Canary's Tiny Stories
I’m 65. I’m surprised to be here now. I relish each day along with the tone or the tune. I was an Indian Once but it’s too early for that story.

I wear shells on my neck, a tiny silver ring in my ear. I have a light strawberry haircut that curls some people’s toes. No matter. My Tie dye shirts say I’m an old hippy or I wear tshirts that say something startling, or advertise my Radio Station with art on tshirts that I’ve collected forever. You see, I’m a DJ there. "The Latest Score" Tuesday afternoons from 1 to 4pm. WOMR.org (I’m sure it will still be there when I’m dead, so check it out) I wear plastic slip on shoes that I can keep super clean in the shower. No odor. Cool. It’s 2008. The Dark Ages.

When I was little, during World War II, I lived in an oil refinery town. My father was a cop. He worked himself into electronics and built, from the inventors plan, the first radio repeater. I was along for the ride. My father had two rooms in "The Castle" atop Mt Diablo in Contra Costa County in California. He was laughed at for the longest time. He was a county Sheriffs Deputy. I got to go along with him for the windy, scary ride to the top and then I played in the castle while he became an electronics expert. These rooms full of electronic stuff picked up a weak radio signal from the county Police cars and sent them on to the Central Office. This repeater is now used in every thing on and off this earth. No one's laughing anymore. Every satellite, every GPS, everything has a repeater, or a repeater by another name. He made some money.

My mother had a full fur coat, diamond earrings and lots of clothes in her walk in closet. I loved her diamonds, her rings, her necklace for fancy. That closet was famous for blocks around. In the 40's only movie stars had walk in closets. My father built it for her. He was a very capable carpenter and gardener and it showed all over our property. Fur coat, yes, I loved that coat, I would bury myself in it and say "mowie, mowie". I always had a cat. Named Cookie. I made her swim to "shore" many times off a board floating in our fish pond, now my pond. I also dressed her in dolls clothes and carried her around the terraced yard, each with a different set of plants.. She was sleek and sassy so I guess it was ok. We all found out cats could swim. she kept coming around the pond when I was in it. I suppose I feel somewhat guilty now.

You see me there...uh...down below the writing. I'm 10, I'm dressed as an Indian. I think I look tough and strong. I seem to only look mad. (Notice the "first" picture window in town) I read alot of books, constantly the books. When I read, I would escape into them. I would "take on" one of the characters, walk around in their skin while I read the book...I insisted my parents and friends call me by the name of the charcter I inhabited, or inhabited me. I carried a book with me and read outside, upstairs and on the boy next door's porch. He and I played in his treehouse and swore to get married when we grew up. In the neighborhood there were boys my age, but no girls. I didn't know the difference, so I played with boys. It was helpful when needing a certain form of teamwork in my adult life. I could throw a baseball.
I was a Plains Indian last time.
I know because the ground is so comfortable
I know because I sit cross-legged.
(the movies showed me)
A little girl with a long leaf for a feather,
sitting in a tree for 10 years,
grew up and knew her land.

I'm close because I brought that
place through from before,
and didn't make the adjustment in time.



Then my Mother died. I was 10.

I was watching cowboy shows on TV that afternoon. My Father came home from work and asked me where Vi was. I said she was napping upstairs and followed him up the stairs where we saw her bed was not slept in but the bathroom door was locked. He called, no answer. He called louder, no answer. So he broke down the door. As we both saw red everywhere, he sent me downstairs with hysteria in his voice. As I left, I heard his bloodcurdling scream as he found my mother dead from a single gunshot to the heart. She used his old service revolver and I think it blew up. When I got to the bottom of the stairs I felt like I was going to blow apart. I went to the picture window and started hiting the glass until I realized I could break the window and fall two stories. At that moment my pain was sucked up within me. I dissassociated and got wrapped up in the police investigation. I told the police my Father couldn't have killed her because the only tree near that side of the house was too far away for anyone to jump. I don't remember much else except telling anyone who would listen that my Mother told me to clean up the nuts I was opening and eating; that she would not come down to clean it up. I said she told me the truth and since I was no longer in pain I could be bright and involved with everyone in the house.

