"Mysteries of a Quiet Life" Sample

MYSTERIES OF A QUIET LIFE:

A MEMOIR

by

Katherine Rambo

DEDICATION

To my grandfather, Francis Ralph Rambo

1894-1990

Artist. Writer. Historian. Master storyteller.

For over fifty years he was the principal graphic artist and Art Director for Muirson Label Company in San Jose, California. After retiring, he wrote and published eleven hand-lettered and illustrated books—history, short memoirs—about the Santa Clara Valley. At the age of 96, he’d taken The Writer’s hand and said, “I want to leave something of myself in you.” The Writer told him, “You have, grandpa. You have.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Backstory

(I). Family

1). 1942

2). A Sort of Love Story

3). The Old Neighborhood

4) Idaho Gothic

(II). Working

5). Final Edition

6). Images

7). The Messenger

(III). Tideline

8). The Beach in Winter

9). Fitzgerald Marine Reserve

10). San Gregorio

(IV) The Walls

(V). Where the Road Ends

11. The World No One Knew

12). Memorial Day: Voices

13). Dreams

14). Fog-fall

15). Ghosts of Skyline

16). 15 Seconds

17) The Russian Book

18). Dark Man

19). Tendrils

20). Ghosts (or) The Man Who Walked

21). Passages

(VI). Frankie Blue Eyes

Backstory

Among the standard categories of genre literature, “memoirs” are the red-headed stepchild.

The Writer has self-published two well-received non-fiction history books and one cookbook. She also has a collection of unpublished non-fiction stories; a kind of memoir compiled and written over many years. Interesting stories. Unusual. With the right publicity, the collection could attract a lot of readers. But self-publish again? No. Financially, a waste of money because after a few sales to friends and relations, self-published memoirs by ordinary unknown people rarely sell. She needs a literary agent willing to handle memoirs. But in the 21st century, how is “memoir” defined?

No website, online writing expert, editor or agent agrees on what a memoir is, or should be. The standard minimum length for a novel is 40,000 words. But reputable sources state a memoir should be at least 70,000 words. Or longer. Except when it should be shorter. Memoirs must have an “arc.” But the experts never explain precisely what the arc should be. They stress that diary or journal entries from family members are not acceptable. And no vignettes. As one agent stated in her online guidelines for prospective clients, “If you have vignettes, don’t bother to try and get published.”

The Writer fixes another cup of coffee. And then, like all real writers, she stares out a window. Thinking. Thinking…

There are flaws in the online advice. Real life is not an “arc.” It’s mostly vignettes. Small moments. Stories. Memories…

But random unconnected moments and recollections are not enough to create a book that anyone outside a writer’s family would want to read. Like short stories, novels and nonfiction, a good memoir must be about something.It needs structure. A unifying “Red Thread” tying all the stories together. So what red thread runs through The Writer’s memoir? Mysteries. Sometimes eerie. Unsettling. Incidents with no real beginning or end. But afterwards, always questions: What just happened? What was that about? What did I see?

And how should they be organized? By logic and her own preference, it would be chronologically. But if she begins the book with entries from her grandfather’s 1942 diary, the manuscript would probably be rejected immediately by irate agents adamant in their refusal to even consider books with diary entries. By theme? In some stories, themes and chronology overlap.

In a second cup of coffee, The Writer finds the answer. Arrange the stories by specific themes, and within those themes, by chronology. So The Writer begins with the diary entries, written over a decade before she was born because, as a child, the first stories she was ever told about life, history and remembering came from her grandfather.

Thank you, Grandpa.

I

FAMILY

(1). 1942

In 1894, my grandfather, Francis Ralph Rambo was born in a two-room house in a prune orchard in Cupertino, California, when the Santa Clara Valley (now Silicon Valley) was known as The Valley of Heart’s Delight, The Garden of the World, and The Earthly Paradise. In the late 1920s at the height of the orchard culture, the Santa Clara Valley had an estimated eight million orchard trees; a landscape so beautiful that every spring between the early 1900s and the Great Depression, people could take organized “Blossom Tours.”

For ninety-six years through four wars, the Depression and two catastrophic earthquakes, The Valley was my grandfather’s life, work, art and obsession.

He graduated from Santa Clara High School in 1912. In 1915, shortly after marrying his childhood sweetheart, Katherine Coker, he was hired by Murison Label Company (among their specialties: designing and printing art for fruit boxes and canning companies) to work in the foundry at a wage of $7 for a six-day work week. One year later, when the head of the company discovered my grandfather’s talent as an artist, he was reassigned to the engraving department.

