Jane Yolen and the map of my childhood
I'll put it behind a cut as I fear it's long
I took the airport freeway up into LA for my meeting with Jane Yolen, dumping off onto Sepulveda, my teenage prowling grounds. I cut over Lincoln to get to the Marina the back way as huge planes lumbered overhead taking off and landing to and from LAX. The north runway was built when I lived just off Lincoln, supposedly to be an “overflow” runway but of course they began using it right away, and I spent my teen years with planes roaring overhead every three minutes, rattling the walls and windows, taking off and landing a scarce half a mile from my house. As I drove up Lincoln I glanced down my old street and saw it all blocked off, grass growing there; the airport threw everyone out in the early seventies, but by then my parents had split up and my sister lived there with some friends, letting the house fall apart. My brother and I made the mistake of going back once a few years later, and the houses were either gone or else vandalized, except for the few holdouts who fought the airport in the courts-and lost, of course. Spooky.
Then down to the Marina, and the Ritz Carlton, so fauncy the sign is about four inches tall and I drove right past and had to circle back. It might have been there in my day for all I know-way above our touch. In, and there was Jane Yolen, looking great. She treated me to a sumptuous tea, which included scones and Devonshire cream and all kinds of lovely little sandwiches. I brought my own tea (no one makes it with distilled water, or has anything like my Sword of the Dragon white, brewed in red Chinese clay) but enjoyed the repast as we talked over our SFWA YA committee biz, interspersing our discussions, decisions, and plans with talk ranging over books, people, publishing, and families. Poignant interruptions occurred when her SCBWI colleagues arrived, each of them grim with the news about Paula Danziger having suffered a massive heart attack day before yesterday, and having undergone considerable surgery yesterday.
An hour later, it was time to go. It being LA, my hour cost me ten bucks for parking. I was not about to get on the freeway, not at five. So I drove up the hill through my old neighborhood, which was jolting for how much it had changed--and how much it hadn't. I didn't always remember the street names, but I knew the way. I drove down my old block, the house looking the same shape, though changed superficially, with kitchy sixties décor (gold-tinted nubble glass in the front window, bruise-red walls next to fake rock insets instead of the ugly pink we’d left behind-my parents contracted for chocolate but got pink, and there was no recourse in those days-and the plate glass window). Some of the block were still 1948 boxes, others had been redone in the sixties, seventies, eighties, a curiously cheerful mismatch that I found intriguing.
Down the back road to the school, and there was the curve where my brother was run over by a car on March 4, 1959 as he sped across the street without looking. Wanted to catch the passing bakery truck to wheedle any stale pastries out of the kindly older man named Ted who drove that truck. We had the nickel for a donut maybe twice a year.
My old grammar school was still open, so I parked and walked in. Oh my. It had fences between the buildings I remembered so well, and bungalows added on the opposite side of the WW II bungalows we had had added. The auditorium was the same, and there was the backstage I hid in my kindergarten year, when they marched all the kids in the school down to the bungalows to get polio shots, one arm, then the other, then the first, most of the older kids crying. I’d known something was wrong when they sent home that yellow paper, on which I could only read some of the words. And of course the adults all lied when I asked what it was about, and either said “nothing” or threatened us, as usual. So when my class marched down and I saw all those older kids crying, a couple of them bleeding slightly, that was it. I took off and hid. The principal was the only one with enough authority to get me to come out of my hiding place when they started searching the school. The only reason I didn’t get the belt when I got home was because my mother had secretly signed the form; my dad was Christian Scientist, and adamantly against shots. So she didn’t tell him about my trouble at school.
The office was the same--except for a computer and copy machine-and there was the principal’s office, just the same, a tiny room. I didn’t ask if I could see it, and the little bitty closet the older kids had sworn had a spanking machine. I remember so well sitting there in first grade, after I changed my report card and lied like a rug about it until that same principal (Mrs. Kelly, an older woman, tiny, firm-spoken, but kind) patiently got me to admit to the truth and then I fell to pieces because I knew she’d put me on the spanking machine. I was sobbing too hard to speak but when she finally understood what I was afraid of, she marched the few steps to that closet and opened it, and there was a coat, a folded umbrella, and a pair of galoshes. I can still see them all, though that was what, 1956? 57?
Outside the office, the little square lawn, and the fir tree that was maybe 25 feet tall in my day, every December decorated with our hand-made holiday ornaments along the lower branches. Now it is a huge gnarled tree reaching up maybe 100 feet, after forty years of steady sprinkler-watering.
The playground had a single baseball diamond of grass amid the vast swath of blacktop. How I recall that blacktop, so sticky when the temperature was over 100, and how our chests hurt like a baseball was inside if you tried to draw a deep breath, the smog was so bad. But we had to play in that endless glaring sun and haze, no green in sight, because blacktop was clean and modern, instead of nasty, messy grass and trees.
Down the halls where I run so often in my dreams. I met a teacher coming out of my sixth grade classroom, and asked her if I could go in a moment. She let me, and I was astounded: it was just as I remembered, bar only the kid art on the walls. My sixth grade teacher hadn't let art go up--she was a grim woman, the scariest teacher in the school. The young teacher said the room has a bad atmosphere and I said, probably the years my teacher ruled there...I described her a bit--always wore purple, and her only jewelry a snake bracelet and ring. I remember thinking that every time she yelled at us (well, scolded us, she never yelled. She'd snap words and then this cold, venomous whisper) the snake's mouth would open a little wider on the ring.
That school, that neighborhood, form the basic landscape of my dreams. Despite new buildings here and there, and the remaining trees having grown so much taller, I kept recognizing intersections and hills and curves that have distorted into dreamscapes. Time is a crueler weapon than any we use on one another, because no one escapes. But as long as I can dream, I will flit over that landscape--sometimes running, sometimes flying--forever young.
