Wait a Minute, World!

I was a quiet little girl. I had a little rocking chair and was always rocking and watching those around me through my eight-year-old eyes. Wasn’t looking for anything special because I didn’t know anything special to watch for. I didn’t know anything much about life, but I knew there must be something to it, or in it, because people were so busy doing something all the time.

People were still new to me, almost everything they did seemed to be interesting if only for a short while.

I had a brother so I played a lot of boy games with him. He played hard, so I knew how to fight and wrestle a little. I could also throw a football, not real good but I could hold and throw it right. But my favorite thing was dreaming, reading, and watching people.

My daddy didn’t like to work for other people, white people. He was from the South. He had worked on a car lot there, and one day his boss asked him to take and park a car. He drove to California where he had a married sister who had been urging him to come there. That’s how I came to be born in California.

He repaired cars in our huge backyard. He separated metals making piles, one from the other, and took them to a metal junkyard to sell. I never do remember him being broke.

We always had plenty food to eat, because he loved food. My mama did too, and she could really cook. We had a big ole round wood table in the kitchen and everybody sat at every meal. You had to eat when everybody else did just to be sure you got some food.

Anyways, that was a piece of how I grew up.

We had two neighbors I watched. In Berkeley, a long time ago, you could live anywhere you had the money to buy. We didn’t live in the best neighborhood and we didn’t live in any poor neighborhood. I don’t remember any ghettos of poor people. Everybody was kind’a poor because a depression was going on or going out. I don’t remember which one, cause we had enough. But I know we got vaccinations and shots free from the city clinic on University Avenue. Everybody went, I guess.

But what I was telling you was about our neighbors. On one side was an old, old (it seemed to me) Spanish man who lived in a great big two-story house, all alone. He must’a had some money because he took care of that house, but he drank a lot. He was quiet and kept to hisself.

He was friends with my father, but everybody liked my father because he was friendly and generous to everybody. He even brought people home to feed them. They didn’t know it at first, but he was going to put them to work cleaning his garage or separating metal or something, But they were going to have to work; no laying around at our house, cause my daddy worked all the time.

One man, Dave (I don’t remember his last name, if I ever knew it), was a good worker and stayed with us kind’a a long time. My mama said he could even have dinner at our round table if he was sober. My daddy paid him a little money and gave him the small room off the garage. Dave made it neat. Dave had a drinking problem too.

Our neighbor on the other side was white. I don’t know what kind of “white” they were, Irish, English, German, or what. I just knew they were white and nice. A real nice pretty redheaded young woman with a husband and two children. A nice family. They were friendly, but were busy so kept to themselves and their business. Both grown-ups worked. Nobody partied together. In a depression there ain’t nothing to party about.

I just lived, grew, watched, and learned about life and people...