For this spring’s Short Takes, several writers have heeded the call to write about happy childhoods. In ckSlack’s “The Spark Ahead” two girls marvel over a fairy-like group of buildings they find in the woods. In “The Red Carpet,” five-year-old Terry O’Shaughnessy  pictures the delight she feels in a candy store during a vacation in Wildwood, New Jersey. “Mary Margaret, a Saturday in April, circa 1951,” by Mary D. Chaffee, describes a world of playhouses, ballet lessons, and tuna noodle casseroles. As Joan Hyams Schmitz writes in her short essay, childhood “was a simpler time. A time when life was less harried.”

But some women are exposed to difficult experiences well before they reach adulthood. Elvira M. Franco grew up in “Post War” Italy, a time of deprivation in Europe. Patricia Wagner Wentworth, whose mother was Native American, fell “Outside the Norm,” facing prejudice from her father’s white family. Six-year-old Marcia E. Herman-Giddens describes, in “What I Learned from Riding Birmingham’s Buses,” how upset she was to observe African Americans during Segregation. Elisabeth Hanscombe states that “childhood is also a time of terror… a time of utmost vulnerability,” yet titles her essay “A Culture of Hope.”

The submissions to Short Takes reflect the childhood cultures of three decades—the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.  Each had its own special character. You will read about blackout curtains, rural summers with grandparents, mothers who smoked, playing outside until dark with friends, air raid drills, the pleasure of having milk delivered in bottles, polio, sitting at the “children’s table,” a variety of comfort foods, and a vivid array of fashion choices. Some submissions focus solely on being children. But others are concerned with Blake’s “higher innocence,” how their childhoods shaped them, and, often, how they rebelled against those norms. Some are joyful about the relative freedom women have today. Others acknowledge the tribulations of aging, with sadness, but also with humor, good sense, and courage. The eyes of these writers are open to what childhood brought. They are open to what life brings now.

Dino Boy, acrylic, by Kari Uhlman

 
I was six-and-a-half in 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War. We were living in an apartment in Berkeley. I remember the family listening to the war news on the radio every night. I remember we had blackout curtains and air-raid wardens, but I don’t remember being afraid that we would be bombed.

My carpenter father got a job at a shipyard, building the wooden scaffolding in which the metal ships were built. When I was a little older, my mother went to work in a bomb-casing factory. I never visited the factory, but I did go to the Richmond shipyard once to watch the launching of a Liberty ship. I remember how small the people looked on the platform high up on the curve of the bow, and I remember that it was a woman who broke the bottle of champagne against the bow.

While my mother was working, she had me check in after school with a neighbor who would give me milk and cookies and send me out to play with the neighborhood kids. Our apartment had a tiny back yard—just enough for a clothesline—so I played in other kids’ yards or empty lots. Or we would walk down to the Elmwood Drug Store, where we bought ice cream push-ups but not chewing gum—none of that during the war. During the summer, I stayed with my mother’s Aunt Jenny in Santa Cruz. She worked in the family clothing store, so her hours were flexible, and she could also take me along to work, where I could play in the big back room of the store and roam around downtown. My mother’s mother worked in the family tailor shop, so women working outside the home was something I took for granted.

When I got sick, my mother would stay home from work—and clean house. It’s the sicknesses that my mother was afraid of. I remember the whooping cough. I was reading Winnie-the-Pooh and my mother had to take the book away from me because I was laughing so hard at Piglet’s description of Pooh in the Heffalump trap that it kept making me cough and whoop. There was no immunization against whooping cough then, or polio. I remember skating on the sidewalk at the end of the block with some friends, and the little brother of one skating behind us and falling. He was taken into the house, and we heard later that he had polio.

In a while my parents accumulated enough money to buy a house. It had a yard, and we put in a victory garden and got some chicks. The chicks decided my father was their mother and clustered around him. After that, we couldn’t kill and eat them. They got a home with my parents’ friend who was back from fighting in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

 
We lived on the outskirts of a small town in Italy. Not quite country and not quite city. The packed-dirt roads exhaled clouds of dust behind the few and rudimentary vehicles. The ice cream man pedaled his little cart, with the bell attached to the makeshift shelter over it. I couldn’t buy even the cheapest cone. “I have no money,” Mom said, and it was true. I watched while the other kids were handed their treats, my eyes fixed on that one last swirl of the spatula. How greedy my eyes were!

