Who Needs Normal, Anyway?

I meant to write about something else tonight, but instead I'm going to talk about my dad and my childhood.

See, my husband and I started talking about my dad and my childhood tonight while our son was playing, and in talking about it, I came to think that my childhood was somewhat unusual, mostly during the time I spent with my dad, although having a Republican archaeologist and a vegetarian/Democrat anthropologist raising you is probably also somewhat unusual, but they strived to offer me normalcy.  They may not have quite got there, though.

What brought this up is that my husband asked me, upon seeing some security guards, if that was a well-paid position.  I said I didn't know, and then I went on to mention that my dad was a security guard for some years.  He was a security guard, specifically, for a Game & Fish museum in Little Rock, Arkansas.  As you can well imagine, there were not a lot of break-ins or other problems--apparently, no one wanted the stuffed trouts on display.  My dad used to take me with him to work in the summers, because our time together was so short and he felt he had to make up for lost time.  So, when I was about 9 and 10 years old, I would spend all night locked in a darkened museum with my just my dad and another security guard and lots of those vending machine cheese-n-crackers.  There wasn't really anyplace to sleep, so I would go around and check out the displays and push all the buttons on the ones that would tell a story or whatever.  My husband can now see clearly why I have such trouble with insomnia.

My dad had two other jobs at various times that he would take me with him to do.  First, he was a salesman of agricultural oils and greases.  I had no idea, really, that so many types of greases existed, but apparently different farming implements require different lubricants.  Some of them are fuchsia, for some odd reason.  My father was an amazing salesman.  He was one of those guys who loved to talk to people, loved to schmooze, and could make anyone feel like a close personal friend within minutes.  He could make virtually anyone trust him.  He could make you feel that, by golly, if you say I need the fuchsia grease, then I must really need the fuchsia grease.  It was amazing to watch.  He took me with him a lot on this job, so I spent a lot of the summer traveling around northern Arkansas listening to my dad sing "Battle of New Orleans" and "Blowin in the Wind" and even "Tennessee Stud" talking to farmers and eating Frito pie.  We also spent a lot of that time holed up in honky-tonks, taverns, and VFW bars.  I don't know if in Arkansas they still let kids into bars, but they did then, and I would sit with a glass of cold tomato juice listening to all these seemingly old men talk about the weather and sports. 

Then, later, my dad became a milkman.  Yes, he drove a truck around and delivered milk and other dairy products to people's homes.  Again, my dad got to use his salesmanship to win new customers and encourage Miss Polly down the road that she really needed a quart of ice cream this week.  I couldn't actually drive around in the truck with him, but he would come get me after he finished the deliveries to help him do inventory and then we went back to the office to do his books.  I did his books for him while he drank coffee and schmoozed.  He pointed out to every person in the room every single day that his daughter, who was only 11, was doing his books for him because she was so smart, so smart that she could get them done faster than anyone else.  It was true that I usually got them done faster than anyone else, but that's probably because I did less coffee drinking and schmoozing.  It felt pretty good to hear my dad brag about me that way, and afterwards we'd often head out to either a Waffle House or another bar.

There was one summer when my dad bought a pool hall (a bar with a lot of pool tables) that was in this ancient building in Newport, Arkansas.  There was an old and probaby condemned hotel on the second floor, and that's where we lived.  He was married that summer to some bar chippie (I had no fondness for the woman), and she had her four kids with her, so we all lived in this 100-year-old hotel we were convinced was haunted.  That's the summer his drinking really got out of hand, and he failed to pay the electric bill or the water bill, and we kids had to take turns hauling water.  It wasn't a great summer.  He really made an effort to keep the drinking somewhat under control while I was there, but that summer he just couldn't, I guess. 

The thing is, I loved all those times with my dad.  I loved spending all night with stuffed deer.  I loved all the Frito pies and Johnny Cash songs.  I loved driving all over northern Arkansas schmoozing farmers.  I loved the VFW bars.  All of it.  My dad was a funny man, always with a joke and a wink, always with a silly song.  He would also get really quiet and scary sometimes, but that isn't the part I want to remember and so mostly I have decided not to.

Then I'd go home, back to New Mexico, and there would be much consternation.  My mom doesn't actually consider Frito pie to be a balanced meal nor Dr. Pepper an adequate substitute for water.  But, while my mother always provided me with a healthful diet, things weren't exactly normal.

My mom went back to college when she was 30, and I was 7.  To go to college and raise me, she took classes (pre-med at the time) full time and also worked full time on the graveyard shift (interestingly, she worked at White Sands Missile Range doing something with computers, and she was involved in some missile testing which I thought was tremendously cool at the time).  She didn't sleep.  She wasn't home much, either, given all that.  She would talk to me in her sleep or half sleep and often call me by the names of her coworkers instead of my own.  She would sometimes find a way to both study and spend time with me by reading to me out of her textbooks.  I would curl up next to her and listen to her read about zoology and microbiology and toxicology and gawk at the pictures of flagella and such.  Not exactly written for kids, those things.

Then my stepdad came along, and he is significantly younger than my mom (9 years to be exact) so he was just a pup, very much still interested in partying his way through college.  And he did.  We did.  Many of the parties were actually at our house, and I would hang around and make chit-chat with all these college students while pouring them beer out of a keg.  I wasn't allowed to stay up past my bedtime or drink any beer or anything terrible like that, and to me, looking back, the most remarkable thing about it is that all those college students would make time at a party to talk to a 9-year-old girl.  Sure, I was conversant in microbiology, but still.  They didn't just make time for it, they actually liked me.  I still see many of them, and they still feel like surrogate aunts and uncles to me.  They cared about me and talked to me like a person instead of segregating me with other children (though to be honest, there were no other children; all my parents' friends were much younger than my mom, and none of them had any kids yet). 

All of this is just to say that I think a lot of our ideas about what kids need and what a normal, good childhood is are overly narrow.  All kids have different personalities and needs, but the life I had suited me just fine, even though I'm pretty sure the authorities would not have liked it much.  That's also why I think our education system just has the wrong idea in forcing children to spend so much of their time sequestered with those their own age and level.  I learned so much more from my interactions with adults than I ever did in school.  Namely, I learned how to talk and act like an adult.  Eventually that translated to being an adult and having some idea of what that entailed.  I also learned a lot from my mom reading books that were way over my head to me, especially because I would ask questions about the pictures (mostly) and she would take the time to answer them, even though an 8-year-old is hardly expected to understand microscopic organisms.

For sure, this is informing the way we raise our son.  I read him books and explain concepts to him that are clearly way over his head--anything he asks about from how clouds make rain or why clouds are white to (with John's help!) why magma is hot.  We take him on trips whenever we can, even if it's just driving around to look at old farm equipment that likely needs lubrication.  I had heard that kids can be so inflexible, but ours isn't so he fits right in.  He's lived in three states so far (New Mexico, Alaska, and Idaho) and knows that he has connections to Japan.  I don't want him to ever know what it's like to have a parent who lets your water get shut off or to spend too much time sitting around a keg, but I want him to know what all is out there, to know how big and full the world is and all the things that can happen in it. 

The other day he was jumping on the couch and he shouted, "I love to live a crazy life!"  That's good, because that's more than likely what he'll get.  Our life right now, in this town, isn't especially crazy (although, like me, he has a mom who works at night and is often very tired--I don't work full time at night, though, thank god), but it won't stay that way forever.