E. A. T.! Everyone Ate Today!

Not sure when I realized we were poor; how early in life;

Stories and events popped up pretty soon; like sleeping in the car;

Like having an outhouse; like my Father getting arrested for hitchhiking from Aspen;

Like me hitchhiking with my Stepfather; like having no electricity or running water;

Like struggling up the path at what seemed like late at night carrying a gallon glass jug (you know;

The ones with the glass loop for your finger and below it another for the other finger)-

Out after dark by myself while god knows what was lurking in the moon shadows, at 5 years old; going to the spring for a jug of water (being told to do so-

I assume). I was scared and excited at the same time; a feeling I would have often….

I knew I had to work; Mother with her history of a broken back, teaching children folkdance part time

And then no dads at all. We were so poor we couldn’t even afford a Dad!

I loved staring at the bubbling, burping cereal as it cooked on the stove; I learned to eat raw potatoes (with salt) and whatever else we could come up with; we followed the goats around and ate what they ate.

“Desperate” was a household word; dimes were squeezed and scrutinized…literally;

And not by me but by her. My best friend Robin and I once mailed a twenty dollar bill to her anonymously. Times were hard. Not exactly Grapes of Wrath, more like……………

Hansel and Gretel;

My grandmother, (’The Witch’, bless her heart), lived in a two story house on the side of a mountain

In the Ponderosa Forest with ice cream and milk delivered every few days by a handsome guy with an official looking cap and a white jump suit with pink stripes.

Her balconies were Swiss Alpine style with cut out gingerbread balusters

And her house was full of dolls behind glass, and music boxes galore, and musical instruments;

Organs and pianos, a mando-chello and zylophone and a life-sized Steif stuffed Santa Claus.

When Mother asked for help, she said she would say “No money, but I will take the boys…..”

And she had us use a wringer washer to wash our own clothes (even though she had

An automatic washer upstairs in the kitchen). But, of course, I already knew how to use a wringer, (having survived having had my arm caught in the wringer already),

She was cool, too; she built us a tree house!

She was rich, so it seemed, and in so many, many ways; words were a cinch, travel was a way of life, common sense was obvious, horses, dogs, gardens, fruit trees, tools, saddles, jeeps and lots of food……She was heavy then…. like I am now at her age……..

I loved Laina; she loved big breakfasts with orange juice and tea and shredded wheat and grape nuts and bananas and big lunches with toast and butter and peanut butter, soup and salad and good hot dinners with lamb chops smoking up the house as they roasted to perfection in the broiler.

We were some sort of royalty, it seemed, but it felt more like Russian royalty-after the revolution;

Something happened to turn our blue blood upside down and inside out.

But before all that; before she took us boys-I learned to take on jobs by the time I was 7 or 8,

I learned to collect coke bottles on the way to school so I could buy lunch!

. We sneaked to neighbors and stole eggs,

Shoplifted……..raw shelled green pumpkin seeds in a huge bin in the walk in in Hemet…and got caught!

I learned that if I wanted something, don’t ask; work for it or don’t expect much at all.

I envied Glenn; his mother was the cafeteria cook and he was just a little stronger, smarter and

Faster than me. He had good meat on his bones

I learned to scavenge stuff from the well-endowed trash cans of La Jolla with the dawn surf in the background and then great scavenging on the beaches for shells of all sorts. I found my first camera in a cave up in those hills.

I loved to wander through the culinary arts store and gape at all the cooking utensils.

I loved to go to other people’s homes and eat with them; and I made sure I was invited back;

By being polite and helpful; I made a child’s living of it; sort of Dickensonian, don’t ya think?.

I watched with wildly mixed emotions as the car drove up around Christmas time and opened up their trunk and pulled out boxes of food; cans and what not and green vitamins and household rejects of various sorts. Robins family and mine both got trunk loads that year.

As gentility, though shabby, it seemed only fitting to go to Prep School or the fancy junior high in the Springs, by the Broadmoor built like a country club…..

Problem was; I had to try to work my way through prep.

Then there was this pivotal hour, back then: Just picture it, if you will….

I was an alert strong boy and so I got on the soccer team here in Santa Fe, but I didn’t have any shoes (cleats),

So the coach had me babysit his kids so I could earn the money for them; he must have known…

And the big soccer trip to Colorado from Canyon Road was fantastic, with great meals in exotic prep schools,

Hotly contested games and dry mouths and lots of oranges to ease the dryness.

Everything was going real well, it seemed, until we hit a steak house the other side of Pueblo:

I had not calculated this in my budget, as much as a twelve year old can budget.

Now, I knew I was poor and not one of them and I must have known it in a deep place because

Well….a rich kid would just borrow money from one of the other kids without even blinking an eye,

But I must have hit a shame spot that afternoon and stayed in the bus and pretended I was sick and then

The Coach came back to the bus and I started to cry and he must have snapped, finally,

And eased me into the restaurant for some food to Eat.

This played itself out again in college, as I was kicked out of the dorms for lack of funds and sometimes slept in my old 1 ton truck in the parking lot after a late seminar.

…..And when my kids went to prep school, ironically; I bought a fake cell phone so I did not look like the only person around there driving a smoking pickup truck…and without a cell phone! I talked on it as I cruised into the drop off area…….shades of Pueblo. What on earth was I doing there? I wonder what my kids must have thought…..

Now I have doodled the word “EAT” ever since, in school while the teacher was talking;

In the margins. I must have doodled it carefully forming the bold outlined Capital Letters-hundreds of times.

I even made a large scale sculpture of the three letters a few years ago and the foundry class and

My friends got a real kick out of it and some even remember pouring it in cast iron in an open-

Faced mold and the twinkling, living phosphene-like lava-esque molten metal danced in golds and oranges and so bright it blasted your eyes and so very very hot it made you want to drop it and run away. Then it dulled and went cold and black; very exciting from beginning to end.

So now I realize something that proves I am fairly mature in my thinking, and having lived on both

Sides of this issue; It Is Psychologically Damaging for Both the Person Who is Eating Next to Someone

Who Isn’t as Well As The One Who Isn’t! We are in this together.

I know these scenarios play themselves out daily around us right now (I have heard about it recently)

The mature sixty year old person in me now says,

‘Make the challenges of my youth become the basis of my strength as an adult and a way to give a gift to the community’.

“Let’s sort this one out”.