#Drive, 2 Sweet Home, Mattson Hollow
Falling asleep to live music, laughing out of a moonroof and lots of imagination provided plenty of good times, but what happens when life isn't not funny anymore?
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes… “—Madeleine L’Engle, from The Rock That Is Higher
“The bass drum sets the pace for everyone else,” Dad told me once as we listened to the radio.“Hear it? Thump… Thump… Thump. Regular and even.” He demonstrated the bass by tapping his right foot on the floor.
“Then, you add your arms for the tom or the smaller drum.” He syncopated a rhythm on his lap, tapping his left foot every so often.
It was all rather choreographed and complicated for me, with feet and legs and arms and elbows flailing around. I could hear what he meant in the music in my head, and I especially loved the skee-dum-dum, skee-dum-dum of the top hat. But I never managed to execute anything except the most basic rudiment. Feet or arms, never both. Besides, I had no interest in practice.
I was happy to play the radio.
Dad was self-taught on the drums and guitar, played the clarinet in marching band—and always had music going at home. He and a few friends started a band, The Country Edition, which played on weekends for more than ten years and often practiced in our basement.
Memories of live music playing as I fell asleep is forever co-mingled with the scent of the pepperoni pizzas and Michelob beer. If the band wasn’t playing the Eagles or Chuck Jones, Sonny & Cher, Johnny Cash, or the Captain & Tennille had shows on weeknight TV.
The Sundays that I stayed home from church with him, Dad would make poached eggs in hot milk with toast for us and we’d listen to albums together. If his band was covering one of the songs, I’d help him figure out the lyrics.
The Country Edition had some legitimate talent, so they often played in country fairs in what seemed exotic, far away places to me. They had friends and fans who would go wherever they were playing, to cut the rug in the open air instead of the Old Maple Inn or Margarita’s.
Mom, my younger brother Wayne and I would go to the fair for a set or two, enjoying our French fries with malt vinegar and salt, with a hot dog and Coke. When the band played, they drowned out the carnival barkers, the roulette wheel, and the crowds. It was glorious and loud--filling my dreams at night for most of my life.
I like to say that my section of heaven will be a carnival with an Irish pub in the center.
It never seemed strange to me that my mild mannered 9-to-5 dad by day could be the drummer in a fun band every weekend for so long. At home, you could usually find him twisting the hair at the nape of his neck while he hummed along to the radio and flipped through a Popular Mechanics or National Geographic. “But I didn’t really read them,” he told me years later. “I’m not a reader.”
Mom’s dad Bobby was a reader. He and Gran lived in an apartment over my parents’ detached 2-car garage. People loved his great laugh and ability to reel off a pithy Ogden Nash poem. An uncle told me recently that he could recite Coleridge’s entire “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” from memory—it could be a tall tale.
Bobby’s wood-paneled den was full of Reader’s Digest Condensed versions, Chilton’s manuals, cookbooks and magazines on shelves lining the walls. I’d sit on Granny’s recliner or perch on one of Bobby’s broad shoulders, to watch TV until I was too big. We’d howl and giggle to every slap, smack or explosion coming from “The Three Stooges” and “The Little Rascals” or their Warner Brothers cartoon counterparts.
In my memory, Bobby smiled so broadly that his wide-set sky blue eyes, friendly and round like Mom’s and Wayne’s, were half-moon slits over his cheeks. At the time, I thought everyone had a Granny and a Bobby, like I did. When I finally asked Mom about it. She said, “He told me that his friends called him Bob and he wanted to be his grandkids’ friend, too.”
So, he was Bobby to me, even though my cousins called him “Grandaddy Bob.”
On weekdays after Bobby had retired, we’d hop in his burgundy Peugeot and whir away, moon roof open, to pick up Gran at work. He’d let me stand up on the passenger seat and poke through the roof to wave my arms at the sky sometimes as he drove, laughing all the way.
I never did that myself while driving Dad’s 1983 Camaro Z-28—the kind with the T-tops—but a few of my friends did. And I still love a moonroof.
Bobby loved his car, loved to drive, and riding with him was sheer joy. On warm days when we’d pick Granny up at work, we’d stop at Dairy Queen on the way home, even if it was right before Mom served dinner. Granny would laugh and say, “Oh, Bob, I don’t know about that.”
I’m sure that got him in trouble with Mom most times, but I wasn’t going to say no to an ice cold Mr. Misty or a Dilly Bar.
The year I was 4, Dad’s brother Ron brought the A Pig Can Jig primer to the house for me—and words sprung to life like magic in the middle of the family room floor, as he showed the first few pages to me. One minute I couldn’t read, the next I could.
Sitting at breakfast, I’d read the cereal box. Waiting to use the bathroom, I’d carefully lift the tissue thin pages of the Rand McNally Dictionary in the hallway; 5” thick and so heavy I could barely move it and try to find a word I knew. And almost any time at all, I’d flop in front of the stand of illustrated encyclopedias and 1959 Encyclopedia Brittanicas—especially the one with the two-page spread of the entire canus lupus family.
That is, if I hadn’t gotten to the library with Dad’s mom, Gramma for a book.
Coatesville’s library was housed in a tall, dark and moody Victorian, painted deep burgundy with dark trim and a sleepy porch on Lincoln Highway in town. A pre-colonial city in Chester County, midway between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Coatesville had its share of places George Washington ate or Lincoln slept. In the 1940s to 1970s the world renowned Lukens Steel mill supported a booming downtown complete with an Opera House, a hotel, newspaper, several banks and YMCA with an indoor pool.
