What Mother Didn’t Know

One day last summer, I was reminded of my childhood as I hobbled around on one and a half feet because I’d stepped on a nail down at the water’s edge next to my dock. I was gathering sticks for Perkins’s favorite game when I stumbled and heavily planted my foot on a well-camouflaged board. I flinched from pain when I tried to withdraw my foot and leather sandal, both of which were impaled on the board, I stumbled again and pushed the nail even farther into the ball of my foot. I screamed, but only Perkins heard me. It is hard to pry a board off your foot while hopping on the other one and trying not to fall.

There was quite a lot of blood that made the ascent up to the house that much harder as my punctured foot was sliding all around on the wet surface of the sandal.

I made it to the house, thoroughly cleaned the foot, soaked it in hot water and Epsom Salts, and drowned it with hydrogen peroxide. Thankfully, only a year earlier I had a tetanus shot after my cat’s teeth got stuck in my finger and my hand had swelled up like a hamburger.

We were living in the Brookville subdivision of Alexandria, Virginia when a board got stuck to my foot. I was five or six, maybe even seven. But those were much different circumstances. It happened on dry land on the construction site behind Tommy Philion’s house. And it was not entirely by accident. Wearing my pink rubber Zori (flipflops), I’d accepted a dare from Tommy that I could step on this single nail sticking out of a board without harming myself. Just the night before we’d watched a TV show, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, where a man in a turban walked across and even lay on a bed of nails without injury. So, I thought if he could manage it on a whole bed of nails, how much easier it would be with a single nail sticking through a board!

After Mother and Tommy’s mom pried the board off my foot and I’d gotten home from the Navy Infirmary (with a tetanus shot and a Band-Aid), Dad proceeded to give me the physics lecture on multiple fulcrums and weight dispersal versus a single puncture point. I decided not to test the theory again anytime soon.

Shall I tell you about the day I asked Dad what time it was and he spent a half hour explaining how the gears work inside the clock and turned the big hand and the little hand at different rates?

Maybe I wasn’t normal. Maybe my whole family was different. But I always thought we were the very basis of normality against which everyone else could be judged. And what I learned from my upbringing was simply this, “What Mother doesn’t know… won’t hurt me (except for nails in my feet).” It wasn’t “What Dad doesn’t know…” although that was also true, but if Mother didn’t know about it, then Dad CERTAINLY did not.

Perhaps that attitude would be strange today, but I think it was fairly common when I was growing up. Most of us had pretty strict parents. After all, our dads were ALL World War II veterans, and some, like mine, were still active-duty military. Their experience of war had transferred those life-saving disciplines to the raising of their families.

But the secret that most of us children suspected was that not ALL of those rules were life-saving. Many of them were merely face-saving, and if we broke or bent them a little bit, and no one found out, no harm done, and secret joy accomplished! We might have underestimated the value of some of those rules, but survived, nonetheless.

Strict parents or not, I had a pretty fabulous childhood (with some serious exceptions, of course.) My memories are filled with blinding sparkles! The sidewalks sparkled in bright sunlight, the dry dirt of the construction site sparkled as we dug castles, motes, and cities for Tommy’s Matchbox cars and Army men, rocks sparkled, the creek water sparkled, hair in the sunlight sparkled, and the glitter in my clear plastic high heels sparkled.

“Tommy, time for Superman!” You could set your clock for five o’clock every afternoon when Tommy’s mother called him in to watch his favorite TV show while she put dinner on the table. The rest of us stayed out for at least another hour.

TV was only a limited part of our lives. Yes, we had a black and white television, but largely ignored it except for rainy days, Saturday morning “Tarzan” or “Jungle Jim.” The family watched “Perry Mason” on Saturday night while Mother set pin curls in our freshly washed hair for church, “Walt Disney” was family viewing on Sunday evening, and the very occasional Friday night “Twilight Zone.”

The telephone was attached to the kitchen wall, typewriters were all manual, computers and calculators were the size of an auditorium and found only in major science labs. So, the glow of an electronic screen was not central to our young lives.

When not in school, we were outside from breakfast until dinner, with a brief cool-off for lunch in the kitchen.

Mother did not need to know that we collected all of that wonderful gray clay and a good portion of my rock collection from the bottom regions of that deep, deep trench they dug behind Tommy’s house (in preparation for installing an additional storm sewer). She didn’t know that when she let me go to Tommy’s house across Paxton Street with the warning, “Don’t cross any streets,” that we often snuck down to Holmes Run at the end of the street (a stream which we simply called “The Creek”) by taking the back way through the dirt or even following Tommy’s sidewalk. On MY side of Paxton Street, the creek was three short blocks away. But on Tommy’s side it was only one long block. Once at the creek we could swing like Tarzan on vines over the cool water. We could also enter the maze of tall culverts (storm sewers) and travel around the underside of our whole neighborhood from there, collecting lost baseballs and whiffle balls. Once or twice we even took our bikes down there. A 20” bike could fit, although turning it around was a challenge. Mother had no idea.

As I got older, my daytime voyages covered much more territory. In Southern California, Linda Rogas and I would wander for multiple miles on foot or bike without our mothers ever knowing what world travelers we were. When I made it home for dinner, as far as she knew, I’d stayed within a couple of blocks of home. I always had free access to Peroxide and Band-Aids, no questions asked. I was happy and so was she. Honestly, I don’t think she WANTED to know.

I can now look up all these places on Google Earth and they look so different from how I remember them. Now, the trip on bicycle up to Foothill High School looks flat and completely surrounded by housing developments online. But then, it was a steep, winding road up mostly wooded, undeveloped areas, so steep we often had to walk our bikes up part-way. Now, there are streets and roads where there were none. It was a long trek up and a rollercoaster trip downhill heading back home, flying over railroad tracks, some nasty gravel crossroads, and past a palomino horse in its paddock. We thought it was ten miles away, but Google Maps says it was only about two miles following the current streets. It took an hour to get up there and maybe fifteen minutes to get back down, burning out the brakes all the way.

There was no such thing as a bike helmet. Knee pads… hah! You’ve GOT to be kidding! We were FLYING down those foothill roads. One day, we were two blocks away from home on Prospect Avenue, having just flown down those roads, and Mother drove by in her car and stopped, demanding to know what we were doing so far from home! Come on, Mother! We crossed Prospect Avenue every single day walking or riding our bikes to school! I didn’t SAY that, just thought it very loudly.

Yeah, this is why we just didn’t tell her things. She had no concept of our daily lives. After all, she’d sent me hours away to Girl Scout Camp in the summers and we did long hikes there. The difference was we were hiking in a clump, with adult camp counselors. Who needed them?

Oh, I almost forgot to mention the several trips Mother and I made to the Navy Hospital to X-ray my knees. Mother was concerned that I was limping. The doctor told her it must simply be “growing pains.” It’s strange how she never asked me if I had been jumping off the garage roof. Linda and I had a contest to see who could jump off and land on the asphalt driveway without bending her knees….

Thank you, God, for Saturday night “Chiller” watching scary movies with Linda, the great climbing trees, my roller skates, my jump ropes, my bicycles, my pogo stick, basketball, my paints and pastels, books, records, library card, and oh yeah, the world’s best collection of dolls! Yes, I had those, too.

And, thank you, God, that I never had to wear a stupid bicycle helmet, and broke my foot only once.

I’ll leave the tales of teen years in Rhode Island and Quantico for another time.