Eve's Memoir

I take a Bible class every Wednesday evening.  Occasionally, we are asked, as part of the homework, to write a little story.  Last week we were asked to write an account of the Fall from the viewpoint of Eve.

In a fit of dutiful reverence, I wrote a sad, tragic account to hand to our instructor.  I can't resist, however, writing a funny version as well.  Our instructor has a sense of humor, so perhaps I will submit this to the class for some extra credit!

How I Ended Up East of Eden[1] by Eve

What was I thinking?  It isn’t as though we didn’t have enough to eat.  We had a whole smorgasbord there in Eden, made up of all kinds of food except meat.  We didn’t mind not having meat, though, because we didn’t know any better back then.  All of the animals in Eden were supposed to be friends for my husband Adam, not food.  That was before Adam got his operation where God took out a rib and made me from it.  At any rate, Adam and I more or less divided up the animal friends.  I took the cute ones and let him have the others, including the slimy ones, like the snake.  I should have paid more attention to the snake.  More about that later.

Anyway, we had a lot of trees in Eden, including a slew of fruit trees, so there was no need for me to want to try the one fruit we weren't allowed to eat.  According to what God told us, it was poison, and we would die from it.  It looked so good, though, that I never really believed it could be so dangerous to eat it.  I mean, what could one little bite do?  But God told us not to eat it, so we left it alone.  Better safe than sorry.

One day the snake came sidling up to me on his four little legs and began to talk to me.  I was shocked because I never knew we had a talking snake in Eden.

“I’m sorry.  Did I scare you?”  he said.

“Yes!”  I answered.  “What do you want?”

“I’m just being friendly.  Say, isn’t that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?”

“Yeah.  Why?”

"Oh, nothing.  How come you never eat any of its fruit?"

“God told us not to,” I said.  If we eat it, we’ll die.”

“Get outta here!”  he said.

“Really.  It’s true.”

“You know what I think?”  he said.  “I think you won’t die at all if you eat the fruit of that tree.  I think it will give you knowledge and you’ll be like God.  That’s what I think.”

“You really think so?”  I asked.

“Come on.  Try some.  One little bite can’t hurt.”

The thought of turning into a goddess was extremely tempting.  I had a feeling Adam wouldn’t mind turning into a god, too.

“Okay,” I said.  “But if this turns out bad, I’m blaming you.”

 To make a long story short, I took a bite of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  I didn’t notice any change, but it tasted good, so I brought some of it to Adam.  Being the idiot he is, he took what I gave him and ate it.

Then the effects happened, the strongest of which was that we both suddenly noticed we weren’t wearing any clothes.  Until then, it hadn’t mattered, but now it did.  We rushed around, gathered fig leaves together and made loincloths for ourselves.  They didn’t cover us very well, but it was the best we could do with what we had.

After that, Adam and I had a big fight.  He blamed me for getting him in trouble, and I blamed him for being such a moron.  He stomped off and hid somewhere.  So did I.  The snake, who was laughing like a hyena through all this, stayed where he was to try to catch some sun.

I stayed hidden until evening, which was when God always came to visit us.  I could hear him coming as usual.  Boy, was I scared!  I didn't know how God was going to react.  After all, He was the Supreme Being, and we were just a couple of jerks that He put together from some dust and a rib.  And He did warn us not to eat from that tree.

Of course, we had to come out from hiding and Adam had to admit what had gone down.  You can't hide from God, and you can't lie to Him, so you might as well give up and take your lumps.  Adam blamed me.  I blamed the snake, as I had said I would.  God took away the snake's legs and told him he'd have to crawl on his belly from then on.  It served that sneaky little reptile right.

God warned both Adam and me about all the hardships we would be living from that point on, then He made us each some decent clothes and shooed us out of Eden.  Ordinarily, I love to get a new dress, but this was my first one, and the circumstances didn't warrant any kind of celebrating.

After God closed the garden gate on us, I suddenly remembered that I had left my purse behind.  I turned around to go back in to get it, but the entrance was being guarded by a scary-looking angel.  He didn't look like the type who liked to fetch things for people, so I left it alone and walked away with Adam.

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[1] East of Eden is a novel by John Steinbeck, for those of you who don’t remember this.  I thought it would be funny to include a reference to it here.  ... Well, it seemed like a good idea.

The Boomer Life 2

My father came home from World War II, and I was born shortly after.  I took the first of millions of breaths on February 22, 1946.  This made me a Pisces and a Baby Boomer, a lethal combination.

This was not our family, but it could have been almost any of our neighbors.