A whole crew of peddlers were in the countryside, their cases fitted across their shoulders, ready to be opened as needed to show their merchandise. Women flocked to them. They didn’t drive. If we spotted the rare woman driver, we would yell: “Go home and knit a sock,” just like we’d heard our fathers say. The knife grinder came around. “Hey Mulitt” (“Here is the sharpener!”), he yelled. He did the grinding from his bike, pedaling in place, after turning the wheels upside-down: a trick I didn’t understand. It was fascinating: the noise of the blade over the gray turning stone.

“Don’t stand there, come inside.” Dad didn’t like us to be outside the gate. Only a few years since the end of the war, and it was still all people could talk about. The fear had stayed in their hearts, and for some it would never leave. The fear of not having enough—enough food, enough house—because at any moment it could disappear under a bomb. And what sense does a bomb make? It has nothing against you. You can’t prepare for it. When the alarm sounds it’s already too late. You are lucky if you can reach a shelter, and if the people there let you in, because they don’t know you; you are not of their neighborhood. I heard those stories. They had passion in them, they felt current. After all, I could see the young men with pinned-up empty sleeves or pants legs, where limbs should have been.

“Don’t stare,” said my mother. So many questions. Never an answer: How did it happen? Everyone knew how it happened. It couldn’t be talked about. Writings on walls, in big letters. They were supposed to have been erased, but were still there, in vivid colors, screaming: “Believe!” “Obey!” “Fight!” I knew about “Obey” because it was all I heard at home. But this was a different kind of “Obey.” It was something shameful, something to turn your head away from. It should not be repeated because now the words were taboo. Yet it was what had shaped the war. The people. Their lives. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Talk about tomorrow, instead. Think about the ice cream you may be able to buy tomorrow. About the woolen stockings without knotty darned spots. About a new world. Perhaps about hope.

 Across the street from my childhood best friend’s home, a long gravel driveway provided an arcadian conduit to the Snider property, enveloped by a canopy of maple trees—bursting fire-red in autumn and offering exquisite bouquets for our third-grade hands. We ran with emancipation, our white Keds kicking up dust and gravel, leaving faint gray poofs in our wake. Our heads tipped back in laughter, faces flushed and freckled, squinting at sunstreaks slipping between the trees.

Brimming meadows and lily-pad ponds appeared where the road ended. Willows bent to touch the water, their leafy fingers stroking the surface as bullfrogs answered each ripple. No human sound intruded—only bees, birds, and the snap of twigs beneath our feet. Tucked among tall, thin pines stood a small, putty-gray, handmade concrete house with matching benches, gazebos, and a wishing well. The air was cooler and damper than at the ponds, holding a freshness only pine needles can release—a smell of Christmas.

Our hands traced the stippled texture of the structures, like hardened drip sandcastles. Surely fairies were selfless, working for weeks or months to create this ingenious sylvan complex. We sat on the curved benches and wondered why someone would abandon such a secret, dreamlike place. Suppose they were on vacation in India? Suppose they moved to Alaska? Do you think they’ll ever be back? We claimed it quickly, whispering rules and mapping secret pathways in our minds.

At the well, clear, cool refreshment arrived with the squeak and splash of the wooden bucket, threaded by an old rope and pulley. We marveled as the well captured and returned our giggles, our voices released to circle the cove. With prodding—and true bravery—we approached the main house. More cottage than house, it had a rounded wooden door and thick, cookie-like shingles. We hushed ourselves, pressing our faces to the windows. Beyond the white, ruffled voile curtains stood handcrafted wooden furniture and a grand fireplace, its stone meticulously carved in masterful intricacy to depict our forest scene.

Something settled into me then. I felt my roots engage for the first time. This, I thought, is where I will bring my tall, blond husband. His name will be David or Matthew or Illya. I will have many babies and live happily here. I made this promise silently, as if the trees were witnesses.

