A Short Reflection on Life

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A Short Reflection on Life   By Christine Wichman c. July 2015

When I was nine years old, my single mom, or “Mommy” as I called her back then, bought her first house on an idyllic tree lined street with rows of white picket fences. I could walk two short blocks to my church. I say “My” church because I was the only one who actually went to church. Mommy told me she couldn’t go because she was divorced. I loved church because it was peaceful and pretty and most of my friends and the Nuns from school were there. I loved Nuns. I secretly wanted to be one. I walked my two short blocks singing to the birds and picking roses along the way. The best part about church was when it was over, we could all meet up in the rectory next door. They always had donuts and coffee. When no one was looking you could eat as many donuts as you wanted and dump extra scoops of sugar into the styrofoam cup. Yes I drank coffee when I was nine….church coffee, only on Sundays when no one was looking, and as mentioned, mostly sugar.

By the time I got back to Mommy’s house, I called it Mommy’s house, because my little sister and I were only there on weekends, the rest of the week Mommy was working long hours so we lived with Grandma and Grandpa on the other side of town. Well by the time I got back to the house everyone was just waking up. My little sister, Mommy, and her roommate, a twenty something hippie chic who looked like Cher, and did not really understand kids very well. I seem to remember an unfortunate incident where my sister’s arm was accidentally burned by her waving a cigarette around while she talked.  She was also quite upset when we would listen in on her phone conversations with her boyfriend. I guess our giggling gave us away…”Are you kids on the other line? Hang up!!” she would yell from her bedroom.. where we once accidentally walked in on her, only to discover she slept in nothing but a black satin eye mask. Weekends at Mommy’s house were always interesting. 

My sister and I would entertain ourselves all afternoon taking turns on the piano. I quit my lessons after two years, so most of it was badly improvised, while playing along to “Ballet Music” on the stereo. Whoever was not playing would attempt elaborate dance moves across the living room floor. When we were hungry we would toast ourselves an Eggo waffle or beg Mommy to take us to McDonalds. Shortly after Mommy bought the house, she got a puppy at a pet store on a whim. We went through a string of names, Pepsi? Sprite? Puppy? Finally settling on Jingles, which fit nicely until he grew to the size of a shepherd/collie/coyote mix, and then my Mother announced he would thereafter be called Jingo. Jingo was a lot of fun, something of a Houdini dog, escaping his backyard confines on a daily basis and famously walking the top of the fence like a cat. A year later Mommy got another puppy to keep Jingo company. He was a fluffy little Keeshound who looked like a clown, so we called him Bozo. 

Bozo and Jingo were fun to play with and show off around the neighborhood.  Sometimes we were allowed to have school friends sleep over on Friday nights. Mommy had a trundle bed for us in the spare room and the pop up bed from underneath would always collapse in the middle of the night scaring everyone, especially the person sleeping on it at the time, which was usually me. We were also the first kids on the block to own a video game. My future Step-Dad set us up with all kinds of state of the art computer type things, he’d procured at work. We’d invite the neighborhood kids over to watch the little “Pong” rectangle ricochet back and forth across a black and white screen for hours of endless fun.

By seventh grade my weekends at Mommy’s had evolved into a new past time. I still walked to church Sunday mornings, but my afternoons were spent twisted up pretzel style in an oversize wicker chair on the front porch with a rose scented breeze and a book. I had a new reading teacher, fresh from New York who was brave enough to assign banned or soon to be banned books. “The Catcher in the Rye”, “Go Ask Alice”, “A Separate Peace”, and plenty of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut novels. As an adolescent, Vonnegut made my life bearable. I loved to escape into books and later create my own stories and characters. My Mother always supported my passion for literature and writing, making sure she took me to meet all of my favorite authors when they were in town. Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut included. She even took me to meet Charles Shultz, when she noticed pages of Snoopy doodles in my notebooks. I remember her telling Ray Bradbury that I wanted to be a writer and he said. “Keep at it kid, there is room for us all.” I also remember Kurt Vonnegut imparting his wisdom on avoiding machines and robots at all costs, he was adamant about having human contact and human conversations on a daily basis, be it with the mailman or the bank teller, human interaction should be made a priority! I still try to adhere to that advice.

When I was fourteen my Mother eloped and moved out of that house on the tree lined street with the rows of white picket fences, where I could walk to church and drink sugary coffee. I started calling her Mom after that and began a different life, a high school life. My sister moved in with my Mom and Step Dad and I chose to stay with Grandma and Grandpa, we were still a family, just bigger and more extended now. I look back on those years between nine and fourteen, when life was a simple sunshine weekend with Church coffee, fluffy dogs and endless books. They were the best times I never knew I had. Life behind the white picket fence is never what it appears to be, but sometimes it’s something even better. 

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