My mother was a European-American of multiple ethnic backgrounds.  She often referred to herself as a “duke’s mixture.”  That was better than calling yourself an “I don’t know.”  Mom grew up in a small town in Washington State.  Her family was best described as “genteel working class.”  They had the income of working class people, but they had good breeding.  They had better manners than a lot of the wealthier people in the area, a fact that I experienced first-hand more than once.

For example, there was a time in high school when my piano playing ability was called on to accompany a girl who studied with the same singing teacher I studied with.  She and I attended the same high school.  We would meet and work together after school, in the gym, where there was a piano.  We rehearsed together like that a couple of times a week, after which she gave me a ride home.  Her family were wealthy fruit growers.  In other words, she wasn’t going to have to work on campus when she went to college, and her family would probably set her up in something or other after she earned her degree.  My cash-poor family would send me out into the world after I finished college with, “Good-bye, good luck, write to us a lot and don’t get into trouble.”

One day Miss Richfamily didn’t show up after school.  I waited until it was obvious that she wasn’t just held up.  She wasn’t coming at all.  She could have sent a message to me by calling the school, but she didn’t think that making me wait for her and stranding me at school (when I could have taken the school bus home) was worth bothering about.  I was pissed off enough to confront her with this the next day.  She didn’t apologize; she gave me some lame excuse.  Nowadays, I would zing her between the eyes with well-placed retorts designed to drive my point of view into her brain.  Back then, though, I was just a timid, shy kid who couldn’t deal with confrontations.  I gave in.  I hated myself for it, but I gave in.  That didn’t change anything.  She was still wrong.

There was also the time when, while driving me home, she decided she was hungry.  To her credit, she asked me if I minded if she stopped at a drive-in restaurant for some food.  Of course, I said it was okay with me.  What was I supposed to say, “Yes, I do mind and I hope you starve to death in great agony?”  My mother would not have approved.  We stopped at the drive-in restaurant, where she ordered a hamburger and ate it in front of me.  She didn’t even offer me a pickle.  I either didn’t have any money with me or I didn’t want to eat before dinner, so I sat and watched her eat.  If I had treated her with such rudeness, and my mother had found out, I would have been chastised up and down for having no class and embarrassing my parents, who didn’t raise any slobs.

My father was a lively, boisterous Italian-American who had been born in Italy and raised on Long Island, New York.  He met my Mom when he was in the Army Air Corps during World War II.  He had been sent to Washington State for some training.  He and Mom met on a blind date.  She took one look at him and didn’t like him.  Fortunately for me and my siblings, she changed her opinion.  She quit high school to marry him, and went to live with his family on Long Island while he went overseas.  Despite her background, Mom took to Italian family life like a real paesana, and Dad’s family loved her.  After Dad returned from the war, they moved into their own home, and I was born.  I spent the first three years of my life surrounded by a gaggle of Italian aunts, an uncle, cousins, grandparents, family friends and neighbors.  Then my Dad fought with his Dad and decided to move himself, my Mom and me back to Mom’s home town, Union Gap, Washington.

I never found out what they fought about.  Nobody ever told me anything when I was a kid.  They still don’t.

Dad was gregarious, friendly, generous, tender hearted and loud.  He had a lot of friends, many of them drinking buddies.  Unfortunately, he became an alcoholic.  When he was sober, he was a good father.  When he was drinking, he was verbally abusive.  That’s a whole other story for another time.

When we first moved back west, we lived in a tiny one-bedroom apartment behind my grandfather’s gas station.  Mom and Dad had to put me to bed in the bedroom, so they slept in the living room.  There was a kitchen, with room for a small table.  Living behind a gas station had its points.  I got to hang out in the gas station, play with the almost life-sized cardboard cutout of the Philip Morris bellboy (until I was told to stop doing that because it was there to help Grandpa sell cigarettes) and watch all the people who came in.  They were ordinary people, but I was just a little kid and I didn’t know that.  Sometimes, too, a drunk would come out of the tavern across the street.  This was always exciting, especially if the town cops came by and the drunk was arrested.  One time the drunk was a woman.  She managed to cross the street and stagger along our side of it until the cop car pulled up.

Our Police Department consisted of two cops and one car.  Our cops were more like Andy Taylor and Barney Fife than Briscoe and Logan.  Arresting drunks and giving out traffic tickets were the highlights of their week.  Of course, there was the time a couple of strangers tried to rob Snyder’s Market and Mr. Snyder took after them with a gun.  That was so exciting that it gave the town something to talk about for weeks afterward.  I think our two cops had to get help for that one from the Police Department in the nearest decent-sized city, Yakima.  An attempted robbery where the potential victim fought back with a firearm was a lot more complicated than giving out parking tickets.