That night I was taken to my Brother Ken and his wife Carrie's house. I remember being alone and awake in the bed I was given. I started to cry real hard and then sloooop, it was sucked up back inside somewhere and I went to sleep. Someone came to stay with me the next day, I think my grandmother. Then they told me I couldn't go to the funeral. I was stumped and sad. The last thing I remember was me in a car going down our dirt road. I was looking out the back window at my house. I said with alarm to no one in particular, "What about my toys?". And I was gone.

I went to live in Texas with my flamboyant aunt. the one with flame hair down her back in curls when every woman in the 50's was wearing short. I loved my aunt. She dressed up in her costumes and pretended to be Japanese. For dinner we had to use chopsticks and eat on a table cloth on the floor. I loved it. Ruby's Red hair was on top of her head with several chopsticks sticking out of it. She pretended to speak Japanese and refused English no matter how much we begged. That was when she was Japanese. Sometimes she was a cowgirl with double six guns. I'd run put on MY cowgirl outfit. We'd go in the back yard and rope cows and ride stick horses and make lots of horse noises. We'd always had a mock gun battle where one or the other would flail around, taking forever and a speech to die.

Sometimes I'd come home and hear dirge music. I'd know Ruby was dying. She'd be wearing horrible makeup and all dressed in black laying in bed, she'd say, this was her last hour. would I fix her some tea or dinner, or cookies or a drought of poison. I would. but it took some years to know what a drought was. There were many variations on Ruby's afternoon delight and sometimes my friends were there for it. On Halloween she made a costume and came trick or treating with me and my girlfiends. No one ever knew she was an adult. This was real radical stuff in 1952

Every month there is a holiday. Ruby and I would decorate the whole house and put a "scene" in the picture window. We used the projector screen for a backdrop, draping cloth until it looked right. Setting up hearts, or shamrocks or whatever on a table we'd balanced on a box. I'd sew things, ruby glued, my uncle JB set up the lights. People came up to the window from the sidewalk to see. I loved it. Christmas was a month long revel in ribbons and paper, shopping and cooking. The tree was decorated with EXTREME care, just like my Mother had done. Lights first, tinsel(it was real tinfoil then and hung beautifully)on EVERY branch from the trunk out, then the bulbs from the top down. We'd leave it be until JB came home to light the tree for the first time.

These are our graduation outfits for my 6th grade at Radford School for Girls. We're still in the old house in this picture. I coveted those black velvet high heels. Notice my crossed ankles. Heck, we had real china dishes, silver napkin rings, lit candles for LUNCH! My grade had 6 girls in it!! I had to walk with a book on my head - FOR REAL. They taught me how to be comfortable in fancy situations. This was valuable knowledge. I didn't know that my aunt was anorexic then. She didn't know either.
I lived with Ruby and JB for 2 years. During that time 3 of us girlfriends stole some cigarets and climbed down into a fox hole the neighbor boys built in an "empty" field next to Radford School for Girls. We all smoked as much as we could bear. I looked up, saw a pair of legs approaching and stuck my lit cigarette in the sand. The other two wern't so fast. They got kicked out of school. I got reprimanded. It turned out a teacher was up on the 2nd floor of the school and could see the smoke rising out of the foxhole. My aunt Ruby made me smoke cigarretes until I was sick. I didn't smoke then until I was 18. Stupid, huh? It took me 40 years to quit. Then someone made the decision for me to live with my father.

My Father was in the Masons. So I was a Job's Daughter. See below my very first Looong gown. I sewed it. By then I was proficient and later I was to sew for a living. I'm standing with my Granpa. I still love the dress. I HATE the hairdo!
We had a swimming pool nearby.I was 12 and 13. It was run by the development so was pretty neat. I swam ALOT in those days. I even entered the bathing beauty contest and marched around the swimming pool in high heels and a one piece bathing suit. I didn't win. My father was building his first boat in the driveway of his house, well, our house at the moment. I have a picture of that too.