William (my father) was born in 1916. My grandmother had tuberculosis, which may have contributed to at least two miscarriages, and the reason why James, their second and last child, was born seven years later.

In April of 1941, William (Bill) married Edith (Edie) Dillingham. They lived in Eureka, California, where Bill was an announcer and the chief engineer at a radio station. In the summer of 1942, before moving to Boston, Bill and Edie visited my grandparents, who always referred to them as “The Kids.”

In 1964, two years before retiring as Murison Label Company’s art director, my grandfather fashioned a new career as a writer and illustrator specializing in the history of the Santa Clara Valley.

In 1987 at the age of 93, he published his ninth and final memoir, E Day 1906: Witness to an Earthquake.

He died in 1990. After his death, while sorting through a cache of his personal papers, my parent’s found a small black leather diary he’d kept in 1942: the only diary they ever found.

In brief, often cryptic entries. he mentions his close friends Ed Johnson and Ellsworth Zahn. “Moffett” was Moffett Field, a naval air station near the city of Sunnyvale. “The Boys” are my grandmother’s brothers, Fred, Frank and Bert.

On December 20, 1941, a new Selective Service Act required men between the ages of 18 and 64 to register for the draft. On April 27, 1942, the fourth registration—“The Old Man’s Draft”—was held for men between 45 and 64.

From the vantage point of 2019, I can see my grandfather’s past and his future: the devastating death of his wife in 1952; his son, James, in 1978, and his anguish as he witnessed the relentless urbanization of the Santa Clara Valley into “Silicon Valley.”

In these excerpts, the diary reveals a pattern of life common to most people--even those on the home front in wartime--who live one day at a time, observing, reacting, planning, making decisions based on past experience, in anticipation of the future they cannot foresee.

###

1942: NEW YEAR’S DAY: Cold, heavy snow on mountains. 3 alone. Turkey dinner de luxe. Manila holding out. Hilo shelled. Transports with wounded from Hawaii out to Moffett.

JANUARY 7: Cloudy. Katherine had knitting class at Red Cross. Jim registered at [San Jose] State.

JANUARY 25: Rain. Battle of Macassar Straits. 8 Japanese ships sunk. McArthur wins the battle. Sugar rationing coming.

JANUARY 30: Rain. Japanese to be moved away from defense areas.

JANUARY 31: Siege of Singapore starts. Bought shoes.

FEBRUARY 4: Rain all day. Alien curfew law.

FEBRUARY 11: Brite and fair. Singapore holding out. Bad news on all fronts. Tried out steam whistles.

FEBRUARY 15: Brite and fair. Singapore Falls. Pruned yard.

FEBRUARY 16: Heavy fog. Bad news all fronts. Pruned apricots and apples.

MARCH 23: Union organizing all departments. Japanese moved to Manzanar.

MARCH 27: Warm. Saw ‘Swamp Water’ and Laurel & Hardy. Blossoms in full now.

APRIL 7: Cloudy. Big Japanese drive on Philippines. Russia pushing Nazis back. Johnson’s father died yesterday.

APRIL 25: Took ride to old prune ground, Morgan Hill and Uvas. Yanks take over New Hebrides. Registered for draft.

MAY 9: Fog & wind. Went to see the boys. Frank not farming. Fred planting corn and tomatoes. Coral Sea battle over. Waiting final report.

MAY 15: Showers. Birthday cake at lunch room. Got camera. Russia attacks Kharkov. Hitler calls on Japan for help.

MAY 21: Cooler. Transplanted tomatoes again. U.S. sub sinks Japanese cruiser.

JUNE 20: Warm. Saw Jack Benny. Sevastopol tottering. Tobruk taken. Low ebb for allies.

JUNE 22: Warm. Seaside Oregon shelled. Bad news on all fronts. Got Jim cannery job.

JUNE 30: Cooler. Jim registered for draft. Egypt still threatened. Katherine still in bed.

JULY 6: Clear. Kids shopping for car. Five destroyers sunk in Alaska.

JULY 7: Clear. Kids about settled on Nash. Nazis drive 120 miles into Russia.

JULY 8: Fair. Kids decide to go east on train. Russians retreating. English holding Rommel.

JULY 10: Russians falling back. Bill and Edie packing. Farewell barbecue.

JULY 13: Russians retreating. U.S. in Port Moresby. Kids in Ogden.