Every threshold I have crossed since has carried the same quiet question: Does this feel like belonging? Every garden I tended, every room I painted, every choice I made was measured against that afternoon beneath the pines. The details changed. The longing did not. That was the spark ahead—the first vision of a life I would consciously create.

By the Casting Ponds, mixed media collage on board, by Nanilee Robarge

 Yes, things were good. I could glimpse it, even though I was five.

I am dressed in my favorite green skirt, blue socks, and my white dress shoes, lately transformed from brown dress shoes by chalky shoe paint, squirted from a bottle and dried to the same matte finish you sometimes see on old cars. I love them and plan to wear them every night on this family vacation with my mother’s parents and aunts. My father is back in Montreal with the uncles, working; the only husband on the trip is my grandfather, and the only other male my baby brother.

It is Wildwood Beach, New Jersey, 1964, and my mother and grandparents have left our pink and white motel to go to Washington overnight to pay their respects at President Kennedy’s fresh grave. My brother and I are free as birds with my grandmother’s younger sisters, Lala and Belle; and even though it’s nighttime, they have taken us out to the candy emporium on the boardwalk.

It’s called the Red Carpet, and my heels make no sound as I tour the fondants, nougats, coconut poodles, and the pointy French mint umbrella chocolates that come in regular chocolate color or pale green, my favorite. There are pink and yellow candies that look like presents, and brittle pralines that I have never heard of but will try tonight because my mother, in her pointy sling-back shoes, is far away praying for President Kennedy and I am let loose on the Red Carpet. I pet each black Scotty dog woven in the design while waiting for Lala to order the chocolates, and Belle who will, as usual, be the one to carry everyone’s boxes home.

Lala is dressed in a matched Capri and blouse outfit in a gold and pink smudge pattern, with little sandals that display scarlet toenail polish and lots of room for her bad left bunion. Belle’s feet, on the other hand, are encased in beige soft-soled shoes that make her seem older than Lala or even my grandmother. As for my brother, he is off crying somewhere; and he can stay there for all I care, because I am patting each Scotty dog and smiling up at Lala because she ordered me both kinds of French mint umbrellas and a praline. Belle doesn’t need any of my smiles, she will carry my parcels anywhere, and I consider reneging on my mother’s rule to never ask either of them for anything because I know I can get what I want at the Red Carpet. The air smells of peanut brittle, warm marshmallow, and power.

I stop for a moment to listen to the far-off rollers that are distantly crashing on the beach in the dark and foresee an evening of television while eating coconut poodles and mint umbrellas in bed, propped up on Belle’s pillows for better viewing.

Yes, things were good, really good, and I knew it.

I was born into a simpler time, a time when life moved at a slower pace. I grew up north of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the idyllic Village of Greenhills. This federally sanctioned Greenbelt community was one of three places in the U.S. designed to provide affordable, suburban housing surrounded by nature. Winton Woods Park is a living border that cocoons the entire town, complete with a large lake ideal for boating, kayaking, fishing, and feeding the ducks. Our first house butted up to the park, which became our backyard playground. My sister and I, along with other neighborhood kids, would slosh around in creeks searching for tadpoles and fossils. We skated on frozen ponds in the winter, and in the summer, we cruised the lake in rented paddle boats.

We regularly engaged in games of hide-and-seek, kick-the-can, badminton, hopscotch, and ching chang. We walked everywhere—to school, the local shopping center, the community pool and tennis courts, and to the homes of our friends. We rode our bicycles through the streets with playing cards clothespinned to the spokes, our attempt at mimicking the engine sounds of a motorcycle. This was a time when children played outdoors from morning till late afternoon, when the ringing of dinner bells called them home. Thanks to so much time spent outside, we were never Vitamin D deficient, and childhood obesity was mostly nonexistent. When weather forced us indoors, we played “house,” turning our basement into makeshift living quarters complete with kitchens, beds, and lots of dolls we mothered in a sort of dress rehearsal for our future lives as wives and parents.