The second year, during summer vacation, Diane slept over frequently. WE stuffed the bed with pillows and climbed out my window, slipped out the garden gate to go swimming at night, alone. It was great fun. We turned on the pool lights and splashed to our hearts content. Along with this antic, were occasional trips via my "boyfriends" car. He was Latino, a total no no in my terribly prejudiced family. We did nothing worse than drive to a nearby town to drink coffee after midnight in a local all night cafe, or went to his mother's house to eat taco's and enchiladas. He told me he was a Pachuco. I think this was the 50's Latin gang. So I called him The Pachuco from Pacheco. That was the little town he lived in. All these little towns were quite close together. He also taught me to drive. He was 15 and had a drivers license. I think the car was his Dad's. It was a one year old Buick with purple lights in the holes along the hood. (those holes were standard for many years)He took me out to large back roads and got me behind the wheel. This was great and later at 15, I got my license on my birthday. I was hot to drive.
At the end of summer, Diane and climbed back in my bedroom window to find my Dad glaring at us, the pillows uncovered on the bed. He chewed us out big time so we crawled into bed, pulling the covers over our heads and begging forgiveness. Later he said he'd always known where we were, he was a cop you know. So actually he let us have our adventures and only called in the chips at the end of the summer. That was kinda like his love/hate relationship with cats. He professed to hate them, but there was always a momma kitty in the garage with a litter and he fed them all. I guess found them homes too. He never spoke about it.

In the picture below you see me and my best friend Diane dressed for Easter. See the white gloves? How loooong and slender the skirts were. Those GLASSES!! I think we were 13. We look older. It's the clothes.


I'm back in Texas after two years with my dad. I think having a child was just plain beyond these folks endurance. I know they loved me, but they we're terribly...um...unready, all dressed up in suits and diamonds. All of them Victorian children and with severe problems. So I immediatley held a sit down strike (foreshadowing the 60's). I said, "All you can do is kill me and you won't do that, but I'm not going to Radford (the girls school), I'm going to Austin High School(the public school)". I won. So I did 4 years of high school at the same place, even after we moved to the suburbs..(we had a bus) I guess I was a difficult child, bright, couldn't sit still, talked alot, did alot, made friends easily and took chances. Headstrong, they said.

I was told I had penis envy. (It WAS the fifties and Freud was quite reduced in the popular eye to a few obvious slogans) I didn't know what a penis was then, so I wondered and went of with what I was doing. Later when I found out what a penis was, from undressing a little neighborhood boy, I was agast. THAT is what I'm supposed to be envying? By then I knew the big "they" really wanted me to stop acting like a boy, sit down and drink my tea. SORRY! I remember thinking I just wanted to capture the ship, or get the gold out of the mine, or whatever the hero in my book of the moment was doing. I never thought it was a boy and I should do something or other. I also played the damsels in distress because I liked the clothing.


So I graduated with a B average. Mainly because I got an F in an English class (my best subject)because I was coughing and disturbing the class. The teacher put me out in the hall where I got pnumonia because of the strong wind blowing in from an open door down that looooong corridor. My aunt went straight from the hospital to the teacher who did this and chewed her out big time. The upshot was I missed too much class time, was never helped to make it up and the woman wanted to give me an F anyway. But I had a B average because my home life was either fantastically entertaining and absorbing OR it was horrible in huge gobs. Ruby would do things like you've seen in Mommie Dearist. Remember the clothes hanger scene? I saw that scene alot in my house. Ruby, when she was up was liberal. She'd drive me and my girlfriends around in her tiny sports car teasing young men. El Paso, at that time had a SAC Airforce base and a large Army base so there were lots of young men. Ruby would drive up behind a troop truck and egg them on until they turned to chase up, then she'd speed off in that Triumph and be gone with us laughing our heads off. But when she was down she'd do things like take me to the doctor to see if I was still still a virgin. What humiliation, especially since I had no hyman but was distinctly still unbedded.

Going back to California

Ruby's death



Yep, one of my drawings.