First, to set the ’scene’,
When I was still in diapers - according to my paternal grandmother, who filled me in on some of these details - and my older brother was around four at the time, our mother took off from her nothing burger life running a small cafe attached to a gas station in the little town of Provo, Utah while our father was having himself a good time (at least in her eyes) going to the university there (BYU), to better himself for his family (according to my grandmother, and common sense), and headed for Hollywood, to try to break into ‘the movies’ (which were just that at the time, with sound coming in later on in the decade). She had been told, by customers at the cafe, that she looked “like that Hollywood star, what’s her name, with the fancy last name. De Haviland - that’s it. Olivia de Haviland.’ and that ‘turned her head’ (grandmother speaking) and she set out to try her hand at fame, either as a stand-in for said actress, or on her own. With nothing opening down in Hollywood for her, she came back, traced us kids down (never forgiving said grandmother for not telling her where our father had taken us, when he had to drop out of school and take care of us), divorced our father (including a Mormon Temple divorce; being done with all that at that time as well), gained custody of us kids (after all, 'Children should be with their mothers'), and, with us in tow (for insurance in her life, I was to realize much later on), headed in the other direction this time: up north to Boise, Idaho, where she arranged somehow (most probably with the help of a couple of her brothers) to go to secretarial school.
What to do with us kids. Somehow she located an elderly couple who took in children for their parents for varying periods of time, for whatever reason. And that was where I grew up. First in a crib in a far corner of their large bedroom. (Where, I was told, by my brother, who traced down ‘Grandma Coble’ - no relation to us - later in life to ask about those days, I used to rock my head so hard - probably at a total loss to understand what the hell was going on around me - that they were afraid that I would harm myself, banging it against the bars of my prison. It took me many years to overcome that habit.) And then I was moved up to a proper bed in an upstairs room that doubled as our playroom.*
Life was idyllic there. No problems. Nothing ever happened, except play. Mostly in the ‘big’ park that we lived beside. (Years later I was to see that it was rather a little park. Things are all a matter of perspective.) Oh - and every once in awhile, I remember my brother telling me to come with him, that we were going to go visit our ‘mother’. What was a ‘mother’? No one ever told me. All I knew was that she had something to do with us.
I remember two such instances. In the first, my brother took me to an upstairs apartment - not too far way from our home - where this strange lady was living. It was Easter - that is, some sort of holiday, that had to do with Easter eggs and Easter bunnies - and she had hidden some small candy Easter eggs around her room, and told us to go find them. It was called an Easter egg hunt. And that was it. We went back home, me none the wiser for the experience. In the second, it was a Christmas Eve, and my brother took me to a different place this time, a small ground-floor apartment, where the same stranger lady had a small Christmas tree, and under it a few presents for us. We were each allowed to open one present there, and save the couple more each for the morning. Back home.
Oh - and she once took me downtown, to a restaurant that had a counter with stools, where she bought me a toasted sandwich, as I recall, for lunch. For some reason I remember distinctly that, walking on the way, she took my hand when we were crossing a street, and I pulled my hand back. What did she think I was - a baby?? I may have been close to First grade age by then. If I had had the wherewithal to think about it, I might have asked this stranger:
‘Who are you to me?’
‘I am your mother,’ would come the reply.
‘What’s a ‘mother’?’
‘Well…It means that I am responsible for you.’
And that was the extent of our relationship from then on. This woman was ‘responsible’ for me. So, when she got ‘married’ - when I was halfway through my First grade - my brother and I went to live with her and the man she got ‘married’ to. In a town not too far from where we were living at the time.
A smaller town. Name of Payette. Where our ‘dad’ would take us to power-boat races on a nearby river. (I think he had some sort of interest in one of them. He was a co-owner of the Ford dealership in town. Very well off. In his small-town setting.) And where I finished my First grade, and on into my Second grade. A period of time in which I recall that once, when I was outside playing, I heard and saw my Mom calling me. She called down (we lived on the side of a bit of a hill): “It’s time for you to come in, DeVon.”
Even at that tender age, I could wonder why this woman got me confused with my brother. Heck, he was three years older than me. Why can’t she tell us apart?? Even as a tyke, before this time period, I knew the difference between me and my brother. He was ‘DeVon,’ and I was ‘Duane’. I may not have known how to spell them. But I could tell the difference between them. Between us.
