Do you ever just wake up with something in your head that you can't seem to get out of it?
I woke up this morning after four hours sleep trying to think of the name of our neighbor across the street from the house that I grew up in. I grew up on a street called “Donnybrook”. My mother always insisted that they grew birds of paradise on every lawn on the street to try and soften the sentiment of the name.
Donnybrook ran smack dab down the middle of a sort of modified section of tract homes. But they were hidden. With the floor plans having subtle differences—a garage here…an extra bathroom there…some sneaky landscaping over there one of the favorite pastimes of the neighbors was to try and determine who lived in the same kinds of houses. Upon further thought, a rather worthy metaphor for the humanity that occupied them. Knowing what I know now, I wonder how the nice Catholic family with the 9 tow headed kids felt in our very firm Anglo Saxon Protestant 2.5 kids per neighborhood? With that single exception, we were all a bit like the housing plans....mostly the same except for an add-on here, a little different landscaping there.
Their last name was “Brown” and theirs was the smallest house in the neighborhood or at least the smallest that we could discover. Her name was Mrs. Brown. But what was her first name? It was something old fashioned...traditional. She had a son named “Forrest”. Worthy of a peanuts character and long before “Run Forrest Run” would have been something the kids at school would have used to taunt him. Mrs. Brown. What WAS her first name? I remember she had a rather self-effacing Charlie Brown-esque sort of a husband. I remember that she was mean in some way that as a kid was hard to describe. She never yelled at you for getting on her lawn or making too much noise in the street. It was something in her eyes, a love of the misfortune of others that covered her like a perfume. Us kids could smell it on her. She was the first person in the neighborhood to "befriend" my mother. We had moved there from Dallas, Texas. My mother didn’t work and was responsible for the care and feeding of a 16 year old girl, a 14 year old girl and a four year old--me.
Mrs. Brown, who's first name had a spice or a flower in it I think, introduced herself to my mother not to be friendly but on a covert operation for the neighborhood bridge set. My mother, you see, was an iced tea addict. She made a pot in the morning and then another in the late afternoon and drank tea all day and night believing that she was not wired from caffeine because it was tea and not coffee. Well, all the neighbors had noted was that every time my mother walked my father to the car or came outside for the mail or to call me into the house she was carrying a tall glass in her hand which looked suspiciously like a tall Scotch on the rocks. Mrs. Brown’s mission, which she chose to accept, was to get close enough to smell and report back.
Betty Jean Strong House was many things but she was nobody’s fool. I was too young to remember the encounter or exactly how it happened but my Mother…with that smooth Northwestern trained voice got Mrs. Brown to confess completely to the nature of the espionage, offered her a glass of tea and friendship on her own terms which Mrs. Brown accepted gratefully and with relief. I think she always liked Mrs. Brown exactly because she was mean and clever and so decidedly not “southern” in approach. While my family might come from Illinois...we come from SOUTHERN Illinois, and let's not forget that Grandma Emma was schooled at Ward Belmonts Ladies College in Nashville. So, the concept of "manners" and "good home training" in our house was as Southern as the Bonnie Blue Flag.
I seem to remember that we were the only neighbors that got invites to Mrs. Browns for cocktails and h’ordeurves. We were certainly the only neighbors who were allowed over with a small child. Forrest was a year or two older than my oldest sister and quite handsome and football captain and considered a catch and all of that. He went to the local high school with my sisters. I think that the currently first nameless Mrs. Brown might have smelled a possible alliance with a worthy family. My mother would have never been so rude as to say it, but she considered the Brown family and Forrest in particular to be far far below the sights she had set for her oldest daughter.
In retrospect she was correct as Forrest eventually enlisted in Viet Nam to hide the fact that he was flunking out of college. As I recall he eventually grew his hair long and became some sort of invented hippie (as the free love movement was something we actually missed on Donnybrook) and married a lanky dishwater blonde and moved to Lake Elsinore to airbrush crazy scenes onto tricked out vans. My Mother believed my sister Suda, cheerleader, math wizard, top 100, Prom Queen to be a consort fit for a King. But better than that…a successful businesswoman without the need of a matrimonial umbrella. Free from a man, and desire, that horrible desire that drove women to force themselves into slavery.
ROSEMARY Brown. Rosemary. They retired to Leisure World eventually and my parents rarely heard from them.
Now…what the hell was his name?
Christy Carol House was born on December 26, 1962 in Dallas Texas. And though living in Dallas in November of 1963 had nothing WHATSOEVER to do with the Kennedy assassination or the resulting conspiratorial cover up. Contrary to published reports I was not the "baby on the knoll".