DUOFILIA

Part I and II

I have a rich Seventh-day Adventist heritage. Yes, we’re the oddities that observe Saturday instead of Sunday. My great-grandfather was a conference president for many regions (Arizona, Nevada, Jamaica) and for many years. He’d be the main speaker at the old-fashioned camp meetings and his wife, my great-grandmother, had a lovely voice and sang solos and led the hymns. Like many preachers he neglected his home-mission to focus on his evangelistic-mission and as a result all of his children grew up to be agnostics, except for one son, my grandfather, who is atheistic.

Somehow, despite my father’s extremely unloving upbringing, or perhaps because of it, he began to search for deeper meaning. He started listening to his grandparents preach and soon after he married my mother, they were baptized into the SDA church.

Like every demonimation, the SDAs have their own peculiar set of traditions and cultures. One of them is to send one’s kids to academy for their high school years, and many of the academies are boarding schools. The conference SDA church has massive worldwide educational and health systems, second only, I believe, to the Catholic’s systems. One could send their child to the academy in your own town, or you could send him to one in India if you wanted. At some point in middle school, every SDA kid is asked, “Where do you want to go to academy?”

I went to a SDA school from 1st to 7th grade. For 8th grade I lived with my now grown sister for about six months and went to a one-room school house. That was a psychotic experience to unbelievable to write about, so I won’t. I returned to my old school for 9th grade and faced the question, “where do you want to go to academy?”

Public school was never in consideration. It pretty much didn’t exist for us. All of my friends were Adventists and the few neighbor friends I’d had that weren’t were so different from what I was used to that I couldn’t fathom going to a school with them. I wasn’t raised to feel like I was better than anyone, so I didn’t think that. But the kids outside my regular circle were vastly different than me. Often equally nice, but they tended to be much more sophisticated, meaning they knew more about the world than I did. I’m not talking about world events or cultures, but the stuff they didn’t teach in schools, like sex, for instance. We knew about sex, but they had the Cosmopolitan version, with details. They also wanted to party. Oh, so did we, but our version had adult supervision, sherbet punch and Uno. Theirs were considerably different. In my twenties I attended parties, but I’ve had to get the adolescent version explained to me by my husband David (he was one of them). While I know it is typical for most kids, it still blows my mind that his parents didn’t know, or appear to care, where he was just as long as he was back by the set curfew time. I can’t tell how foreign that was to me as a teenager. While I had my rebellious phases I never felt smothered by them.

I wanted to go to Auburn Adventist Academy in Washington. Mainly because it seemed far away, but not too far away, and I had friends who were going to go there. My parents disagreed, as parents will. AAA was too expensive, and getting too rowdy, or so they heard (I think they heard right). Some friend had told them about “self-supporting” Adventist schools. These schools were not run by the Conference so were smaller, cheaper, and supposedly more godly. I believe that some are. Ahem. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So AAA was out and “self-supporting” was in, much to my great dismay. I waited for my parents to find the one they wanted and fill me in. California? Canada? Right.

(Part I)

After living in various places in California and Oregon we finally settled in Beaverton, Oregon, which was at that time a smallish suburb with rural areas of mostly hazelnut and apple orchards. It is ironic that although I now live an hour away, I work in Beaverton, which is now an overpopulated city (home of Nike!) with clotted freeways and photo-radar intersections. I drive by my old house occasionally to make sure they haven’t cut down the grape vine in the backyard. So far so good. Although they did cut down the apple tree upon which my dad grafted pears. Fascists.

The old house was pea-green and had two small bedrooms and one bathroom with a deep tub but no shower. The area under the kitchen sink was covered with curtains and it was where we kept the bucket for kitchen scraps which would eventually be put in the compost pile outside for our perennial vegetable garden. I shared my room with my obnoxious sister (I like you much better now, Mia, but at the time you were a huge pain, unlike me who was nearly angelic. Stop choking.) who is six years older than me. There were built in drawers in the room and if you opened them you couldn’t open the bedroom door. Which was how my sister locked me out of out room on a regular basis while she chatted with friends about Leif Garrett and Scott Baio. I retaliated by following her and her friends around as much as I could and asking obnoxious questions and steal her Bonne Bell lip gloss.

Our neighbor and landlord lived next door on a corner lot. He had a huge Queen Anne cherry tree and we’d climb high into its branches, eat cherries, and drop the pits onto cars passing below. On the other side of our house was the neighbor where I practiced piano before I had my own. She was old and her house smelled like old things but was extremely fascinating to me and I liked to explore it since it was much bigger than ours. Like my mom, our neighbor had a pantry with rows and rows of sparkling Kerr jars of tomatoes, peaches, applesauce. We made grape juice every year from our grape vines, dried fruit from our fig tree in the dehydrator and canned tomatoes from the garden. Every house I’ve owned as an adult I’ve had a vegetable garden and we plant trees. Currently we have apples, plums, figs, peaches, nectarines, pawpaws and olives. Trees are a very important part of my life. Must have trees!

I played by myself most of the time. I was mostly a Hot Wheels car girl and made roads in the dirt. I had a few dolls, but had the most fun with homemade paper dolls and the Dandelion Ladies (see instructions in my previous post) that Mia taught me how to make. Childhood seemed to last a lifetime, which was sometimes good and sometimes not. But elementary and junior high ended, as did life at the old house.

There were worms on the tips of every cob of corn. Ten minutes after my parents drove away, I was assigned the task of husking corn. I stood outside where tables had been set up in a row so that workers could prepare the corn for freezing. There was a large bin of fresh corn on my right and I grabbed a cob and peeled back the husks to expose the plump yellow kernels. But the very tips were underdeveloped and the home of plump green worms. I had the choice of chopping off the tips with a large knife, machete-style, or thwacking the tips on the corner of the table. I then passed the peeled, de-tipped and de-wormed cob to the girl on my left whose job was to slice the kernels off the cob. She looked at me, friendly, smiling with crooked teeth, hands slimy with corn. She wore a blouse, a long denim skirt, and her sneakers were brown with dirt. I didn’t know her and couldn’t quite smile back.

Peel, thwack, peel, thwack. My wussy girl hands, used of scholarly pursuits such as reading and writing, became red and sore. I knew no one around me. Even the geography was foreign – dust, alfalfa, sage brush, and tumble weeds – it was if I had fallen off a plane over an alien planet. How did this happen?

——

I was born in Medford, Oregon, home of the llama tours, joining my family that consisted of Mom, Dad and sister Mia who is almost six years older and viewed me with suspicion. About a year later we moved to Costa Rica, my mother’s homeland. Dad attended the university for a degree in theology, Mom was working hard taking care of us girls, and I was busy eating anything I could get my fat little hands on. I started walking at seven months and was into toddler exploration, the extreme version. There wasn’t a crib from which I couldn’t escape. There wasn’t a closed door that resisted my advances, nor a kitchen cabinet I couldn’t scale.

One day, my grandfather walked in from a day working on the tropical ranch and removed his muddy shoes by the door. Intrigued by the caked mud, I hurried over. Apparently one brown morsel looked promising and so I did what any one year old would do (if they were me). I ate it. My mother rushed over to try to stop me, but she was dealing with Sherry the Extreme Baby. She couldn’t have pried the dirt out of my mouth with the Jaws of Life.

Tropical dirt is, naturally, chock full of microscopic life, most totally unknown in North America. Within 24 hours I developed a very high fever. I was taken to the hospital and many tests were run over the next few weeks, finally deciding I had a parasite. After a couple weeks my kidneys started shutting down, so my parents decided to take me back to the States where I finally recovered.

To be continued…