Doors to our homes were often left unlocked, as crime was mostly limited to drivers exceeding the 25-mph speed limit. We shared things, including a “borrowed” cup of sugar, a loan that never required repayment. Television was limited to just three or four channels “streamed” from roof-top antennas. By day, soap operas ruled the airwaves, providing entertainment and distraction for the many stay-at-home moms: and at night, families gathered together to watch the news, sitcoms, and variety shows. A multi-level strip shopping center located in the middle of town contained just about everything a family would need—a grocery store, bakery, two banks, a barber shop and beauty salon, gas station, doctors and dentists, a Pony Keg, bowling alley, hardware store, post office, library, and laundromat.

It was a simpler time. A time when life was less harried. A time with work/life balance, though we didn’t refer to it that way. It was a time when people possessed strong morals and values, often acquired from the lessons and teachings preached from the pulpits of the Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians. Our community was a true community. We felt connected. We felt supported. We felt safe. We felt like home.

The path from the bungalow colony to the lake wasn’t technically a path: It was wide enough for the Good Humor truck to carefully wend its way through the woods, past the pines and the beech trees, bells jingling all the way. By the time it reached the beach, there was a bevy of swim-suited, sun-kissed children, me amongst them, all clutching nickels and dimes in our sandy palms, jostling to be first in line.

But still, it was called “The Path,” and–for as long as any of the grandchildren of the immigrants who had captured the American dream in the form of summer bungalows at Lake Mohegan could remember—it had presented a recurring initiation rite that was as much a part of summer as orange Creamsicles and Coppertone.

The rite technically started on Donald Court, a graveled dead-end street with ten bungalows—a colony—owned by the butchers and bakers and liquor store proprietors who spent the workweeks in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens and who joined their families in the country on Friday nights, bearing brown paper sacks filled with T-bone steaks, rugelach, and schnapps from “The City,” and whose Saturdays were filled with the click, click, click of push mowers and the proud smell of newly-cut grass. But most of us kids, who ranged from about seven to early teens (too young to be consigned the weekly lawn care chores), had learned to avoid the road by darting across neighbors’ yards until we reached Uncas Street—named for the sachem of the Mohegans, on whose purloined land the colony was situated—which presented only a brief discomfort as we dashed across, with minimum contact of feet with hot asphalt.

Someone once thought it was a good idea to pour gravel the length of the steep path, but time and weather and gravity had left a rutted trail. It was these pebbles that presented the test to tender winter feet, for no kid wore shoes on the path. By the end of the summer, our young feet would be callused and feeling no pain, but in early July, you didn’t dare cry out, or even wince when the pebbles pierced instep or heel. And it was lucky that in those pre-helicopter-parenting days, we were allowed to go to the lake by ourselves. There was, after all, a college-boy lifeguard. If our mothers had accompanied us, we would have been filled with tales of lockjaw and blood poisoning, and we would have had to wear shoes for sure.

Not all paths end at a sparkling lake. Some of the ones I’ve trod over the years have been rutted and twisty and risky and taken me to darker places. But that brave and sun-kissed girl of the summers of “The Path” still guides me, even as I approach my ninth decade, even if sometimes I have to wear shoes to avoid the shards.

Rocking Horses Never Get Old, acrylic and pastels on paper, by Susan Pollet

Third grade. One day: life as usual. The very next: fear of annihilation colonized every waking moment.

At the beginning of the school year, I didn’t even know what an air raid drill was. Sometime in the fall, we started having them every day.

Fire drills we knew. We walked silently in single file by classroom, taking different paths out of the school building—some grades out the front and around the corner past the church, others straight out the back and through the garden—until everyone ended up in the church parking lot that doubled as the school playground.

Students remained motionless, still in single file, while teachers walked slowly from front to back and up front again, heads bent into their attendance books as they checked and double-checked that everybody who’d answered “present” at the roll call that morning was accounted for. Kids whispered to their friends ahead of and behind them in line. I always craned my head to see if I could spot my sister Eileen, one grade below, in the line next to ours. Everyone waited, with an eager anticipation we never questioned, for the bell to ring again with the three short peals that signaled “all clear.” The rest of the afternoon hummed with something out of the ordinary, as if we’d all gone on a field trip together and were still savoring the adventure.

