My Favorite Year

 

            “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 21^st 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.