“What was your all-time favorite year?” asked no one,
ever.
However, I think about things like that, and my answer is
usually age four.
Four?
It seems like an odd age to pick, but, while I was
completely dependent on my parents to provide food, shelter and clothing, I was
an autonomous individual by four.
I could bathe myself – except washing my hair – brush my
teeth, dress myself including all fasteners except my shoelaces, and feed
myself, except for cutting my meat.
I knew the precise code
for the perfect bath temperature – three turns of the hot water faucet and the
cold all the way on as far as it would go.
I knew my colors,
numbers, address and phone number, even though I wasn’t allowed to use the
phone because we had a party line and the lady who lived behind us was always
on it. I wasn’t allowed to cut with scissors, but I could color – just not
inside the lines.
I also knew the names of the days of the week, although I
didn’t know what day it was unless it was Saturday or Sunday because my dad
didn’t go to work on those days. And on Sundays we went to church where the guy
in the fancy gowns mostly spoke in a foreign language, and at the end we would
say that prayer about the knives (to my ears part of it sounded like, “Show
unto us thy knives of mercy toward us.”)
Sometimes on Saturday night we would to go Confession,
which consisted of my parents and brothers standing in line to go into a closet
while I waited in the pew. In those days, we didn’t have to worry about being
kidnapped out of church or murdered in it. Besides, if my mother told me to
stay there, the whole heavenly host could not have pried me from the spot until
my mother returned.
I remember I once asked my mother what they did in the
church closets. She told me that’s where they kept their skeletons. (Imagine my
surprise at seven, when I made my First Confession only to discover there were
no skeletons. I had been looking forward to seeing them.)
Sometimes in the summer, after Confession, my dad would
take us for a drive, and we’d magically end up at Greenwood Dairies, where we
would get ice cream cones.
Four was also the age at which I received the only
spanking of my life because of a failed attempt to assert my independence.
At four I knew the rules.
I could play in the back yard on the swings, sliding
board and in the sandbox, contentedly pretending to be my brothers’ friends
from school: Ricky, Gerry, Joey, Steve or Wayne. I never pretended to be the
ones I actually knew.
In summer, the lady who lived in the summer house next
door, and was about a million years old, would stop
and talk to me. She was even older than my grandparents, and had white hair in
a bun, little round frameless glasses, and she always wore a dress, even to
rake the leaves. She had a teenage granddaughter who invited me over once, and
I got to drink lemonade with her on their side porch.
Mostly, I played in my yard, where I could also ride my
tricycle or the pedal car that sometimes went forward and sometimes backwards.
I could never figure out how to make it go the way I wanted.
The people who lived behind us had a dog. He was brown
and white or black and white, and his name was Zeke. They kept him tied up in
their back yard. There was space between their chicken coop and their outhouse
for Zeke to come to the fence. I would stick my hand through the chicken wire
to pet him. He seemed to like that. Since we didn't have a dog at the time, I used to pretend he was my dog.
Sometimes the lady there would come to the fence to talk
to me. I never knew what she was talking about, but I would stand there
respectfully while she talked, even though I wanted to play. When my mother
would see her talking to me, she’d call me in. She would say the lady was
gossiping, and it wasn’t the sort of thing small children should hear. She
didn’t mind me talking to the million-year-old lady, though.
Four was about when my mother started talking about my
going to school. She would tell me all the wonders of school, like learning to
read, making friends, learning math and learning about the world. And all of
this would occur once I turned six.
Of course, I thought it was just one of her stories. I
would never be six!
School was where my
brothers went with their schoolbags and lunch boxes. I had a toy lunch box that would fit a half
sandwich, and my mother would fill the plastic “thermos” with milk. I used hold
my lunch box while I waited with my brothers for their bus to come. They’d dash
down the road to the bus stop. I’d go as far as the corner and wave at the bus
as it passed. (This caused a bit of teasing once I started school.) Then I
would return to the house and play in the yard, my lunchbox safely in the
fridge.
Somehow, I thought I
would die before I ever made it to six. I had no health issues, but I could
never imagine reaching such a great age.
Once I did reach that
mighty school age, the next best year of my life was going to be 17. I picked
it simply because I liked the number.
But alas! 17 wasn’t as
good as four. At 17 I was a senior in high school.
At the beginning of the school year, we received our class rings at a special ceremony which, my school being
Catholic, included Mass. Throughout the day friends would turn your ring on
your finger as some kind of good luck ritual.
That night there was a
dance. My date picked me up, and after pictures at both houses, we were on our
way.
Although my date and I
had known each other since we started school, we didn’t know a lot about each
other, so the conversation was rather halting until we realized that music was
pretty much our only common interest. So we chatted about things musical on our
half hour drive to the school, where the dance was held.
But a school dance was
not to be in our future. About 10 minutes from school, we were in an accident.
This was the ’70s. New cars didn’t have seatbelts or padded dashboards, and no one I knew had a new car.
As I was hurtled forward into the windshield, the only thing that kept me
from going completely through the glass was my knees hitting the bottom of the
dash. Rather than death or worse, I ended up with a concussion.
My date wasn’t so
lucky. His mouth hit the steering wheel, and the wires from the braces on his
teeth broke, causing a bloody mess. When we arrived at the hospital – my first
ever ride in an ambulance – they wouldn’t even touch him because his injury was
an orthodontic one.
The following Monday at
school, my classmates wanted to know where I was Friday night. They looked
doubtful when I told my story, and I had to let them feel the lump on my
forehead before they believed me. My oh-so-supportive friends assumed I didn’t
have a date, and had made up a story about coming to the dance.
The rest of being 17
was non-descript, so I moved on to pick my next favorite year: age 21.
I had my 21st birthday as the highlight of that year because I spent my birthday in England, the place I’d wanted to go since the Beatles visited America, during a study-abroad semester.
On my actual
birthday, we had a field trip in which we visited Peveral Castle and then on to
Chatsworth, the stately home of the Duke of Devonshire, who happened to be the
chancellor of Manchester University, the school I was attending in England.
A few weeks later I got
to meet some distant cousins who lived in London, and spent Easter with them.
21 promised to be one
of the better years, all-in-all. But I stopped trying to pick best years after
that, since most years have tended to have their good parts and their less-than
stellar parts. Even 2020 the neverending year of Covid-19, held a silver
lining. While I didn’t get to go out to celebrate a milestone birthday – who
did? – I had a preview of retirement for a few weeks before we resumed work
virtually.
And for what it’s
worth: I could get used to that.