AUGUST 25: Prunes at peak. Battle of Solomon Islands start. Battle of Stalingrad. Duke of Kent killed.

SEPTEMBER 27: Planted Sweet Peas. 42 Japanese planes shot down in Solomons.

OCTOBER 11: First big rain of year. Worked on chicken pen. Hulled nuts. Nazis laying off Stalingrad.

OCTOBER 24: RAF pounding Northern Italy. Hulling nuts.

NOVEMBER 4: Clear & frost. Rommel’s army in wild flight. Coffee getting scarce.

NOVEMBER 7: Yanks invade North Africa.

NOVEMBER 17: Rain. 2 admirals killed in sea battle. Allies pincer movement on Rommel. Los Gatos Creek running. Rain all night. Sold nuts.

NOVEMBER 25: Clear. Ellsworth baby announcement.

DECEMBER 1: Allies close to Tunisia. GAS RATIONING.

DECEMBER 6: Rain. Pearl Harbor anniversary. Ellsworth lost the baby.

DECEMBER 13: Clear & fog. Rommel driven out of Agheila. Planted lettuce and rhubarb.

DECEMBER 14: Warm & clear. Jim enlisted. Sworn in at 7:30 nite.

DECEMBER 31: Foggy. Plant not working. Flood in Pennsylvania. Jim’s dinner.

Finis

(2). A Sort of Love Story

If I excavated the boxes and filing cabinets of my dad’s family archives, I could probably find the original 1911 photo of his Aunt Trix that appears in a 1976 newspaper article. I don’t know which newspaper, because it was copied in pieces onto four pages and the only clue at the top is “Penny Saver.”

“Trix” was her nickname. She was born Clara Baumgart on May 21st, 1893. Her father, Joseph, owned a dairy farm in Stevinson, California, in the San Joaquin Valley.

At 16, she began driving a two-horse combination five-passenger buggy and freight wagon eleven miles each way between Stevinson and Newman. The buggy and the horses belonged to her family. In the article, she recalls having to use hot bricks in the winter to keep her feet warm (one time the bricks set the wagon on fire). From family stories and my own memories of The Valley, I also know she had to deal with summer temperatures as high as 112 degrees; spring floods from the Merced River, dense fog and dust storms.

In the photo, wearing what appears to be some kind of light colored long-sleeved “duster” overcoat, and a big floppy dark hat, she’s sitting in the wagon, on the driver seat, looking back and grinning at the camera.. I know that in her youth she was blond, with freckles on her nose.

Stevinson is now just another dusty little Valley town, about to be overrun by urban development. A hundred years ago it had two newspapers, a two-story hotel, a livery stable and a general store. There was a Protestant church, a Pentecostal church and a Catholic church. Trix’s mother had designed the Catholic church, and everyone in town helped to build it. Stevinson’s residents boasted that someday the town might become another Turlock, or even a new Merced.

Among all the young, fresh-faced farm lads who took her to dances at The Grange Hall; bought her ice cream at the general store, or competed, strutting and preening to impress her at community picnics, George Hagerman always stood off to one side. In my family, I never heard him called George, just “Hagerman.”

He was a farmer, a master carpenter and bricklayer. He was also ten years older than Trix. He loved her. He wanted to marry her, but she couldn’t make up her mind. She was young, feisty and a free life was a good life.

One day, early in the spring of 1916, Bert Coker came to town. Bert was Hagerman’s best friend. Like his brothers Frank and Fred, Bert was also a master carpenter. Their sister, Katherine, who’d married Ralph Rambo, would become my grandmother.

The Coker family...well, that’s another story. They were all handsome. Not “pretty”, but handsome in the classic sense. They were hard workers, but fiercely independent, and cursed with a restless spirit. “Fiddle-footed.” Few Cokers ever worked successfully for anyone else. They were also good people, often stubborn and contentious, but never mean. Their sense of humor combined with a taste for reckless adventure often got them into trouble.

Like many Cokers, Bert had black hair and blue eyes. He wasn’t tall, perhaps 5’ 9”, but strong enough to pick up a bail of hay and throw it into a wagon. He was a hard worker, honest, kind, and he danced well.

In the San Joaquin Valley, in Spring, there is a time of transition between the dank cold winter and murderous summer heat. Days grow warmer, but nights are still chilly. Orchards are in full bloom, and the fields full of wildflowers. There is fresh grass beneath the oak trees along the Merced river and sometimes, especially under a full moon...

