onions for the hamburgers when she sliced into her finger. She had to be taken to the hospital for stitches. Then the next year, my father was teaching me how to swing a golf club in the backyard. He first showed me how to swing it with his arms around me, mimicking the proper stroke. Then he backed away and told me to swing, but he did not back far enough away, so that when I swung the club back, it made contact with his mouth. I didn’t even know that the club had hit him until I heard him spit out profanity and saw his hand held up to his bloody mouth. He had to be taken to the hospital for stitches and sported a slight scar above his upper lip for the rest of his life. Never again did he try to teach me how to play golf!

In this Easter snapshot of my dad and me, you can almost see the Cumberland River in our back yard. You can also see those little flaps on the back screen-in porch that Hampy escaped from. And there is our big new Buick; my dad loved Buicks and nearly always bought them. Because he was a big man, I think that he was comfortable in their spaciousness.

My trip to the emergency room did not involve an accident. It was mid-December, and I was in sixth grade. That morning as I was getting ready for school, I was brushing my hair with my mother’s hairbrush at her dresser. My parents’ bedroom was beside the kitchen, and I could hear the rest of my family in the kitchen. My right hand which bore the hair brush felt as if it had fallen asleep, like our feet sometimes do, so I was trying to wake it up by lightly tapping it on the dresser. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the hospital.

Here’s what happened as I have pieced it together: I had some kind of epileptic-like episode. When my parents found me, I was seizing with my eyes rolling back in my head. My sister was sent over to get the nurse who lived next door to us, and she recommended that a spoon be place in my mouth to keep me from swallowing my tongue. I was taken in an ambulance to downtown Nashville to Baptist Hospital, where I stayed for a week, having various tests, including a spinal tap.

The medical personnel did not tell the nurses or my parents that I had to be kept still after the spinal tap, or else I would get a headache that would last for days. I still have not forgotten that headache. But something worse happened for me during my hospital stay. It was 1960s, and there were definite visiting hours back then, even for parents. So I spent a great deal of my time alone at the hospital--devoid of family or friends.

This one particular night, with the headache still pounding away, I was waiting for my family to come visit me. It was nearly Christmas, and I was in a children’s ward, filled with dozens of other children of various ages in dozens of other beds, some separated by pulled curtains, some not, sort of like what I imagined an orphanage would look like. My little cubicle was up was against a corner wall. I watched and waited as the other children’s parents and families came in the door, all jolly, bringing them little presents of flowers or fruits. No one pays any attention to me.

Three long hours passed, and my parents and sister did not come. I began to cry, and the nurses became concerned about me and about my family. The other parents began to leave for the night. I felt so all alone and abandoned and frightened. Finally, my family swept through the door. My mother and sister, all stunned and quiet, and my father still in a temper and cussing about some Christmas parade blocking the streets to the hospital. They were able to stay for a few minutes past visiting hours, but because of my father’s rage, they could not be much comfort to me.

The hospital tests discovered nothing conclusive about my episode, but even eight years later, when I went off to college, my mothers asked my college roommate and best friend Linda Gillihand to please keep an eye on me. That is when I knew that she had worried all of those years about another attack.

We left Madison, Tennessee, when I began seventh grade. I left behind a budding romance with Harry, lots of friends, a beautiful landscape of a yard, lots of good memories, and my childhood. In our next move to Louisville Kentucky, things were going to be quite different in so many ways. Now as I think back, I wish that we could have skipped the years we spent in Louisville.

The 1960s in Middle Tennessee were the time period in fashion and modesty when skirts were always below the knees. I am wearing knee socks here, but they look like tights! Even in high school, we did not wear our skirts above the knees. When I began college in 1967, women were not allowed to wear pants on campus at MTSU! It was a very different time from today.