My First Few Years

My family moved to the house we all grew up in when I was 2 years old. It was a big, brick 2-story colonial house in a quiet suburb northeast of Los Angeles. It cost my parents $25,000 to buy that house, a small fortune back then for a young family. Of course, they had no credit, and so the woman selling the house financed it for them. They settled on a monthly payment, and that's all it took. They never even set foot in a bank or loan office.

The neighborhood used to be all orange groves before houses were built, so almost every house on our block had at least one orange tree in the backyard. It was a street lined with maple trees in front of every house and young families. I loved that house. It had 3 bedrooms, a large den with hardwood floors, a long driveway and a huge backyard with orange, lemon, fig, peach and loquat trees.

When we first moved in it was just Mark, Cindy and myself, but my mom was getting ready to have my baby sister Teresa. My father hired a housekeeper, Helen, to help my mom out while she was pregnant. I don't really remember much of her except she was kind of stern, and very protective of me, by orders from my mother. Just in case I might "catch something" from the other kids. Because I was so isolated from my brother and sister, I was the "unknown", Mark and Cindy were always trying to get a peek, or sneak in when no one was looking. But Helen always shooed them out so they were left to play on their own, and I was pretty much left alone.

One day shortly after we moved in, my mother, who was still pregnant with Teresa, was upstairs napping. We still didn't have enough furniture to fill that big house, and there was lots of empty space that just begged to be used. Mark and Cindy wanted to play with me but Helen wasn't having any of that. She told them to go find something else to do. Suddenly there was the great rumbling sound of thunder coming from downstairs. Mark and Cindy had found the perfect roller rink on the hardwood floors in our big empty den and were skating circles around and around with metal skates strapped to their shoes. Shortly afterwords, those somewhat scarred and battered hardwood floors were covered with wall to wall carpeting.

I remember the day when my parents brought Teresa home from the hospital. She was born in mid December, and I guess the hospital thought it would be cute to send all the new babies home in a Christmas stocking. So when my mother walked through the door carrying a Christmas stocking, naturally I was pretty excited. But when she bent down to show me what was inside, I was confused. It looked like they sent home a baby monkey! Teresa was covered in thick, black hair...everywhere! I was sure somebody at that hospital place had made a terrible mistake, and we would need to return her for the right kind of baby! But she eventually lost the hair (at least the extra hair!) and she became the most extraordinarily beautiful child with big blue eyes, and jet black hair in ringlets. As she grew older, she came to look like Elizabeth Taylor.

We had a dog named Trixie that followed me everywhere, or maybe I followed her everywhere. I just remember always being around Trixie. When I rode my tricycle around the backyard, Trixie was there to get in the way so I couldn't go too far or too fast. I would crawl into big cardboard boxes to play, and Trixie would crawl in right after me. I was so little for my age, that she would dwarf me in that big box. She was a big Collie with beautiful long hair and a long, cold nose. And she was the only living creature I was allowed to play with for my first few years. Funny how my mother thought that the dog was somehow cleaner than my brother or sister.

I loved that dog. She was my best friend; my only friend for a while. But still not the same as having other kids to play with. Not the same as having a brother and sister. And I think it drove my mom crazy that I loved that dog so much. It took my attention away from her. A few years later, my mother told us that Trixie had run away. My mom and dad drove us all around the neighborhood in our station wagon "looking" for Trixie and calling out her name for hours. I found out a few years later from my next door neighbor that my mom called somebody and sold Trixie to him while we were out of the house one day. She sold my only friend.

Although I couldn't know it then, my first few years in isolation from my family was a foreshadow of the rest of my childhood.