Bert and Trix did what respectable people had to do when they found themselves in trouble; they got married. At the wedding , Hagerman was best man.

I’ve seen a photo of the entire Baumgart-Coker-Rambo clan taken during a picnic on the banks of the Merced River. By that time, Bert and Trix had three children; George (named after Hagerman) Irene and Dolores. In the photo, Trix holds Dolores, still an infant. Bert has his arm around Trix. Hagerman sits on the ground in front of them, with his arms around the toddlers, George and Irene.

Bert had a deep secret; he wrote poetry. According to the few people who ever saw the poems, they were beautiful. He wrote most of them for Trix.

In 1937, she became Stevinson’s post-mistress. After selling the Baumgart dairy business, she and Bert moved into a modest, charming Victorian house.

According to my father, Bert’s fondness for liquor crossed the line into alcoholism during World War II, when George became a fighter pilot stationed in England. Bert was never a mean or loud drunk. Just sad. and quiet as the evening.

After the war, George became a crop duster. He’d inherited the Coker sense of humor and good nature--but also the fierce pride and willingness to fight anyone whom he believed had insulted him or the family. In the Valley, he had enemies.

In 1947, one of them probably stretched the wire across the field where George was working. He may never have seen the wire before his plane hit it. He died in the crash.

Bert died a few months after George. Hagerman took care of the funeral arrangements.

Trix kept a promise she’d made to Bert years earlier. After his death, she burned all his poetry.

Hagerman still loved her, and she may have loved him. But she didn’t want to marry again. She was no longer young, and she was tired. Hagerman respected her decision--but he was always there when she needed him.

She worked as Stevinson’s post-mistress for another thirty years. I remember listening to her stories of how, every year, she attended post-mistress conventions. I seem to recall that they were held in cities like Los Angeles and even New York.

Hagerman died in 1952.

In 1977, Trix moved to Anaheim and lived with her daughter, Irene and her family. She died in 1979.

A few years ago, one morning in late autumn, I left Paso Robles on the four-hour trip back to my home in Foster City, south of San Francisco. With time to spare, I decided to detour and visit Stevinson. I hadn’t been there in over thirty years, and I wanted to see if anything I remembered still survived.

The Victorian house had been torn down. Tract homes covered what had been pastures and farm fields. But on the other side of town, at the Sunnyhill Cemetery, nothing had changed. Small, perhaps a couple of acres enclosed by a low stone wall, it was still surrounded mostly by fields and a few farm houses. There were no trees, just immaculate green grass and neat rows of headstones. Cloud shadows drifted over the treeless Diablo Range.

Trix was here with her parents, sisters, brothers and other relatives, along with Bert and Hagerman, and Bert’s brothers, Fred and Frank. Cokers and Baumgarts along with generations of people they may have known, but whose names I didn’t recognize. The old caretaker came out of the tool shed, and we wandered among the graves, chatting.

“They’re good people,” he said, looking across the cemetery. “Yeah. Good people.”

When I left Stevinson, it was late afternoon and the Diablo Range had deepened from gold to shades of fiery orange. But I had time, and I wanted to visit Fred and Frank Coker’s old farm, just fifteen minutes away near the junction of the San Joaquin and Merced Rivers, where the family had once gathered for picnics, 4th of July fireworks and other celebrations.

The farmhouse remained, but there were holes in the roof. The front door sagged off its hinges, and the windows had no glass. Fog rising from the water hid the outlines of the fallow bean and corn fields.

When I saw people on the river bank, gathered beneath the oak trees, I slowed down, then pulled over and stopped. Some of the people looked familiar, but I couldn’t be sure because they were made of mist, with only a few touches of color, perhaps from a yellow dress, blue overalls, a red-checked lumberman’s jacket.

I heard nothing except the river. They didn’t seem to notice me. I drove away, as they faded into the backwash of twilight.

(3). The Old Neighborhood

I never had trouble keeping up with our next door neighbor, Mrs. Anderson. She was short, rotund, ancient; older than I could imagine.

One day when I was about five years old, I followed at her heels while she puttered in her overgrown garden among roses and oleanders behind her two-story Victorian house. In a floppy straw hat, flowered dress, sensible shoes, wire-rimmed glasses and tatty old sweater, she knelt in the grass by the big fishpond, pulled back a lily pad, exposed two large floating goldfish with their guts eaten out, looked up at me and said furiously, “See what those cats did!”