Grandpa’s gas station and our apartment were located across the main highway, isolated from most of the town.  This was hard for me, since I had been used to being surrounded by relatives, friends and neighbors.  I never quite adjusted.  Instead, I developed a terminal case of shyness that lasted all through my childhood and into some of my adult years.  I never had a social life when I was growing up.  Most kids don’t make it into the most popular clique, but I didn’t make it into ANY clique.  Instead, I made friends and had fun with a couple of the other outcasts, and was happy whenever any other kid would talk to me.  Most of the time they ignored me.

My younger sister was born after the big move, in 1950.  Suddenly, I wasn’t getting the attention I was accustomed to as an only child.  I developed a habit of acting out, which didn’t turn out to be as useful as I hoped.

One day, I decided that I was sick because I had a mosquito bite.  I refused to get out of bed, insisting that I was dying.  This went on until Dad decided to teach me a lesson.  He pulled the mattress off the bed and hung it from the clothesline outside.  He must have been pissed off as hell, because getting a mattress out the back door of a tiny apartment, then getting it to hang on a clothesline, isn’t easy.  He managed to do it, though.  I spent the rest of the day sitting in a chair, staring at the mosquito bite.  It didn’t do any good.

My family wasn’t the Cleavers or the Andersons.  The Bundys and the Conners wouldn’t be introduced to television until much, much later, so we didn’t have any dysfunctional family role models to compare ourselves with.

My little brother was born in 1953.  By this time, I was in First Grade at St. Joseph’s Elementary School in Yakima.  I was too busy dealing with school bus rides, nuns, other kids and school subjects to act out over a new addition to the family.  I had become resigned to not being the center of my parents’ universe, anyway.

In First Grade, I was introduced to the 1950s Catholic school experience.  That is a subject for a later time.

If anyone could scare hell out of us, she could!

I Want Christmas! -- Memories

Okay.  I already told everyone about my stage debut as Innkeeper No. 2 in the St. Joseph’s Elementary School annual Christmas pageant.  If you haven’t already read about it, you can find it here.  I won’t repeat that story again – not that it isn’t a good story, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble and I don’t want to bore you.

I didn’t tell you about the doll house, though.  That was one of those magical Christmases.  I was about 4 or 5 years old.  My parents and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment behind my maternal grandparents’ gas station, on our little town’s Main Street, which was part of a longer highway that extended to nearby towns and to the small city located about three miles away.  It was a noisy, busy highway and my parents and grandparents were always watching to make sure I didn’t venture onto it and get myself run over by some passing idiot driver motorist.  The little apartment was cramped and old.  A few years later, we would move across Main Street, into a much bigger house, but for the time being we were roughing it.

My parents didn’t have much money then.  My father was working seasonal jobs as a bricklayer.  My mother was not yet working outside the home.  Things were tight.  Of course, being a little kid, I didn’t know that.  My parents knew it because they were the ones who had to figure out how to live on peanuts.  There was never a thought, though, of not having Christmas.  Of course, we had a tree.  In my memory’s eye (which can be mistaken because, after all, I am now 70 years old and this happened back in the very early 1950s) it was a small tree.  To my young eyes, it was probably the most beautiful Christmas tree in the world.  I was easy to please.

That Christmas, I woke up, got up out of my bed in the apartment’s only bedroom and walked into the living room.  There, by the tree, was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.  It was a doll house.  It was unwrapped, probably because it was too big to wrap with whatever Christmas paper my parents had.  There were other presents, too, but the doll house was the centerpiece.  Of course, it was just an inexpensive metal one, but to me it was a miniature palace.

I played with that doll house for years until, eventually, it became dented and worn out.  I don’t know how it met its end.  It was probably tossed out.  But that would be in the future.  On that Christmas morning, it was the best present ever.

Another thing I remember from around that time is that I was scared to death of sitting on Santa Claus’ lap.  Nobody could get me to do it.  I was a pathologically shy kid, anyway, and a big, bearded fat man in a red suit with a loud voice could send me hiding behind my Mom’s coat.  Finally, one day, someone (I think it was Mom) got me to sit on the lap of some Santa or other and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I did it very well, too.  I actually talked and I didn’t cry.  Word of my accomplishment got around the family and my parents’ friends, and they must have thought it was cute because some of them laughed.

