Down the Rabbit Hole

During the time I was working full time, I didn’t even try to concentrate on writing, as I couldn’t get to the place I wanted to write from. These days, spending most of my time thinking about my kids and their lives mid 20th-Century, as I have heard the 1950’s called, I am surprised to find that I cannot keep the rest of my life straight! In other words, I knew that it was hard to get down into the real locus of a book if you had much else to think about. I did not know that, once you had gone there, you might have a hard time getting back!

It is a little like deep sea diving. If you go down, you have to come back slowly, so you don’t get the bends. Don laughs at me, seeing that I can’t remember what day it is, or what daily tasks I had hoped to accomplish. “Welcome to my world,” he says. He is always in the present, using calendars and emails to remind himself of what he wants to do. Only with effort, and lots of lists, do I keep the two parts of my concentration flowing smoothly. I have no wish to let writing replace my blessed, active daily life.

This week, with guests in the house and some work for others, I didn’t do any original writing. There was time for editing and research, however. For example:

When would Mother have been reading Adele Davis? She was often interested in food and cooking, and her handwriting is all over many cookbooks and recipe files which are still to be found scattered among her children. “Let’s Cook It Right” was first published in 1947, and Mother certainly could have been reading it ten years later in North Dakota. Later, in the 1960’s, she had copies of “Food Is Your Best Medicine,” by Henry Bieler. I remember her standing over a pot of Bieler broth, happy when she went on to something else! I am never sure how Mother and Dad got their hands on things, but they did manage to be quite current, mostly due to the large number of magazines which arrived in the mail.

During the time Adele Davis (pictured above) was writing, she was living in southern California with complete access to fresh vegetables, something we didn’t have in the winter. The most lasting part of Davis’ influence was probably in the lovely breads we often made, whole wheat, sometimes using brewers’ yeast or milk powder to intensify the protein and vitamins. I really don’t remember eating much Wonder bread. “Mattress stuffing” Dad called it. Towards the end of his life, Dad was grinding the grains to put into his breads.

At my desk this morning it is very quiet. The sky is dark, the wind is strong and it is raining heavily, raining sideways. Reminding me to let myself down, down the rabbit hole to see what adventures await my brave young protagonists.

Paper Avatars

Before the vast array of video games and Farmvilles that people spend their time on today, there were paper dolls. As you can see in the photograph (probably posed, as these girls are wearing their school dresses), kids in the 1950’s, if they didn’t have anything else, had plenty of paper, pencils, colored pencils and crayons. Kids could trace anything they wanted by taping a page to the window, putting a sheet of paper over it and tracing the outlines of what you wanted to make a copy. The copy could then have a different color of hair, a different smile, whatever you liked. And most especially, new dresses!

Of course you could play house with even less, using hollyhock flowers stuck with toothpicks to make dolls with long dresses, or piles of leaves raked into “houses” which resembled house plans out of the magazines. “This is the door, and here is the bedroom, and this is the kitchen,” one child explains to another. And it is absolutely so.

Imagination runs rife in kids. If you were the Brontes, stuck in a gloomy manse with paper and pencil on the moors of England in the 1820’s after the deaths of two older sisters, you might write dark romances about people in imaginary kingdoms. If you are the kids in the photograph, enduring long North Dakota winters with books, magazines, and the Sears catalog coming to your post office box, you have plenty to feed your thoughts, in the optimism of the post-war period. Plenty of ideas about what people should look like and how to make poodle skirts and princess dresses for your paper dolls.

Every kid imagines what his future will be like, basing it on the stories of the people he sees around him. And every kid makes up stories about himself. [I use the masculine English pronouns to stand for humans, as we all are.] I suspect growing up in a high-rise apartment, as kids all over the world now do, must give rise to a need for avatars as strong as those of kids in isolated towns once did. The stories of celebrities, sports figures, musicians and actors fill our kids’ heads these days. With luck and parental help, they have room for the stories they make up themselves, for their own stories.

19th Century Schoolhouse

From first through sixth grade I attended school in this schoolhouse. Occupying a full block, with playground in front, softball diamond in back and ringed in cottonwoods, the school was a focal point of its tiny North Dakota town. The basement had a big furnace in it and a hot lunch room. We played marbles around the furnace and one of my teachers loved square dancing so much, she gave up teaching us in favor of taking us down to the furnace room, where we learned “Put Your Little Foot,” “Take a Little Peek,” and the “Virginia Reel” to 78 records.

On the first floor were four large rooms, two grades to a room, and upstairs, in one large room was the high school. There were usually about ten kids in my class, not so many kids in high school, probably 30-40 at the most. What is hard to believe though, was that all of us, all ages, sometimes played together. The high school kids probably instigated these games of Red Rover, Pom Pom Pullaway, or Tackle Tag. This would be in the middle of winter, kids in their snow clothes flailing about on the ice-covered yard in front of the school. On February 22, the year I was nine, I wrote in my diary, “We had an awful lot of fun at recess. The boys kept us down.”

It was a pretty homogenous, egalitarian bunch, of course, all of us of northern European origins. Most of the farm kids looked a little more poverty-stricken, and definitely worked harder than the town kids. Kids looked after each other. It would have been considered unsporting for a bigger kid to pick on a little kid. Perhaps there was also that Northern need for people to pull together against the often serious threats from the weather, especially in a sparsely populated place.

The cultural net of family, church, small town and this school nourished and encouraged my small budding self, leaving me without much fear and a great desire to take on the world. Our Dick and Jane readers portrayed a suburban world of newspapers being delivered and Father coming home after a day at the office. It was not what I saw around me. Our world was no less worthy of being in books. I have wanted ever since to celebrate it.