Fire drills were fun. Air raid drills were not.

Nobody understood how to practice for an air raid. We weren’t going to evacuate the building, since total destruction would be raining down from the sky. We were supposed to shelter under our desks: the classic model of the era, with a large writing surface affixed to the right armrest and storage for books underneath the seat. Our teacher, Mrs. Duffy, advised us to kneel down facing the desk, scrunching the top half of our body onto the seat as far we could manage, so that the desktop protected our heads. In case of an actual air raid, we girls were to pull the skirts of our uniforms up over our heads. But only in case of an actual air raid. Not now, NOT now! And the boys were NOT, under pain of lots of extra years in purgatory, to look.

Jamming myself into the wholly inadequate space available for scrunching, I heard Annette Gambino on my left sob, “We’re all going to die.” Mrs. Duffy promptly replied, “Oh, don’t worry—you’ll go straight to heaven.”

None of this was reassuring.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis resolved, thanks be to God, life at Our Lady of Victories returned to normal. Apparently, my classmates emerged unscathed from those thirteen days of terror. It took me longer to recover.

Fears of World War III faded soon after the last air raid. Doubts about the presentability of my underclothes robbed me of sleep for weeks.

One summer day seventy years ago, when I was on the cusp of five, I dawdled alongside my elder sister, two brothers, and a neighbor enroute to the local swimming hole, a creek fenced in by boulders to form a dam.

Why I chose the deep end, I cannot say. Something of the water’s allure called me, the way you might step into your mother’s arms. The water, a promise of hope.

I sank with no knowledge of how to swim. They did not teach such things in the Netherlands, my parents’ home, where swimming was rare. This faraway country where they sluiced water away to turn marsh lands into dry for human consumption. The fish made homeless. The way of colonizers everywhere.

Freedom, as Ocean Vuong writes, is nothing but the distance between the one who hunts and the one hunted.

I was neither as I sank to the bottom, then bobbed slowly to the surface. A sensation of floating without panic. It would have been easy to die. Quietly, invisibly, the way toddlers drown when no one sees or hears.

Smart enough not to jump in, my sister leaned across and grabbed a lump of my hair. It snapped. She tried again.

On the bank, I was resentful of her intrusion into my ascent to heaven. I had imagined I was already there, where freedom lives. Where you can have everything you want, whenever you want. And others can, too. No bitterness or rivalry. No hunger.

My childhood is book-ended by dead babies. The first daughter, before I was born, during the Hunger Winter of 1945, who died at five months of malnutrition. At the other end, in 1962, my youngest sister was pronounced stillborn. Her mother’s placenta failed to nourish her.

My childhood was thereby marked by hunger, invisibility, an expectation that you pull your own weight from the moment you can walk. The seen-and-not-heard variety, where those of us conceived into large Catholic households were dispensable whenever death or disease came knocking.

Although my parents were sad momentarily, they needed to get on, as did the rest of us.

They say childhood is a time of joy and wonder where everything is new.

Childhood is also a time of terror when everything is possible—including the unexpected, the unpredictable, the abusive.

Childhood is a time of utmost vulnerability, which stays with us throughout our lives and returns with full force in our final years, when once again we are rendered feeble in our bones and bodies.

It’s not easy being small. Or old. Subject to the whims of those who hold greater power. But there’s also strength in the authenticity children bring to the world before their minds are warped in adulthood.

Over seventy years have passed now, and I’m not yet dead; but memories of hunger remain. The lure of water, a return to the womb, with its promise of heaven. And still hope remains.

Peace Roses: I Have Three Photographs of My Father, oil on panel by Arlene Goldbard

I remember the milkman.

He was a reliable, yet faceless, presence in my young life, a person I imagined uniformed in white with a perky, pristine cap perched on top of his wholesome head. On Milk Day, early morning, he retrieved six emptied glass bottles from our back porch to replace them with six quarts of pure white chilled milk, subsequently collected by our grandmother. Securely arranged in our humming refrigerator, they represented the supply for a week for three sisters, all avid whole-milk drinkers growing daily out of their Oxford saddle shoes and polka-dotted pedal pushers.