I took the airport freeway up into LA for my meeting with Jane Yolen, dumping off onto Sepulveda, my teenage prowling grounds. I cut over Lincoln to get to the Marina the back way as huge planes lumbered overhead taking off and landing to and from LAX. The north runway was built when I lived just off Lincoln, supposedly to be an “overflow” runway but of course they began using it right away, and I spent my teen years with planes roaring overhead every three minutes, rattling the walls and windows, taking off and landing a scarce half a mile from my house. As I drove up Lincoln I glanced down my old street and saw it all blocked off, grass growing there; the airport threw everyone out in the early seventies, but by then my parents had split up and my sister lived there with some friends, letting the house fall apart. My brother and I made the mistake of going back once a few years later, and the houses were either gone or else vandalized, except for the few holdouts who fought the airport in the courts-and lost, of course. Spooky.
Then down to the Marina, and the Ritz Carlton, so fauncy the sign is about four inches tall and I drove right past and had to circle back. It might have been there in my day for all I know-way above our touch. In, and there was Jane Yolen, looking great. She treated me to a sumptuous tea, which included scones and Devonshire cream and all kinds of lovely little sandwiches. I brought my own tea (no one makes it with distilled water, or has anything like my Sword of the Dragon white, brewed in red Chinese clay) but enjoyed the repast as we talked over our SFWA YA committee biz, interspersing our discussions, decisions, and plans with talk ranging over books, people, publishing, and families. Poignant interruptions occurred when her SCBWI colleagues arrived, each of them grim with the news about Paula Danziger having suffered a massive heart attack day before yesterday, and having undergone considerable surgery yesterday.
An hour later, it was time to go. It being LA, my hour cost me ten bucks for parking. I was not about to get on the freeway, not at five. So I drove up the hill through my old neighborhood, which was jolting for how much it had changed--and how much it hadn't. I didn't always remember the street names, but I knew the way. I drove down my old block, the house looking the same shape, though changed superficially, with kitchy sixties décor (gold-tinted nubble glass in the front window, bruise-red walls next to fake rock insets instead of the ugly pink we’d left behind-my parents contracted for chocolate but got pink, and there was no recourse in those days-and the plate glass window). Some of the block were still 1948 boxes, others had been redone in the sixties, seventies, eighties, a curiously cheerful mismatch that I found intriguing.
Down the back road to the school, and there was the curve where my brother was run over by a car on March 4, 1959 as he sped across the street without looking. Wanted to catch the passing bakery truck to wheedle any stale pastries out of the kindly older man named Ted who drove that truck. We had the nickel for a donut maybe twice a year.
My old grammar school was still open, so I parked and walked in. Oh my. It had fences between the buildings I remembered so well, and bungalows added on the opposite side of the WW II bungalows we had had added. The auditorium was the same, and there was the backstage I hid in my kindergarten year, when they marched all the kids in the school down to the bungalows to get polio shots, one arm, then the other, then the first, most of the older kids crying. I’d known something was wrong when they sent home that yellow paper, on which I could only read some of the words. And of course the adults all lied when I asked what it was about, and either said “nothing” or threatened us, as usual. So when my class marched down and I saw all those older kids crying, a couple of them bleeding slightly, that was it. I took off and hid. The principal was the only one with enough authority to get me to come out of my hiding place when they started searching the school. The only reason I didn’t get the belt when I got home was because my mother had secretly signed the form; my dad was Christian Scientist, and adamantly against shots. So she didn’t tell him about my trouble at school.
The office was the same--except for a computer and copy machine-and there was the principal’s office, just the same, a tiny room. I didn’t ask if I could see it, and the little bitty closet the older kids had sworn had a spanking machine. I remember so well sitting there in first grade, after I changed my report card and lied like a rug about it until that same principal (Mrs. Kelly, an older woman, tiny, firm-spoken, but kind) patiently got me to admit to the truth and then I fell to pieces because I knew she’d put me on the spanking machine. I was sobbing too hard to speak but when she finally understood what I was afraid of, she marched the few steps to that closet and opened it, and there was a coat, a folded umbrella, and a pair of galoshes. I can still see them all, though that was what, 1956? 57?
Outside the office, the little square lawn, and the fir tree that was maybe 25 feet tall in my day, every December decorated with our hand-made holiday ornaments along the lower branches. Now it is a huge gnarled tree reaching up maybe 100 feet, after forty years of steady sprinkler-watering.
The playground had a single baseball diamond of grass amid the vast swath of blacktop. How I recall that blacktop, so sticky when the temperature was over 100, and how our chests hurt like a baseball was inside if you tried to draw a deep breath, the smog was so bad. But we had to play in that endless glaring sun and haze, no green in sight, because blacktop was clean and modern, instead of nasty, messy grass and trees.
Down the halls where I run so often in my dreams. I met a teacher coming out of my sixth grade classroom, and asked her if I could go in a moment. She let me, and I was astounded: it was just as I remembered, bar only the kid art on the walls. My sixth grade teacher hadn't let art go up--she was a grim woman, the scariest teacher in the school. The young teacher said the room has a bad atmosphere and I said, probably the years my teacher ruled there...I described her a bit--always wore purple, and her only jewelry a snake bracelet and ring. I remember thinking that every time she yelled at us (well, scolded us, she never yelled. She'd snap words and then this cold, venomous whisper) the snake's mouth would open a little wider on the ring.
That school, that neighborhood, form the basic landscape of my dreams. Despite new buildings here and there, and the remaining trees having grown so much taller, I kept recognizing intersections and hills and curves that have distorted into dreamscapes. Time is a crueler weapon than any we use on one another, because no one escapes. But as long as I can dream, I will flit over that landscape--sometimes running, sometimes flying--forever young.