Fast forward to my high school years.  By then, everyone knew I could sing and I had ambitions to become an opera singer.  One Christmas, I found myself part of a small choir rehearsing to sing at the Midnight Mass at our Catholic parish church.  The choir was being led by a man whose desire to serve far outweighed his musical ability.  He couldn’t even carry a tune, a real drawback in a choir director.  The choir consisted of two men and three females:  my younger sister, another soprano and myself.  We three females had good singing voices.  The two men, on the other hand, were at least as tone-deaf as the director.  This made for an interesting balance.  My sister was the youngest of the female participants, so the other soprano and I were the ones who ended up trying to make sure the whole thing wasn’t a disaster.

Somehow, we got through the mass, and that particular singing group disbanded for good.  Nobody was sorry about that.

I Want Christmas, Continued!

I always love the Christmas season, but this year, more than ever, I need a good old-fashioned one.  I have a terminal case of We-Are-Going-To-Have-a-Sociopath-in-the-White-House Syndrome.

Even back in ancient times, before cable TV, smartphones and the Internet, we knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.

It always started off with the annual collection.  This was my idea.  All three of us Minicozzi kids would pool our money together to buy gifts for Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa.  As the Advent season ground on, we would add whatever coins we could spare to the fund, and by a few days before Christmas we would have enough to get something nice for all four of them.

“Nice” was a relative term.  Our family was working class, and we lived in a small town, next to a small city, in the middle of the apple growing area of Washington State.  Nobody in our family expected diamonds or anything like that.  We weren’t rich, not by any kind of stretch.  Some sweet-smelling hand lotion from the dime store was a “nice” gift from three kids who had been pooling their change.

We always had the most fun on the days and weeks leading up to Christmas.  The streets in the Downtown shopping area in the small city next to our small town were decorated for the season, and the stores had their colorful displays in the windows.  Window shopping and browsing were obligatory and fun, especially if you were trying to figure out what you could get for Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa with the money collected from you and your siblings.  I think that’s where I learned how to be both budget conscious and a spendthrift.  I can spend a lot of money, but I know how to get a bunch of decent stuff in return, even if some of it is stuff I don’t need.

I don’t remember when I stopped sitting on a store Santa’s lap, but I remember one of the times I did.  I was a terminally shy kid, but I was persuaded to go and sit on the lap of the big man with the big beard and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I must have been cute or funny, or both, because my parents laughed about it and told their friends.

Our Catholic elementary school held a Christmas Pageant every year, and the whole school took part.  Every grade had a presentation.  I made my stage debut in the First Grade, as an innkeeper.  Our grade was presenting The Nativity that year.  When the time came to cast everyone, Sister A. gave all the plum parts to other kids.  I was a homely kid, tall for my age and awkward.  In addition, I had attention deficit problems.  There was no way that I was going to get the part of the Virgin Mary, and I was not likely to be cast as an angel, either.  Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men were all boys.  The only thing left that would at least give me a line or two and a chance to shine was the part of an innkeeper.  I became Innkeeper No. 2, in a line of three.  Innkeeper No. 3 (a boy, of course) was the one who got all the lines because he got to direct Mary and Joseph to the stable.  All I got to say was that I didn’t have any room.

I learned very early in life that it’s best to get on the good side of the director if you want to be cast in a decent role.

I got a laugh when I spoke my line in the performance.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I was telling the two holiest people in the world that I couldn’t put them up, for Pete’s sake!  Later, my Mom told me that the audience laughed because I was cute up there.  I wasn’t trying for cute, either.  I was trying for unforgettable.  I was unforgettable, but not in the way I wanted.

I have a special memory of the school Christmas Pageant when I was in the Eighth Grade.  My singing voice had been discovered the year before, and my wonderful Seventh Grade teacher, Sr. Ernest, had passed the word on to my very dear music teacher, Sr. Dolores Mary, who had arranged for me to get singing lessons at a local music school on a partial scholarship.  In the Eighth Grade, I was asked to sing “O Holy Night” in the annual pageant.  The catch, though, was that I had to sing it in French.  I had never attempted French in my life.  Sister Ernest, who was of French extraction, taught me how to sing the words phonetically.  Poor Sister Ernest!  She tried hard, but I had a terrible time getting my American mouth around some of the French pronunciation!  I wish I could sing it for her now, because now I can do it properly.  Back then I was just a kid who couldn’t speak French who was thrilled to be asked to sing such a big solo.

Sister Ernest would be proud.

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For more of my humor, go here.

Songs My Father Taught Me

The education that my siblings and I received from my father was eclectic, to say the least.  We learned some dialect Italian words for a few things.  We learned that it is possible to wind spaghetti around a fork by holding it in the air and revolving it until no strand was hanging down.  We also learned how to shoot craps.

