The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(6)
Our capability of memory storage is even worse when it comes to our mundane day-to-day lives. How much do you really remember from your childhood? You might know the names of all your teachers, first grade through high school, maybe. You wouldn’t be able to recall when you learned what in school, though. You’ll certainly remember who your good friends were, the kids you hung out with. Some of the toys or games you played with. Perhaps you’ll recall seeing a favorite movie with someone special. That’s the key to memories. Events in your life have to make a personal impression in order to be stored in the archives of your mind.
That’s why we often have no problem recollecting significant trauma. A sickness, an accident or, God forbid, violent incident. I can always evoke an image of me with chicken pox back when I was four or five—I’m looking into a mirror at the spots on my face and I start to cry. Fortunately, that’s it; that’s my single, entire memory of having chicken pox. Thank goodness we don’t relive the physical pain of an ordeal—we only remember that we were in pain.
My recollections of growing up on Chicory Lane in Limite, Texas, are sketchy at best. My high school years—tenth through twelfth grade—I remember the clearest; after all, that’s when I was almost an adult. I was much more aware, my brain operating like a receptacle for knowledge. I stayed active in high school—I was involved in the Drama Department, acted in plays, dated boys, was on the student council—so there are plenty of wonderful flashes of remembrances from those years. Memories of junior high school—seventh through ninth grade—are more elusive. It was an unhappy, awkward, and confusing time of my life, as I’m sure it is for a lot of other girls. I certainly didn’t feel particularly pretty then.
And before that, there was the “prehistoric era”—the first through sixth grades of elementary school. In Limite, kids usually started first grade at age seven and left elementary school at age twelve or thirteen. These are very important years in our lives, yet we barely remember them, am I right? Only glimmers of events, a handful of snapshots, or brief video clips in our brains.
Limite—pronounced “la-meet,” although the correct Spanish pronunciation would have been “la-meet-tay”—sits at the bottom of the Panhandle in West Texas, within an hour’s drive of the New Mexico border, with a population of about sixty-five thousand back in the 1960s. Sort of a big small town. We had two high schools that were ferocious rivals, three indoor movie theaters, two drive-ins, a bowling alley, and lots of Friday night football. The economy was built around oil, cattle, and high school sports. The oil fields surrounded Limite for miles. Oil derricks and pumpjacks dotted the flat, desert-like landscape. The old-fashioned downtown with shops and department stores was already dying even in the sixties, and was later replaced by a new mall in the early seventies. It was an old segregated city—the African Americans lived on the south side of the tracks in near-poverty, with some exceptions, of course, including the four black students who attended my high school when I was there. There was probably a larger mix later, but “colored town,” as that neighborhood was called when I was growing up, was still present in the nineties. Some folks, I’m sorry to say, called it by a far worse epithet I would not like to mention.
And then there were the churches. Dozens of them. There are even more now. All denominations, but only one Catholic church at that time, and, remarkably, one synagogue. Certainly no mosques. Not in West Texas.
One could say that Limite was a few years behind the big cities such as Dallas or Houston. When I was born in 1954, I’m sure the people of Limite felt as if they were just entering the decade of the fifties. The late sixties were still the early sixties. When I turned twelve years old in 1966, Limite still hadn’t totally embraced the explosion of artistic, political, and cultural expression that defined the latter half of that decade. We had Top 40 radio, so we were well aware of rock and the Beatles and all that. Three networks—NBC, ABC, and CBS—were the only available channels on television.
Chicory Lane was a fairly new development on the east side of Limite. The houses on the block had been built in the fifties. Being situated in the desert, there wasn’t a lot of vegetation. Chicory Lane had trees, which weren’t particularly pretty. Whenever I went back to visit as an adult, I was always struck by how drab and brown the neighborhood appeared, as if it had been slowly baked by the bright, hot sun for years—and it had! Our street held thirteen houses on each side, brownish-red brick ranch houses with three bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen and dining room, and a “front room,” with a picture window that faced the street and where our piano stood. We moved there in 1960, when I was five or six, from nearby Prescott, where I was born. I was the only child at the time, but I imagine my parents were planning on another one since they had bought a house with three bedrooms. Michael didn’t arrive until six years later. In the meantime, Mom used the third bedroom as a sewing room until it became a nursery.
I can count the snippets of memories of my earliest years, prior to grade school, on two hands. Mere snaps of images that flit through the brain. Walking with and holding my father’s hand at the rodeo. Making cookies with my mom. The kids on the block. Sally, the girl who lived up the street and who was my best friend when I was really little; Sally the redhead who had freckles, millions of them, which contributed to her nickname, “Freckles.” It’s funny; that’s about the only thing I remember about her. We grew apart in junior high. Greg and Dean, two older boys who lived on the street, and their pal Joey, who resided a block over. Greg and Dean, who lived next door to each other, may as well have been joined at the hip. They were always in the neighborhood throwing balls. I didn’t like them much; they acted like bullies most of the time. There were others, but I really don’t remember their names or much about them.