It wasn’t a nice thing to look at, but I wasn’t frightened or even upset. In my neighborhood, stranger things could happen and often did.

Besides, the cats didn’t belong to us. Stray and streetwise, dozens lived in the basement of my family’s rented Victorian house at 812 Myrtle Street, in San Jose, California. A previous owner had ripped out the inside stairs and put them on the outside, creating a duplex. My grandfather lived on the second floor. My parents, baby sister and I lived on the first.

It was a tired old house. Wind across the chimney sighed and muttered behind a sheet of plywood blocking the fireplace we never used because it had been damaged in the 1906 earthquake and never repaired.

My grandfather had a potbellied stove in his living room. On windy nights the stove made weird noises, which my grandfather explained came from a family of owls who lived in the stovepipe to keep warm. He also reassured me that other strange noises in the walls were harmless. It was just the rats going bowling.

At the corner of Myrtle and Emory Street, a big white wall hid everything behind it except a few tree tops, and the arched second-floor windows and red tile roof of a house I’d heard was beautiful, in which three elderly sisters kept exotic animals, including a blue screeching Macaw parrot that spent sunny days tethered by a thin golden chain to the twisted branch of an old lemon tree.

One night, the usual background noise of ardent passion and ritual combat from our stray cats escalated into chaotic yowling and screaming that finally drove my patient, kind, animal-loving father absolutely starkers. Storming into the front yard, he stopped suddenly to reconnoiter when he heard unusually deep growls, and saw two pair of glowing eyes from cats hiding under our front porch steps. Larger than any cats my father had ever seen, the beasts slithered out, bounded past him and leapt over the board fence into Mr. Moloney’s backyard, sending his three mean bulldogs into shrieking hysterics.

The next morning, my father learned from a neighbor that the big cats were actually ocelots that had escaped from the House of the Three Sisters.

It was a time of transition. The kids who played, scuffled and reached through wrought-iron fences to illegally squeeze snapdragons in other people’s gardens were not yet labeled ‘Baby Boomers.’ A few houses still had derelict water towers and old stables converted to garages. One day, I saw old Mr. Watkins drive a horse and buggy down his driveway and across the street into the back yard of a house where a few gnarled orchard trees still bloomed white every spring.

The neighborhood kids I remember most vividly were Little Frank, whose father, Big Frank, drove a bread truck by day and a mafia staff car by night; Luna Celeste who wore large gold hoop earrings, and whose skin and wild, naturally curly hair were the same shade of light bronze; and Yolanda, whose lean, taciturn mother worked the night shift at the cannery. Yolanda had a tiny grandmother passionately devoted to TV soap operas, and a shy uncle named Joe from Guadalajara who was always walking downtown to go to the movies.

The backs of four houses, including mine, shared an unfenced vacant lot. One rainy night, from my bedroom window I watched Yolanda’s father, her Uncle Joe and several other men building an addition onto their family’s kitchen, sawing, hammering and laughing beneath the new roof, the side walls still unframed, in yellow light spilling through the open kitchen door and windows.

On the corner, a few houses down the street from my own home, there was an immaculate two-story Italiante Victorian with a wrap-around porch connecting the front door with the parlor door. The front lawn was immense, edged along the sidewalk by big trees. The house was so beautiful and mysterious that I didn’t even dare step on the lawn. The people who lived there were ancient, rarely seen and wildly extravagant. At Christmas they had two trees; a big one in the living room and a little one in the parlor.

Adults made rules, but kids also had their own rules based on a tribal belief system full of legends and lore, some of it so dark and arcane that it would have left the Arch Druid whimpering and sucking his thumb in a corner.

For example, there was The Big Bat Thing that lived on Myrtle Street in a huge malevolent elm tree covered in ivy that also provided cover for squirrels, owls and rats. Occasionally, in a fit of temper, the tree would drop a rotten branch and bash in somebody’s parked car. The Big Bat Thing had sharp claws and a pointed beak and only came out at night to eat kids who disobeyed their parents and stayed out too late. But at that age I never stayed out too late, so I wasn’t afraid.

Myrtle Street was only a few blocks from the Southern Pacific switchyards where the tramps came from, and everyone knew they did bad things. One kid told me, “Don’t talk to the bums. They steal little daughters from the cook.” At the time it made perfect terrifying sense. Now, as a rational adult, I have absolutely no idea what he meant, although I suspect it may have been his confused and murky memory of an old movie.

