On And On

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Bet You Didn't Know...

I’m fairly confident that even my closest friends have no idea how poor I was growing up. Part of the reason is they’ve never asked (why would they?); the other part is that it isn’t a big deal to me. After all, I’m not poor now, so what difference did it make? Not much, but here it is anyway.

My friends don’t know that our living room wall was cracked…it had even buckled right above the stovepipe. This was never fixed. As far as I know, it wasn’t even discussed. I honestly have no idea if my family thought they couldn’t afford it, or just didn’t think it was a big deal. It just never came up.

My mom was sixteen when I was born, and my parents never married. My mom had my brother L two years later, and then seven years after that she had my baby brother P. We each have different fathers, and while all three of us know that, we just don’t care; we’ve never thought of each other as anything but brothers.

When I was fourteen my mom did finally get married, to a man who was not the father of any of us. I was too old for anyone to pretend to be my dad, but my two brothers weren’t. L caused enough trouble to make my stepfather stop trying with him, but P was just about to turn five. This gave my stepfather hope. Suffice it to say, any of P's success in life has been in spite of, not because of, my stepfather.

At any rate, when they got married I decided to stay with my grandparents. We had spent most of our lives moving in and out of their house anyway, and I had never lived anywhere but in that town, so I stayed.

It is their house and their living room I am referring to. The house was only about forty years old in the eighties. But it was really older than that, because my grandfather and his father built the house in the 1940’s by nailing an ice house to a carriage house, then adding a half story above it. There was a dirt cellar, and the first floor consisted of my grandparents’ bedroom; the living room, kitchen and bathroom. Upstairs were two bedrooms. Having set that scene, try to imagine that for a time in the late eighties or early nineties we had living in that house: me, my two grandparents, my two brothers, my mother and stepfather, my aunt and uncle and their infant daughter. Ten people, three bedrooms. Good times were had by all. I honestly have no idea where everybody slept.

We did have running water, but no hot water. As a child, I remember a cast iron bathtub in the bathroom, but I don’t remember it ever working. It did, however, make a fine storage unit. It was removed when I was in junior high, I think. In my house, we took something called sponge baths. This meant heating water on the stove, putting it in the bathroom sink and washing yourself with soap and a washcloth. Heat from the woodstove was rarely able to make it into the bathroom, providing a thrill all its own.

We did get a telephone when I was a sophomore in high school, the first time I had ever had one in any residence I had lived in. It was a glorious day.

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