Gramma and I would walk the couple blocks to the library. I liked when we’d walk the long way, down Chestnut Street past the huge, 19-room Victorian homes with sprawling shade trees that trapped the pungent aroma of English ivy and mold on the concrete sidewalks. We’d pass the elegant gray stone Olivet Methodist Church where Mom and Dad got married, to drop a letter in the post office. Then we’d return to l’eau de grease, fried onions and newsprint of Lincoln Highway and go on to Samuel’s stationery store or Devitt’s hardware, stopping to shop and talk to everyone along the way: the butcher behind the huge counter at Weaver’s, a clerk at the 5&10, her friend at JcPenney’s. Ultimately, we stopped at the library.
Sometimes, I was led straight upstairs to a round turret room. As dark and narrow as its hallways and rooms were, stepping through the front door transported me from the grassy rural existence of my family’s home into an exotic, wide-open world of stories.
Other times story time was on the porch, dusty with black ash from the steel mill. The longer I stared while the librarian read, the more the curvy and pointed millwork seemed to creep along the roofline to where the posts held up the roof.
By contrast, our home in the hollow was nestled into the north side hill of the rural Supplee Hollow, its road crossed by a creek. The tiny Brandywine tributary overran its banks and carried the bridge and gravel road away so often I wanted to park a rowboat at our mailbox to use when it rained. Decades passed before the small drainage pipe supporting the bridge was replaced by one that could handle flash floods.
My cousin once told me, “Whenever someone comes to Coatesville, they all want to come here, to see the place,” said my cousin Bethany, indicating our two homes and yard. “It’s the family homestead.”
Having lived there my whole life, I didn’t get it.
When I was stuck at home, I solved mystery after mystery with my Nan and Bert, Freddie and Flossie at a snowy lodge, lake house, or even at the shore, where we met twitter bugs, vagabonds, and elephants. I befriended the Black, an Arabian stallion, and raced it on the deserts of northern Africa before bringing it home to hide it in a stable in New York —and on no less than 19 other adventures.
And if I explored one abandoned castle—the kind next to a loch with an island, beautifully maintained except for that one wing—I’d been to ten more on the moors of Scotland. Certainly, I could find the courage to throw open the door and outrun a wild-eyed inhabitant if I had to, straight into the arms of my future husband.
Hopefully. Isn’t that what reading is about in the end?
It fills an ache in our souls that tells us we’re made for more than what we are. In that way, learning, knowing can be as heady as falling in love, especially when it’s forever.
How sad that education can bury that innate desire so deep in routines or discipline for kids that it eventually goes away. In one of the most widely viewed TED talks, Sir Ken Robinson wrote and spoke so eloquently on keeping the curiosity and love of learning alive in children (2006).
With so many stories and adventures absorbing my own young life, when “What’s out your window?” was the theme of an art contest, my 8 year-old self won third place for a full-color drawing of a girl looking out a window. That literal part lacks some imagination, I know, but you should see the girl’s vision. It’s at a collage of things to do and people to meet: a football player and a judge, Mother Necessity in her rocking chair next to a space shuttle, alongside a pond and a frogs while butterflies flutter throughout the design.
I was the one who was sure that I heard thunder hit the clouds like bowling pins being toppled in a single strike when thunderstorms boomed off of side of the hollow and rebounded on the other. My brother would sprint into the house when a storm threatened. I would slow my steps to wonder at the raging sky. I always hoped to see it happen—but I was usually urged to “Get inside!”
But then, Wayne had so many breathing issues. Issues that left him wiped out on the couch—or left me sitting alone in a doctor’s waiting room while Mom and he went in the back. I was always excited to read the Highlights for Kids that were on the table, but I couldn’t focus on the stories or puzzles when I heard him cry.
Years later I learned that his crying was from 20 or so individual pricks and pokes on his trim little back, the early version of the multiple-prick tests modern allergists administer in a single 20-pin compression on a meaty shoulder or forearm.
My favorite waiting room was on the second floor of an ancient house near the County hospital, a Victorian like our library, but much larger. The sprawling porch was covered in ivy and surrounded by boxwood and smelled damp and pungent, like Gramma’s house in town.
Its first floor waiting room was grand and had more copies of Highlights, but I wanted to climb the winding staircase. I snuck up those stairs whenever I could, compelled to visit a giant painting of a big-eyed girl bringing soup to her sick big-eyed brother who was covered by a patched blanket and slumped in a wing chair.
What was wrong with that little boy? Could he breathe? I wondered. Did she make that soup?
All that to say, I remember feeling like even the girl in the painting knew what her brother needed—but I couldn’t help mine. And sometimes, I wanted help, even if I didn’t actually need it.
“You were always doing so well, it was a relief—our golden-haired happy girl,” Mom said once.
I’m sure most people, myself included, would take that as a complement, but I think my chatty, little self was always a little lonely at home in the hollow—especially after Bobby died when I was 7. Even with my books.
Once Wayne started taking Slo-Phyllin and Dimetapp, his life improved and we spent after school and weekends avoiding quicksand, alligators, and bad guys in the back yard. We followed the creek all the way through the swamp, rode our bikes for miles and played a lot of kickball and $5 ball with neighbors. One of the neighborhood girls and I liked to take our Barbies on camping trips (she even had the Barbie RV!).
I always had a best friend in class and tons of guy-friends for four-square and tetherball at recess, but it was years before I realized that games and laughter aren’t the same as friendship.
To me, they were the best part.
When deep troubles caused by my husband’s memory loss and temper shook our relationship, it couldn’t be laughed off and escaping to a book wouldn’t fix it.
I was grateful that I could go home.