One day, walking home from school, flocking with a bunch of kids on the sidewalk along a main street called The Alameda, a fragment of serious conversation floated past, “...And the boy was lying naked right here and a truck driver found him.”

I attended the monolithic grey stone and concrete Hester Elementary School which still had a few cracked walls from the 1906 earthquake, and a principle named Mr. Harrington who was eight feet tall and kept a big paddle with poison spikes.

The school grounds were officially divided into “Little Siders” (kindergarten through third grade) and “Big Siders” (4th through 6th). No one was allowed to cross the line. Big Siders were scary and possibly dangerous. One kid, the scariest, smoked cigarettes and wore a white undershirt.

Behind Hester across a chain link fence, there was a dark overgrown backyard with dog kennels made of wood and tar paper. I felt sorry for the sad little dogs, because everyone knew that their mean owners liked to eat them.

Hester was built on a major San Jose street called The Alameda. Beneath The Alameda there was something called an ‘underpass’ which I never saw. I knew people used it to keep from getting hit by cars. But the real reason it had been built was because two kids Broke the Rules.

In a prominent place in the school’s main corridor there was a metal plaque etched with the profiles of a brother and sister who’d crossed The Alameda against the light and got run over by a car, probably driven by the Angel of Retribution. At least that’s what our teacher implied when she told us the story.

Walking between my home and school along The Alameda required passing a tall old privet hedge almost a block long. Close to the hedge, I was always wary, because that’s where the Bad Nuns lived.

Actually, they lived in a house behind the hedge. Although we never actually saw any nuns, we knew they were there. Just out of sight. Waiting. (The rumors may have started among kids from St. Leo’s Parochial school, a few blocks from Hester, who told tales of terror, like the one about the poor sap who called Sister Mary-Francis, “Sister Mary-Frankenstein” to her face).

One day after school, on a double-dog dare, a brave crazy kid ran through a gap in the hedge and along the inside until someone yelled, “There’s a nun behind a tree!” The rest of us never saw her. We were running too fast.

Curiosity is often stronger than fear, and sometimes I’d spy through the hedge at the only visible part of the house: the front, made of wood painted white, a broad shady front porch, and big windows with long green shutters. The house looked kind of peaceful, even pretty, although I kept those feelings to myself.

The Alameda had once been a fashionable neighborhood with an eclectic mix of architecture dating between the 1860s and 1920s. In my childhood, many old houses were being demolished or converted into offices.

One of the houses was long and white, possibly stucco, once elegant, now empty. Decades earlier, when The Alameda had been widened, the house lost most of its front yard, leaving only a narrow strip covered by cracked concrete.

One hot windy day, with small dry weeds rolling across the sidewalk, I stared through floor-to-ceiling windows into an enormous room. In the back wall there were two sets of French doors obscured on the outside by leafless bushes. Sunlight filtering through the front windows cast long narrow patches of light onto the polished wood floor, leaving the rest of the room dim and full of ghosts.

Across The Alameda, three steps up from the sidewalk, there was a compact dark red Victorian called The Century House. It was pretty, and I knew that nice people must live there.

One day it was gone. I was shocked. I had no idea that houses could just disappear. I convinced myself that I’d simply lost it. For a long time I waited for it to reappear, maybe somewhere else.

Sometimes in the evenings, my grandfather and I walked to the switchyards at Emory and Stockton, where we’d wave to the train engineers, who always waved back. Across the tracks there was a plain wood cafe where the railroad workers ate. It was a mysterious place on the edge of my world and I wanted to go there and look. My grandfather always told me, “Someday...” but we never did.

Hester Elementary has been replaced by a modern school. On the Alameda, along the route I followed to school, only a few old houses survive. The rest--including the House of the Bad Nuns--have been replaced by office buildings.

The kid I used to be remembers a big white wall, a lemon tree, a blue parrot, windows, a red tile roof and stories about three sisters and their strange pets who all lived in a beautiful house. The wall is gone, and the grown-up I’ve become admires what has been revealed: an early 1920s white stucco Spanish Mediterranean-style mansion on a one-half acre lot with a formal garden in front and, in the back, visible behind a wrought-iron fence, another garden with citrus trees and a swimming pool.

The kid, however, is puzzled, because it’s in the nature of ghosts to be confused, trying to impose images of what they remember from the past onto what exists in the present. There was just a wall, the tree, sometimes a parrot, a roof and windows. I never saw any of this. I don’t remember. It can’t be the same place. How can something exist, how can it be real when I don’t remember?

