This has been an interesting weekend. I could use “emotional” to describe it, but somehow that adjective seems so over-used!
On Saturday, my friend Gay Morris and I drove to Bakersfield for the day. She wanted to put flowers on her mother’s grave, and asked if I would be interested in seeing where she grew up. We could also drive by the home our family had lived in while there. She knew that I had lived in Bakersfield for a time, and attended the same high school. , I’d been a bit “down” due to this being the first Mother’s Day without my mother and mother in law, so this sounded great.
As we approached Bakersfield, I noticed that I could not see the mountains in the distance. When we lived there back in 1962-63, the mountains appeared so close that you could almost touch them. That was one of the things that I really liked about living there. Well, not the case any more. We’re in a dust bowl!
Gay and I spent much of the drive talking about our time in Bakersfield, and about our mothers. Living in Bakersfield was not a good time for my mother, or our family in general. Our father was on a steady downhill spiral by that time. But the home we lived in on Kavalier Court was one of my favorites. It had a big tree in the front yard (no longer there) from which my brother fell, and a nice family room with hardwood floors that I’m sure my mother worked hard to keep up. But now, the house is in foreclosure, neglected, and in disrepair.
We also talked about how seat belts were not used back then … my brothers would both stand on the front seat with their arms on the back of the seat! Geez! But who knew? This time period happened to be a hard time for Gay’s mother as well, and we talked about how at that time, our mothers “knew their place.” That “place” was to be silent, uncomplaining, and careful to walk on eggshells so as not to cause problems. Serve your husband and family, even if it meant you suffered or compromised yourself while doing so. It was the way things were back then.
There are some memories that stand out in my mind. We struggled financially all during my growing-up years; at this time it was particularly hard. I coveted a shiny and new pair of red patent leather shoes. My mother put them on layaway for months, and on Christmas morning of 1962, I opened my parents’ gift to me of the shoes. I’ve never forgotten that, and in recent years, I had numerous opportunities to remind her how special that was. Interestingly enough, she didn’t recall having done that. What I came away from this is that we may never know how all of those precious and giving things that we do for others has affected them.
Gay and I went by Bakersfield High School, home of the Drillers, where I attended the ninth grade. It seemed much smaller now than it was then … isn’t that usually the case? The campus is no longer open, but we were lucky enough to find an open gate that would allow us to drive in. We figured the worst thing that could happen would be that the campus police would give two old ladies the Boot! We drove onto the quad area. Back then, “groups” were very segregated. There were the “rich white kids” that lived on Panorama Drive, the black kids of which there were many, and the rest of us that literally blended into the background. There was no intermingling; groups were polite to one another, but distant. I remember being afraid of the black girls in my PE class. During lunch, in the quad area, I happened to view several fights (I mean on the ground fist fights) between black girls. I had never seen anything like that before! It made me fear them even more, and I was careful to defer to them completely. Prior to this time, our family had lived in Houston, Texas. It was during the time of complete segregation. I attended an all-white grammar school and black people (called negroes then) didn’t even drink out of the same drinking fountains (this was back in the ’50s). Everyone “knew their place.” Although my father was raised in the south where bigotry was rampant (his mother, my grandmother, was extremely biased), he was never that way, nor did he raise us that way. I loved the two black women that worked in my grandmother’s beauty shop; they gave the best shampoos (the only thing they were “allowed” to do) and I never thought about them being “black.” It was only when I got back to California that I saw “groups of kids acting differently.” And frankly, my thought at the time was: “The black girls fight. The white girls don’t.” Well now, I know there are different kinds of fighting: backstabbing, bullying, harassment … getting it all over with in a fistfight now sounds like a better alternative!
Gay and I stopped at a home that had been converted into a shop called “Into the Forest.” It was jammed full of gift items. We each found paintings that reminded us of our mothers and wasted no time getting them. It was a moment Gay and I will remember forever.
Gay’s childhood homes and my family’s prior home on Kavalier Court were only blocks apart. The grammar school she attended, and Bakersfield High, were all in the same part of town. Back then, it was typical “middle class.” Now it is run-down and unkempt. Even the infamous “Panorama Drive” looks out on dried, barren oil fields of no particular beauty. Driving on Brundage Lane and Chester Avenue brought back memories, but oh how different it looks now. It made us both feel blessed for what we had then, and for what we have now.
Today, Mother’s Day, I miss my mother terribly. But I have many, many memories to cherish for the rest of my life. Time in Bakersfield is but one part of those memories.
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