Dad did not need help from a spoon to wind
spaghetti around a fork.

The lessons in shooting craps took place when we were on a family vacation in a beach town on the Oregon coast.  We were together every evening in the little cabin where we were staying, with no television.  This meant that we had to rely on family togetherness.  Dad took out a pair of dice and got us started shooting craps for pennies.  It was a real penny ante game.  Although the odds favor the house in games of chance, I don’t think Dad won any more than we did.  He never did have much luck with money, anyway.

These are not instruments of gambling.
They are instructional materials.

My Dad was a friendly guy who would give his last dime, an arm and a leg and the shirt off his back to anyone he thought needed them, without expecting anything in return.  He was an honest man, probably because he was such a poor liar that he almost never tried it.  Like many good-hearted, honest people, Dad thought everyone else was as honest and good-hearted as he was, and was sometimes shocked and hurt when one of them failed to extend help when he needed it.  In addition, he was always looking for bargains.  His friends knew that if they had some old piece of junk they didn’t want they could always sell it to Dad.  The result was that we always had the worst cars and television sets in the neighborhood.  If it had to be pushed to start, or if the only way you could get a good picture was to have the youngest member of the family stand next to it and act as a human aerial, it probably belonged to us.

I won’t even mention the ugly shed that someone persuaded him would make a good gas station, even though the only place Dad could put it was in our back yard, next to a gravel alley, and there was already no lack of gas stations on our main road.  That thing was so ugly, the neighborhood kids wouldn’t even play in it.  I don’t know if he actually paid for it.  I hope not.

My Grandma (Dad’s mother-in-law) once won a color television set in a church raffle.  Grandma gave it back to the church so they could raffle it off again.  She was more devoted than almost everyone in the parish, including the nuns and priests.  When Dad heard about this, his reaction was typical: “Why didn’t she give it to us if she didn’t want it?”  The two of them were not each other’s favorite person, even under normal circumstances.  This pushed her even farther down the scale of Dad’s estimation.

The priests of St. Joseph’s Parish thought Grandma was “a little saint.”  Dad had other ideas, although he was good enough not to discuss them with us kids most of the time.  When the two of them were together, they were cordial to each other.  Dad even called her “Mom.”

In fact, Dad’s language was pretty clean, in spite of the fact that he grew up a poor kid on Long Island.  I don’t remember ever hearing him say the “f” word, and he kept other four-letter words to a minimum.  I don’t know how he spoke when he was among his male buddies, outside the house, but with us he kept a clean mouth, even when he was yelling at us.  This must have taken some control.

Dad had an untrained but beautiful, natural baritone voice.  He was a living example of the stereotype that all Italians can sing.  Sometimes I would be singing at the piano when he came home.  He would join me, and we would sing duets.  Old standard pop tunes were his forte, although he could croon a pretty good Neapolitan song now and then.  He would never sing alone in public, which was a shame, because he could have been a pretty good pop singer.  Maybe he could have even made some hit records.  We would have loved that.  We would have had a Dad on television, and our TV would have been a good one.  My little brother would not have had to be an accessory aerial anymore.

Unfortunately, my Dad’s escalating addiction to alcohol drove a wedge between the two of us, which lasted until I left home for good.  A lot of things were never resolved, and any real communication between the two of us was broken.  He was a good man, even though he showed that side of himself much more to his friends than his family when he was drinking.  I look at pictures of him holding me as a baby, before the damages of life took over, when he still had his dreams and his life ahead of him.  He was a good father then.  I like to remember him that way.

One last thing that I have learned is that I have a lot of him in me.  Like him, I have no luck with money, although I am learning, late in life, to be more careful with it and to save at least as much as I spend.  Like him, I also prefer to be friendly and helpful to people when possible and I have a tendency to trust people too much.  That means that, like him, I sometimes find myself knocked down when I wouldn’t have been knocked down if I had known better, but hey!  I have always survived and gone on. 

Another thing I got from him is my tendency to dream dreams.  In my case, I have followed them, and I’m still following them.  I get that tendency to focus and pursue from Mom, who was the practical one in our family.  When one dream becomes impractical, I just find some other talent and form another one.  It hasn’t made me rich or famous or anything, but it has made my life simultaneously fun, stressful, emotional and intensely interesting, to say the least.

This world needs friendly, helpful, good-hearted, honest people who dream big dreams.  If I have any of that in me at all, I got a lot of it from Dad.  All I can give him in return is thanks for passing on the right genes.