Hanging Out

A favorite pasttime in my neighborhood was "hanging out". This meant being anywhere with nothing to do. We would hang out at the gas station and giggle over the mechanic's cute butt. We would hang out on a porch and stare at the bus people. We would hang out at the used car lot and pretend to be bus people ourselves, but the best place I ever found to hang out was a house that was being renovated. Whoever was fixing the place up never locked the door, so at 3 in the afternoon, I'd meet my "boyfriend" there and we'd sit and talk about growing up. I was maybe 10 years old, so we never kissed or held hands, we would just talk.

It was so wonderful to sit on a new hardwood floor, surrounded by sawdust and fresh plaster, talking about things you could never say outside in the real world. We'd say things like, "When I grow up, I want to go to college and be a -insert white collar job here-." I used my boyfriend to work out an entire business plan, that would culminate in me owning a horse ranch. He used me to work out a plausible way to get a scholarship and become a doctor.

Let me explain why we couldn't express those kinds of dreams outside of our safe house, and why a scholarship was every child's hope.
Poor people don't get student loans. Period. (yes, I know this is a falsehood, and I dare you to walk into any inner city neighborhood and ask a kid how you get to college.) Any suggestion of college within hearing range of an adult always yeilded the same results-
Me: "I'm smart, and I'm going to college!"
Adult: "Really? How do you plan on getting there?"
Like it's some far off country surrounded by man eating wildebeasts, not some achievable goal
Me: "Well..."
Adult: "Because let me tell you something, little missy, We don't go to college."
Me: "But"
Adult: "College is for people with money. Do you have money? Do you have the kind of money it takes? You think you can just get a loan? Like for a car? Well you Can't! Give it up kiddo, it ain't gonna happen. Ain't nobody in his right mind gonna give you any cash to go to college, no matter how smart you think you are. You ain't good enough, you got nothin' they want, and they ain't gonna invest in you."

If I was lucky, the adult in question had vented enough, and would shut up. If I was unlucky, they would keep going until I would finally cry. I hated crying in front of adults, especially because tears would usually bring a look of contrition to their face and they'd say, "Well, you might get a scholarship. But you're white, so don't count on it."

My mother never ranted at us that way. When we brought up college to her, she would sigh and say, "Well, we'll just have to work extra hard on getting you a scholarship. You can do it, you're both smart. God blessed you with a good head on your shoulders, it's up to you to use it."
Sometimes we'd have to hear about how she gave up her scholarship so she could get a job, and help put her brothers and sisters through school. Sometimes she'd talk about how when dad left, he took our college money. That one always gave me an empty pain in my chest.

Once upon a time, I had a dad and a house, and my own back yard where we grew vegetables. I was 5. We would get a dollar a week for the chores we did, and half would go into our college fund. We'd go to the bank and put 2 quarters every week into a book with a chipmunk on it, and mom would match it. We also put away half of any other money we received. This meant birthdays, Christmas, Easter and the kindness of strangers sent us to the bank to stash some cash for college.
In the 2 and a half years we lived there, we put away better than $700. When dad left, he emptied our college fund. I didn't know about it until I told mom to take some of my college money to pay the bills. That's when she told me we didn't have a penny for schooling, because our bastard father had taken it all. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomache. All that money... all that saving instead of buying toys or candy... gone? I didn't want to believe her. Gone??
What kind of person takes college money? What kind of person thinks it's ok to steal a child's hope for her future? I spent days wandering around feeling cheated, for once seeing the world as an ugly place where nothing is safe. It was just... gone. Poof! Sorry, start over. What the hell?

How do you resolve "your dad just couldn't handle the responsability" with "he took everything"? There is no resolution, you just have to suck it up and move on, which is what I did.

A few years later, when mom broached the idea of filing for divorce, my sister and I said in unison, "Good. It's about time."

We did both eventually go to college. I went for art, and J became a physician's assistant. (the kind of PA that requires residencies, not the thing you can earn at a tech school.) She got student loans and a scholarship, I paid out of pocket and took only the classes I wanted. I'm terribly proud of my sister.

Charity Work

During the early years of living on California Avenue, it seemed that every month we went to the St. Vincent De Paul Society. They would give us food and toilet paper. They would also give Mom a check to help pay the bills. She hated asking for help. It was just one of those odd parts of life for us. Every Sunday we'd drop a dollar into the Vincent De Paul poor box, then once a month we'd go ask them for food and money. I know that my Mom's hope was that she wouldn't have to ask, and our meager offering was her way of trying to pay them back. To this day I still drop whatever spare cash I have into any charity box I come across.
Those wonderful men at Vincent De Paul never judged us, they never looked down on us, they just helped.
A few years later, the De Guire family opened Hosea House and started giving away clothing to the neighborhood kids. It started off in their home, but it quickly moved to the nearby church. St. Francis De Sales had a highschool on their grounds. The highschool had long since closed, so they turned it into Hosea House. You could go to them for food, toiletries and assistance with your bills.
I remember the winter they were selling shoes for dirt cheap. It was late in the day when we got there, so the shoes had been pretty thoroughly picked over. We each had fifty cents to buy shoes with, but nothing really fit. Mom spotted some boxes with our sizes marked on them. Size 8 for me, size 7 for J... perfect! She pulled down the boxes and said, "Oh, these are heavy," so we resigned ourselves to wearing hiking boots to school. She opened the top box and inside were a brand new pair of snow white ice skates. The other box held new skates too. I held my breath, wishing that I could have those beautiful skates. I wanted them so badly, and I was so very afraid to ask.
We used to take several busses to get to Stienberg rink in Forest Park, just to go skating. Ice skating was one of my freedoms. I'd go around and around the edge, trying to gain the confidence to do a spin. I never got up the courage to try a jump, so I settled on speed skating. I used to do my best to keep up with the men in their fancy snow suits, whizzing around the track on their razor blade skates. I got to where I could go just as fast, but not for very long. I'd close my eyes and think about going to the olympics and maybe, just maybe, bringing home some money for my family.
They were asking a dollar for the skates. We had fifty cents each. Our mom looked at the skates and sighed, then she put back the work shoes she had found and gave us each a quarter. She said, "It's fate that these were here in your sizes. It's late, ask them if they'll take 75 cents." I argued with my mom and told her she needed shoes, I did not need ice skates.
I was putting them back when a woman who worked there came over and said magic words, "It's after 5, everything is free."
I swear, I floated home. Heh, I never did go to the Olympics, but I got a chance to dream.