Pouring the foamy milk over my Sugar Jets every morning, glumly chewing the sopping mixture that grew more and more limp by the second, I had plenty of time to contemplate the squat glass bottle on the table and its design. A red-lined drawing displayed a sitting toddler subtly and symbolically exhorting me to drink my milk. Fine. The baby sat. I slurped.

A full bottle would provide a background of pure white (a white baby), but as the quantity of milk descended, the little baby progressed from being fully immersed to the perilous position of only its head protruding above the milk line (horrors!). Mid-way, the baby enjoyed a comfortable seated position as the milk line seemed to support a happy baby who might otherwise topple. But in time, as the milk bottle emptied, the baby’s entire person hollowed out into transparency.

Was this a delight for me? Did I serve myself seconds with a view to preserving the baby’s well-being, or did I gulp down a few more mouthfuls so as to leave that baby hanging in unexpected danger? Que sera sera, I might have clumsily concluded as I greedily downed another spoonful of Sugar Jets, enjoying the taken-for-granted friendliness of a milkman carrying out his duties in the suburban grid pattern of our neighborhood.

On occasion, a high point surfaced, punctuating the comforting sameness: the request for a bottle of chocolate milk, a prize I relished and remember as lusciously thick, of nearly chewable chocolate. Altering our regular order required the use of glossy cardboard tabs fanning out like the colors of a paint chip palette. Judiciously placed in the front window, the chocolate tab in vertical prominence, this simple contraption relying on an observant milkman could enrich the milk supply for the following week and bring us untold joy (and, as a bonus, a Chocolate Baby).

But even better than chocolate milk was the unquestioned regularity of a milkman’s delivery that gave off a sense of security in our young lives. The FBI might have been lurking, the Cold War hovering, the air raid drills in school commanding us to crouch under our desks in supplicant helplessness; but we had the benevolent, discreet, reliable presence of an invisible milkman to put things right. And also our grandmother…

As a child more than fifty years ago I grew up with clearly defined cultural norms and expectations. Roles during that time were unquestioned, and conformity was expected. My mom would often say “Don’t do as I do, do as I say do.” Growing up in a single-parent home felt predictable, shaped by specific values about behavior, gender, family, and responsibility.

I was shy and observant; adults held authority, and children were expected to listen and comply. At home, values, such as respect, self-discipline, and responsibility, were emphasized over self-expression. I learned who I was through what was expected of me—to behave properly, help when needed, and not demand too much attention. Approval came from doing what I was told, not from standing out.

Television, school, church, and community presented similar messaging. Women were caregivers first—mothers, wives, and supporters—while men were expected to lead and provide. Work for women was acceptable, but secondary to family responsibilities unless you were single, which was often frowned upon. I absorbed these ideas without questioning them. They shaped my early understanding of what it meant to be a woman: nurturing, dependable, and self-sacrificing. Independence was admired; but my mom gave me to understand that it was a necessary evil instead of acceptable.

School further shaped my sense of self. Teachers were unquestioned authorities, and we followed strict routines. There was comfort in that structure, but little space for emotional expression or individual difference. Feelings were private matters, not openly discussed in public or in the home. You were expected to persevere without complaining. That environment encouraged resilience and self-reliance, but it also taught me to hide uncertainty and avoid asking for help. Children were to be seen and not heard.

I never felt secure but often limited, as if something was missing. Childhood allowed for physical freedom—I spent long hours outdoors, largely unsupervised, learning through experience. Emotionally, there was little language for fear, confusion, or self-doubt. I rarely questioned who I was supposed to become, though I had dreams of who I wanted to be.

Those messages stayed with me into adulthood. They influenced how I approached motherhood, often emphasizing duty and sacrifice, and how I approached work, measuring my value by how well I met expectations. Even as society changed, those early lessons continued to shape my instincts and perspectives.

