So I was surfing the web this morning. I ran across something that made me think about parts of my childhood in ways I hadn't done in years. Normally, if I wanted to write about it, I'd post the link right here, but this piece of writing did not work well when I did that. (Skip to the end of this entryif you can't restrain your curiosity as to what tickled my memory.)
When I was a kid, I lived with my family in a 3 BR suburban ranch house not too far from San Francisco, on the Berkeley side of the Bay. The neighborhood was filled with what I now recognize as young families, mostly white, but a variety of ehtinicities, creeds and religions. Most of the families had fathers who worked and mothers who stayed home and took care of the house and the kids and the day-to-day business of keeping the familieis running. For the occasional mom who was a school teacher, there was always a neighbor who was happy to earn a little extra money by watching the teacher's kids after school until the teacher got home. (This was important -- in my elementary school, there were 13 teachers and 12 of them were women, most married.)
Our parents had all been born and raised in the depression, mostly on farms in various parts of the country. (Well, okay, there was the guy across the street who walked from Russia to Palestine during WWII in search of a better life, on his way to a nursery business in Berkeley, CA. But most of them were children of the depression.) Our fathers were professionals (like my dad, who spent 30+ years as an engineer for a major oil company) or small businessmen (like the guy down the street who sold industrial strength vacuum cleaners and was the first on the block to put a swimming pool in the backyard).
My parents had some friends outside the neighborhood, and they also socialized with our neighbors. Bridge games, dinner parties, summer barbeques, that kind of thing. Barbeques included beer. Dinner parties included a couple bottles of California wine (just coming into its own). And my mother's bridge game for some reason invloved cheap red wine and doughnuts (don't ask me, I think it sounds like a gross combination).
Then there was that family up the street. The mom was a little younger and a lot more glamorous than the other moms. The dad was a little younger and a lot brasher than the other dads. For a long while after they moved into the biggest hour in the neighborhood (FOUR bedrooms! and a HUGE yard, into which her father immediately had built a GIANT swimming pool), they also had no kids. Then they adopted twin boys and immediately followed this up with a son and daughter obtained the more usual way. (In fairness to these people, who I am not treating all that well in this article, I don't think they ever treated their adopted children differently than their biological children.)
The wife continued on her merry way once her children were on the scene. She always struck me as a very loving but not paticularly involved mother. She was involved in different volunteer groups than the other moms (who were mostly PTA, AAUW, League of Women Voters, church committees, and so on, whereas she was involved in more groups that had a social aspect; I don't think Junior League, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were, after all).
The father was "in real estate", which I think meant that he was trying to prove he could earn as much money as his father-in-law, who provided not only the swimming pool, but a station wagon and a pair of matching Corvettes, as well as a summer place in Lake Tahoe. He'd gone to Stanford and his big expense was a giant party he threw for his old frat buddies every other year when the Cal-Stanford game was at Cal. The high point of this for us kids on the block was when the chartered bus showed up to take them all to the game.
They returned neighborly hospitality with cocktail parties and pool parties, at which the liquor flowed. One time when the liquor had been flowing for awhile, some guest asked one of the twins how old his mom was, and he said "29" (which was the honest to goodness truth) and the guests all laughed uproariously at how well she'd trained her kids. She was outraged, because it was true.
When I got to be about 13 or 14, I started babysitting for them. They were my best source of income for years, even though they paid the lowest rates. The thing is, they partied a lot. I ususally sat for them both Friday and Saturday nights, and they often stayed out until 2am.
They didn't have a lot of common sense. I recall one time, after the kids were fed and in bed, that a drunken man knocked on the door and said that the mom had sent him over to "get the place ready for an after party". I was pretty freaked and called my mom to come and stay with me, as more and more drunken people showed up. My mom was pretty mad, too, as I was about 13 or so. But I think it wasn't until her own daughter was a young teenager that this woman understood why sending drunks to your house and expecting the 13-year-old babysitter to just let them in the house didn't make sense.
I stopped babysitting for them after one rainy evening when the father drove me home (because it was rainy and very late). I was a pretty niave 15-year-old, but even I knew he was hitting on me. And whatever he saw in my face caused him to say, "You're a young girl -- what red-blooded man wouldn't?"
Anyway, I turned 16 and better money-making opportunities came along, and I was just as glad. Because that? freaked me totally out.
Nowadays, we'd say that it proved he had no good sense of boundaries, and I guess that's true. I mean, if you hit on the teenaged daughter of your neighbor, then you lack sense.
Anyway, I grew up an went off to college, and these people got a divorce. I'm unclear on the details of what happened next, but it either involved the results of a prenup, or a very good lawyer that her father hired for her. but the wife ended up getting the house, the cars, custody of the kids, alimony, and child support. (Some of that was only to be expected, given the tenor of the times.)
The next thing I heard was that the mom of this family, who I will always remember best in her bikini, insisting, correctly, that she was so 29 years old, had been murdered. Brutally murdered. Two thugs kidnapped her from her house and drove her in her own car to the Berkeley hills, where they stabbed her to death, in return for a payment of $2500. The money was paid by her ex-husband, and all three (the thugs and the ex-husband) were convicted and sentenced to death.
He died on San Quentin's death row, maintaining his innocence to the end, and attempting to sell insurance from his prison cell.
So what brought on this collection of memories of the guy I once knew who died on death row? Just a timeline. (Search on "Carlene" if you want to see the entry that stopped me in my tracks.)
He was sleazy, and lacked bounadries. She was perfectly nice, and lacked common sense. Today, I can't stop thinking about their children. For me, this is a footnote in the story of my life. For them, it must be the central fact of their own stories.
Today, I feel lucky that what's unfair about my life is the pain, and not that my father had my mother brutally murdered.