Oddly enough, that wasn't the story I was going to tell. Here's that story...
In 1982 we got hit with a blizzard of immense proportions. The California bus ran that morning, but mom had to hitch a ride home, because the busses couldn't make it through the snow. She had told us, "There's a big snow storm comming, so run to Hosea House and get some food for Mrs. P, you know she needs it, and she can't get out in this weather." We saw Mrs. P in the spring and fall, the rest of the time she laid in bed. It was always too hot or too cold for her, and we had gone with Mom to bring her food before. We had never gone alone, though. We fretted about what we would do if they didn't believe us, but mom had asked, so we had to go.
We got out the sled and bundled up... and walked out the door into a wall of white. I don't really remember how we made the 3 block walk to Hosea House. I remember seeing a guy on skis, and I remember being so cold my knees didn't want to bend. The sled kept getting bogged down in the snow, and we would stop to clear it, then lift it atop the snow again. It would be all covered again in 5 minutes, but we kept trying, and eventually we made it to Hosea House.
Ah, the blessed warmth that awaited us! We were greeted cheerfully. Mom had called from work, and they were expecting us. They let us sit and dry our mittens while they loaded our sled with food. I was almost warm by the time they were done.
The snow wasn't nearly as heavy on the way home, but the sled sure was. It kept tipping to one side and spilling the boxes, so one of us would pull, while the other walked alongside and kept the sled steady. We took turns all the way to Mrs. P's apartment, then we carried the boxes to her door and knocked. When she opened the door and saw 2 little girls between a mountain of food, she cried -and it made the whole trip worthwhile.
I understand now that Mrs. P was a very sick old lady, with chronic pain and a lot of depression. I know now that she was all alone in the world, and the blizzard had terrified her. But all I could think at the time was, "Please God, don't make me have to carry this stuff to her kitchen, I can't fit the boxes through."
She was a serious pack rat, and there were little 6 inch pathways through her heaping stacks of old clothes and older newspapers. Her house always scared me a little. I was always afraid something would move, and I'd have to face down the biggest cockroach in the world. Or worse yet- be covered in lots of little roaches. Ew.
We did not have to carry the food to the kitchen. She had set up a hot plate on the windowsill, so we made some room near her bed and left the boxes of food there. She tried to pay us, but we wouldn't take it. We knew she didn't work, and in our world work=money. If someone didn't have a job, you never, never take money from them. We told her thank you for the offer, but our mom had asked us to do this, and her smile was reward enough, thank you.

Eating

If you haven't guessed from previous writings here, we were poor. We were not destitute, we were the kind of poor where you make $100 a year too much, so you can't get food stamps or AFDC. Practically every meal was home cooked, and dinner fell into 3 basic categories- 1/2 lb hamburger with noodles, Rice a Roni stuffed into green peppers, and Totino's party pizza. We had Totino's once a week. We could buy 2 pizzas for a dollar, and we would each get 2/3's of a pizza. Mom always picked the smallest, plainest slices. She would carefully pick the pepperoni cubes off of her slices, and make 2 equal piles for us. There were quite a few nights where she would say she wasn't hungry, and she wouldn't eat at all. We would try really hard on those nights to not be hungry also, so that she could have some left over. We would eat very slowly, and exclaim loudly about how good it was. We'd ask her over and over, "Are you sure you're not hungry?" Then the plates would be clean, and there was no food left for mom.

As we got older, and roamed farther from home, we learned ways to fill our bellies before dinner time. The walk to the grocery store took us past a mulberry tree, so we would stop stuff our mouths with berries -run to the store -run back to the tree, and stuff ourselves again. In a pinch, grass makes a good filler. Yes, I ate grass. I ate bark and leaves and orange peels too. A little bit of bitter goes a long way toward supressing an appetite.
During summer vacation, we could always bum some crackers off our friends. We learned how to make Halloween candy last 'til Christmas. Christmas candy can stretch to Valentine's Day, and those chalk-like conversation hearts could float us through Easter.

Where did her $120 a week go, you ask? Well, taxes knocks it down to about $95. There were bills and rent to pay, and our tuition for Catholic School was almost two thousand dollars. (mom got a grant to help pay for it) Plus, there were foods my Mom refused to do without. We always had milk, provided we drank no more than 3 cups a day. We always had whatever fruit was in season. We had meat 4 times a week -if you count those pepperoni cubes on the Totino's pizzas, and once a month or so, Mom would buy cheese. So, we weren't starving, by any means. We were just very hungry.