Do I ever feel like that child now? Sometimes. In moments of uncertainty or longing for simplicity, I recognize the child who wanted clear rules and reassurance. Adulthood has given me something childhood did not—the freedom to question those early beliefs. Looking back, I see that growing up over fifty years ago gave me structure and resilience. What time has given me since is the ability to redefine what it means to be a woman, a mother, a worker, and a person.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, my world extended roughly three blocks in any direction and was supervised entirely by women who did not smile in photographs. By day, I was American at school. By dinner, I was Italian at the kitchen table. It was a kind of dual citizenship that demanded strict adherence to rules. Rule #1: Never discuss family business outside of the home.  Rule #2: Never show your face in public without makeup. Rule #3: Don’t accept dates from boys whose parents were not both Italian.

We lived with my grandparents and my unmarried uncle in a four-bedroom house with one bathroom—a logistical miracle. On weeknights, we all gathered in the kitchen for an informal meal that often resulted in heated conversations. As a child, I remember watching intently from the sidelines, making mental notes. Insecurities played out like a full emotional orchestra.   Family roles were taking shape right before my eyes. I was, and still am, the Chief Communications Officer. If a letter needed to be written, a eulogy delivered, or an explanation required in English, it was understood to be mine.

Life revolved around the kitchen and the preservation of the “good” (plastic-covered) furniture in the parlor. We were not allowed to sit on it, but we were comforted knowing it existed. On Sundays after Mass, relatives materialized as if summoned by the aroma of simmering sauce.  Arguments rose and fell theatrically. These loud, messy gatherings were central to the family’s love language and are alive in me today.

Culture-making belonged to my grandmother, Nonna, a compact, black-clad sentinel who enforced tradition with a wooden spoon and the phrase, “What will people say?” Outside influences were regarded with suspicion, including television characters, Protestants, and girls whose skirts hovered recklessly above the knee.

Catholicism was less a religion than a social calendar. My childhood unfolded in full costume:  First Holy Communion veils, May Crownings with armfuls of roses, and Easter Sunday, the Super Bowl of salvation. The annual pilgrimage for Easter outfits was nothing if not a master class in accessorizing. White gloves, patent leather shoes, and hats that required engineering. We were being trained early in the art of presentation. Modesty, grace, and posture were emphasized. Independent thought was not.

The closer I got to the ’60s, the more I was transitioning away from the immigrant-heavy traditions of my grandparents. By high school, the culture outside our ethnic perimeter was shifting. The counterculture suggested that girls could be something other than well-dressed future wives. I rose to the rebellion and never let go. Fifty years later, the cultures of childhood bear no resemblance to my own. Our grandchildren are influenced by people they have never met. Yet beneath the shifting rituals, the same need to belong is unquestioned. To that end, we carry these generational time capsules forward as emblems of our sacred place in time.

Higher Math, photograph by Doris Brigitte Ash

I turned ten years old in 1972. Nixon served as president, astronauts went to the moon, and everyone talked about women’s equality. The Vietnam War, which seemed to go on my whole life, was still happening.

This was the year our parents decided to start economizing. They bought us each a pair of hiking boots and told us, “You only need one pair of boots. These are for working outside, hiking, winter boots, ski boots-everything! All-purpose boots.” The frugal lifestyle didn’t end there; we made our own bread, ate less meat, and used less gas in our cars.

I sang in the elementary school chorus, and I played saxophone in the band. In PE, we were fearless: we jumped on a real, Olympic-sized trampoline and climbed a big, fat rope all the way to the ceiling of the gym.

I had friends, but not too many, and the ones I had were starting to think I was weird, that my family was weird. It was all that frugal living; plus I would talk about socials and ceremonies that we attended at the Longhouse. “Longhouse?” “Yeah, on the reservation where my relatives live. My mom calls it home.” “Reservation? Oh! Like… Indians? That’s why you have long hair and dark skin.” My long hair was blond and wavy, and my skin was not very dark, not even as dark as a paper bag. Most of my life I have been able to pass as white. But I’m not white. My Father was white. My mother is Mohawk. We were a biracial family.