And that ‘habit’ of hers lasted her throughout our lives together. Example. When I was in my late high-school or early college years - and my brother was long gone out of the picture, having been shipped off to live with our father up north in the Bay Are (we were living in Southern California, here in my ‘home town’ of Long Beach, by then) when he hit his high school daze of attraction to the girls and became too much of a hellion for our Mom to deal with - she told me one day to check in with a certain young sales guy down at Buffums (a downtown major department store) whom she had arranged with to help me buy something or other in the way of clothes. I felt a little foolish about it, but nevertheless, went along with the gig, and checked in with the guy. Explaining why I was seeing him, he replied, ‘Ah yes. I remember. You’re - DeVon, is that right?’
No, it wasn’t right. But never mind. Because we are not our names, anyway. I AM not my brother. Nor am I my name. This is an identity that I have assumed, in order to be able to be amongst you at this key time in your development. Walking amongst you lot, and observing it all, from behind my screen (my bars??), as you prepare
for
liftoff.
—
* I remember it well. It was where I learned the letters of the alphabet - from the set of building blocks we were given to play with - and to put them into words - from the little portable blackboard easel there, that my brother used to teach me words, and how to read. Before I hit the First grade. So that I was always ahead of the kids in my class in such ways.
—-
P.S. When my mother died, I found out how ‘old’ her habit was, of not knowing the difference between her two boys. Her children in this incarnation. She died - of breast cancer** - in the early ‘70s, in her early 60s, after living a comfortable life with her third husband from the mid-’50s, first in Anaheim, CA - within evening fireworks display-watching distance from Disneyland for a few years - and then in a posh area in far Southern California (Rancho Santa Fe). When she died, her husband (a good man to her) sent me a shoebox of her personal belongings that she had kept. Among the items was a yellowed newspaper clipping, describing how a Rita Case Stanfield had retrieved her sons from a kidnapping by her ex-husband, their father The children were named as “Duane, 6, and DeVon, 3”.
If I hadn’t obtained a copy of my birth certificate to get a passport, I might have been convinced that she had gotten it right, after all…
The question of why a mother wouldn’t get the names of her two sons right is probably not worth going into. After all - as I say - our names are not who we are, anyway.
And I should note, for the record, that our ‘relationship’ suited me fine. She lived her life while I was growing up, and I lived mine. No one trying to boss me.
N.B. She was still trying to get 'discovered' many years after the fact. It was why she talked her second husband into moving to Southern California in the first place. There would be “good jobs” there, she told him, in either the shipyards or the airplane factory, from the World War that was then upon us. And once the move had taken place, she ‘arranged’ for a divorce, and went her own way (getting the house in the deal). With us two still in tow. Until my brother got too much for her to handle, and he got shipped out.
As for me: She was a quiet presence in the background while I grew up. ‘Responsible,’ for little nudges. She arranged for me to have clarinet lessons, for one. Not that I was aware of it at the time. But I have since appreciated her for that little episode in my young life. And she bought me a membership in the downtown YMCA, where I ended up honing my basketball skills. And because of the membership, was sent off to 'Y' Summer Camp, two or three summers. Upon returning from one of which, I remember, a strange lady was in the house - a friend of my Mom’s, from her membership in the Business & Professional Women’s Club. She told me thar my mom would be ‘back in a few days. When she returned, I asked her - as one would - where she had been. “Well, it’s none of your business,” was her curt reply. Which set the tone of our somewhat ‘estranged’ relationship even deeper. But hey - it was all fine by me. I was left to live my life the way I wanted to. (I found out later that she was spending her summers hanging out around swimming pools in Hollywood, trying to be ‘seen’.)
When this is all said and done, and I meet up with that soul on the other side of this ‘screen,’ I will be able to tell her what I failed to tell her in the drama:
that I appreciated her.
I can’t talk about ‘love’ in that relationship. I never felt that towards her. I never knew her that well, to do so. But I can tell her
that she played her part well.
-
** By then I had read a considerable amount of literature on the general subject of health and the specific subject of cancer, and tried to give her some info on an alternative treatment for her condition from the mainstream treatment she was undergoing, which I knew was not going to do the job. At least, not the job of curing her. (But it would certainly make a lot of money for Big Pharma.) I even wrote to her doctor, to suggest that they check out a clinic right near where my Mom lived at the time (near San Diego), that was into an ‘alternative’ approach to the matter. (Mater, matter, Mother.) She subsequently wrote me to keep my nose out of her business - “and besides, why should I listen to you. You never went to medical school.” My dropping out of university a very sore subject between us. Which, in the end, may not have made any difference, anyway. Because I may have become as brainwashed sa the rest of the allopathic lot on these sorts of things.
I would like to think that if I had gone on into Med School - which was the path I was on, at the time; before another scenario developed for me in life - I would have awakened to the fact that I was being brainwashed, by Big Pharma, in my training as a medic. But you never know. The Powers That Be have a lot of power.
It may have seduced even me.
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