On Myrtle Street, although the malevolent Elm was cut down, displacing all the little animals, the birds and The Big Bat Thing, most of the old houses (including my family’s battered Victorian duplex) have been restored and gentrified into a beautiful set for a nostalgic movie about “The Old Neighborhood.” Only the ghosts know what’s missing: the vibrant energy of a neighborhood in transition between cultures, traditions and generations.

In my dreams, I sometimes return to the old neighborhood, always mixed with streets and houses from other lost places; at peace, and yet with a purpose I can’t explain, where I often stop at the railroad tracks, wanting to cross over and enter the cafe with the open door.

Idaho Gothic

Since 1945, my mother’s sister, Lella, her husband, Sam—WWII veteran of North Africa and Italy—and their daughter Edith (“Skip”) had lived in Honolulu. In the winter of 1950, before my uncle shipped out to Korea, the family visited my grandparents in Rigby, Idaho. Skip was 14. When my aunt and uncle left, Skip stayed in Rigby and spent a lot of time alone with her small transistor radio, trying to find her favorite program, “Hawaii Calls.”

In 1894 my maternal grandmother, Willie Self (her parents wanted another boy) was born in Midland, Texas. At age five she slipped on an icy sidewalk and broke her right hip. Because her family, devout Christians believed in “laying on of hands” instead of professional medical treatment, she spent the rest of her life with a fused right hip, bent knee and leg four inches too short. When she stood, her right foot pointed straight down.

In 1892 my grandfather, Ray Dillingham, was born in the backwoods of Adair County, Kentucky. At age twelve, an accident while repairing a barn roof left him with a withered left arm and permanent contraction in his left hand. At fourteen, he ran away from home. In 1915, in Clayton, New Mexico, he married my grandmother. Because he rarely spoke about the nine years prior to the marriage, family stories were based mostly on rumor and conjecture.

At age thirty, he lost his left leg above the knee to blood poisoning.

In 1934, my grandparents settled in Medford, Oregon, where Papa Ray found a secure job as a farm manager, and my grandmother ran a combined bakery and candy store.

In 1948, age 56, traveling in eastern Idaho, he found a new business opportunity in Rigby, a small town with a thriving economy based on farming, ranching and the Union Pacific railroad. After buying a small cafe called The Do-Nut Shop, he quit his job in Medford, uprooting my grandmother from her friends, a comfortable home and the job she loved.

The shop’s location was ideal, downtown in the West Main Street shopping district near the railroad depot, the Hotel Rigby and two movie theaters, the Royal and the Gem. None of the buildings on West Main were over two stories high, but most were either brick or sandstone, as sturdy and practical as the Mormons who’d established the town in 1883.

Rigby, Papa Ray believed, had potential.

In 1950, the population was 1,826. In 1960: 2,281, In 2000: 2,998.

My parents and I had made previous summer car trips to Rigby, but the trip when I was eight was different: the first time they left me there for most of the summer, and the last time, until I was twelve, they returned in person to pick me up. For the next five summers we’d drive to Rigby; they’d stay a few days, then leave. When my visit ended, my grandparents would drive me to the airport in Idaho Falls, where I’d take a flight back to California.

At the time I no more questioned being left in Rigby than I would have questioned going to school. I was an adult before I connected the summers to my mother’s emotional instability and the probable agreement between my parents and grandparents that for my mother, having me around all summer was too stressful.

Papa Ray’s 1948 “downtown” was not the one I knew. In just over a decade, many old buildings had either burned down or been deliberately demolished. Others had their facades covered with aluminum siding or stucco. The Royal Theater site was a parking lot. I was eleven when the Main (formerly the Gem) was remodeled into a furniture store. In eastern Idaho, Union Pacific had eliminated passenger service, and Rigby’s train depot was boarded up and abandoned. Except on weekends and during events like the Pioneer Days Parade, downtown was bleak and disturbingly empty.

What hadn’t changed were shady residential streets with bungalows, frame houses and modest single-story “pioneer” Victorians with front bay windows, friendly yet self-contained, that I imagined had secure happy families because I rarely saw and never met the people who lived in them.

In five summers, my grandparents and I never had a complete conversation. Our interactions were mostly limited to imperatives like breakfast is ready, we’re going for a Sunday drive and gramma telling me, we’re going to the picture show. It was always just gramma and me, because Papa Ray never went to movies.

