Remembrances of Christmases Past, Part 4
Writing by treason on Thursday, 29 of December , 2005 at 12:10 pm
…All together now: How poor were you? My sister, who had returned to Chicago, was working in a factory for minimum wage and living in a little apartment near the L station. (When I visited her there a year later, the building smelled so bad that we had to hold our breath starting from the sidewalk, all the way up several flights of stairs, until we were in her apartment with the door shut tight. To this day I don’t know what that stench was.)
She was so poor that all she ate was caramel corn, but she always said that job was the best she ever had and she was happy then. She stood on the L platform in bitter Chicago winter wind at four o’clock in the morning and traveled far to get there. She liked the immigrant women she worked with. She liked her little apartment. Most of her life she would be over two hundred pounds, but this was a time that she would be thin. She didn’t eat because every spare cent she had she bought clothes for me and sent them so I’d have something wonderful to start school. My sister had extraordinary taste and I was her Barbie doll. Everything she wished she could wear, she bought for me. She sent my mother money so we could eat.
Things were grim. My mother had been told that her leg was so badly damaged that the knee might not ever heal. She didn’t drive, we walked everywhere, and she waited tables to support us. This was not good news. Also, the bathroom was upstairs in our wonderful split level apartment. She couldn’t get up the stairs. I remember distinctly a bucket. The bucket was my responsibility. So was shopping and cooking. We lived on bologna and egg sandwiches.
Christmas came. I remember a white plastic clock radio that I had all through high school, college, and through three jobs after college. I’d listen to KGO talk show hosts and Rush; in high school I listened to Dr. Don Rose. I grew up with that radio. It finally died - but I had it for over twenty years.
Again, I had no idea how bad things were, but that was a wonderful Christmas. Out of desperation, my mother cut off her cast and returned to work. And that’s where she met the man who would become my stepfather.
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