I am the youngest of four siblings. Four is a lot of kids for a mother who seemed unsure she wanted to be a parent. She always seemed surprised to be stuck in the role of mother; she was not a confident or nurturing parent, but one who could barely tolerate us, her kids.

My dad was confident, nurturing, kind, and loving—the opposite of my mother. Also, he was not concerned with norms, thus the biracial marriage and the frequent visits to the reservation.

He rarely got angry, but when he did, his voice and demeanor grew quiet and deliberate.

“Well, if you’re going to talk that way about my family… don’t talk about my wife like that… Don’t say that about Theresa… Goodbye.”

That’s what he said on the phone when he cut ties with his brother.

I rarely saw my white relatives, and when I did, I felt a difference between my family and them. They spoke to us as needed, but never in conversation. I knew they were talking about us when they thought they kept that hidden. The opposite of our relatives on the reservation.

So that’s how I grew up and how I remain—loved and cherished, tolerated, exposed to racism, and considered a little weird and outside the norm. I was like this as a girl, and now I am a tough, independent, unbiased, frugal woman.

A few weeks before turning six I arrived in Birmingham, Alabama. My parents and I had just moved there from Long Island, where my father had commuted to Manhattan for his Social Security job. They did not know anyone in all of Alabama, so it was a lonely start. During my early years in New York, my mother would occasionally take me into the city to shop. We rode the subway where people of any color might be beside us. So it didn’t take me long to notice the buses in Birmingham offered quite a different experience. Soon, still six years old, I was sent alone on buses to a downtown facility for swimming lessons. The buses that stopped one block from my house let me off a few blocks from the indoor pool where the lessons were held.

At first, I would not have even known what segregation was, but I soon saw the results, I certainly didn’t understand any of this. I learned there were rules about what sort of people one was supposed to like and be like, especially from watching what Black people had to do to ride Birmingham’s buses. They had to climb a few stairs in the front to pay their fare, then turn around, walk outside to the back of the bus, and climb more stairs into the back door. In the buses, each double seat had bars across the top with two holes a foot or so apart to accommodate pegs that held wooden signs stenciled with “White” on one side and “Colored” on the other side. They were moved according to the changing proportions of white and Black passengers.

When I was able to read, I learned from those signs on the buses that I was white and that being white mattered. I’m now in my ninth decade. Not too many years ago I was at a meeting to explore communication issues between white and Black people. A mixed group sat around a table engaging in often difficult conversations. I learned that some of the white women did not know they were “white,” a racial category heavy with meaning and privilege, until they were grown. They were simply people, and everyone other than themselves had a label.

Back in the bus, it was against the unspoken rules for a Black person to move a sign. At times there were many empty seats around me and, as I sat there, I would look at the African American people crowded together in the back. Mostly, they were tired-looking women, often in gray uniforms with white aprons. I think now about how much work they would have had to do to keep those uniforms so smooth and bright and starched-looking. I knew something was wrong and it made me uncomfortable.

Cowabunga, photograph by Merry Song

An Old Man’s Darling: a memoir

by Deborah K. Shepherd

  In this captivating memoir, Shepherd examines her first great love, with a man thirty-four years her senior. In 1968 and at age 21, Shepherd found a low-level corporate job, where she met Bill Shepherd, an unhappily married, 55-year-old senior executive. That they had a fling is unsurprising for the time. What is surprising is that they stayed together, for twenty years and two children, despite their age gap, differing religions, and society’s expectations. With today's perspective, and the benefits of both age and hindsight, Shepherd revisits her past, asking tough questions, of herself and about romantic love, religious roots, judgment from others, and feminism. But she offers no easy answers in what becomes a powerful, engrossing, and unforgettable read about an unlikely love. "...unflinchingly honest...a thoughtful and multidimensional examination of love, power, and self that doesn’t shy away from asking difficult questions." - KIRKUS Reviews "...gripping...a moving, emotional ride." – Sari Botton, editor of Oldster Magazine Learn more at deborahshepherdwrites.com and at Heliotrope Books Available for pre-order from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent bookstore. Publication Date: May 12, 2026

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