The only one I remember was Disney’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People. The banshee terrified me, and when I put my hands over my face, Gramma tried to pull them down, telling me, “Look! It’s beautiful!”

In the evenings after work, in the apartment above the shop, my grandparents and I watched TV, mostly westerns and variety shows. Papa Ray in his red plaid bathrobe, without his artificial leg, sat in his wheelchair. Occasionally his bathrobe would slip, revealing what remained of his leg. It was not a pleasant sight, but I wasn’t repulsed. Just a little embarrassed, as if I’d invaded his privacy.

I was a voracious reader, but the apartment had no books. So I’d visit the one-room public library and, one-by-one, check out (again) all the pre-WWII editions of Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift and other “juvenile” books. Then I’d re-read the library’s few history books and after that, out of desperation, novels for adults, most of which left me bored and confused, so I never finished them.

I usually hung out with Darla and Twila, about my age, whose family lived in a frame house about two blocks from the shop. The family had three other kids, including Donna Mae, a high school student. Their father was gaunt and frail with strange intense eyes. Their mother, thin and grey-haired with black-framed glasses, screamed and scolded if kids played too close to the backyard cellar door, or washing pinned on the clothes lines.

Darla and Twila once told me how excited they were about the upcoming October potato harvest “vacation” when all the schools shut down, allowing kids to work in the fields. The previous year, Donna Mae had made almost $100. I was amazed and envious. It sounded like fun, and so much money!

Years later, I learned the work was peonage and exploitation. Farmers hired kids because they came cheap. For manual labor not only strenuous but dangerous even for adults, a generous wage was just over a dollar an hour.

During the harvest, local newspapers, including the Rigby Star, had brief laconic articles about unskilled underage kids injured in the fields when they were hit by tricks, or their arms and hands were caught by the rollers and chains of potato combines.

One day on Main Street, I watched the Pioneer Days parade led by Donna Mae in a drum majorette costume, high-stepping and twirling her baton. A few years later she was married with two toddlers.

One of my grandparents’ closest friends was Mr. Farmer, a banker and the richest man in town. He was also ugly with sallow skin, pockmarks on his sagging lower cheeks and a nose like a potato. He always wore dark suits and a fedora.

As a kid I was impressed, vaguely associating “richest man in town” with stories in books and TV shows. As an adult, I wonder what was it like to be the richest in a small town where, beyond the essentials, there was nothing much to buy and most people lived like everybody else.

A few blocks from the shop, one of Gramma’s friends, Frieda, had a beauty parlor inside her house next to the city park with a swimming pool rumored to give kids polio. When I was twelve, Gramma took me on a forced march to Friedas and a couple of hours of shampooing, curling, drying, cutting, back-combing and fluffing, giving me a dippy-looking bouffant that I hated, but Gramma and Frieda loved because it looked so cute and “modern,” just like on TV.

From time-to-time, in the alley between the shop and the Eckersell Funeral Home, my path would cross with the four friendly and mischievous Eckersell kids who lived in the big apartment over the family business. They were usually accompanied by a few cousins, including a girl who always wore what looked like the same flower-patterned dress with thick white knee socks and heavy shoes. Her thin mousy brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her shoulders were slightly hunched. She never smiled or spoke words, but grimaced, and occasionally made noises like a giggle, a grunt or a growl.

One day the kids and I were upstairs in the apartment’s living room with white pillars, white walls, white plaster molding, dark brocade curtains and heavy ornate furniture, like the room hadn’t been redecorated since the Eckersells bought the business in 1928. When one of the kids asked if I wanted to see a dead body, I said okay. Sure. Why not?

It was downstairs in the funeral parlor, in an open casket; an old man in a dark suit. I was not horrified or scared. Just interested. A kid dared me to touch him. I did, with my forefinger. His cheek was cool, and felt like firm cheese. Overhead lights focused on the body left the rest of the room in deep shadow. Not black or blue, but brown. That bothered me. It still does.

Just before my thirteenth birthday, Papa Ray told me I was no longer allowed in the shop (the kitchen was okay) because customers “Didn’t like to see little girls in the shop.” Gramma told me—without giving a reason—that I could no longer associate with Darla, Twila and the Eckersells. I did anyway, and when Gramma caught on, she told me that while I could still go outside, I was confined to the adjacent parking lot.

On the morning when my parents appeared (without telling me they were coming) to take me home, I got up so fast from the breakfast table I almost knocked my chair over.

I never went back to Rigby.

But the writer never left.