Lasses Without Lassie
_Casual Lasses Without Lassie The other day I came across some diaries from my childhood and browsed in them enough to find them quaint and intriguing. When I actually read them, I realized what...
...The idyll, of course, ended...
...We spoke to Grandma and Grandpa on the phone...
...We both liked to read—Enid Blyton and the Anne of Green Gables series, Louisa May Alcott, Classics Comics, and something I call "love comics...
...But then who had time for movies...
...When we said goodbye, "Helen and I had to be dragged apart...
...We lived there for three years, almost innocent of electronic entertainment...
...They did have radio down under in 1957, and my sisters and I liked the program "Life with Dexter," about a boy who called his sister "Compost...
...Still, sailing back to America—16 days across the Pacific—was a kind transition...
...The Tingey girls lived a few doors away, and we were in and out of each other's houses every day and slept over many nights...
...Once we went mushrooming in the early morning, and several times on coastal walks we gathered mussels from the rocks...
...Near the end of our stay, our family and the Tingeys took a two-week camping trip in the South Island and walked the famous Mil-ford Track, three days through the bush...
...Steffy and I, and Patricia and Helen Tingey, had a club called B.D.A., which stood for Big Dark Alley, after the closet where we held our first meetings...
...It was beautiful...
...They took us to their apartment to have some refreshments...
...It only means my family moved to New Zealand when I was 9, before television had arrived there...
...In addition to each other, Steffy and I and our younger sister Jenny had best friends who also were sisters...
...Like any normal baby boomer, I was weaned on Howdy Doody and Davy Crockett...
...It's hard to imagine a 1990s nearly-12-year-old writing with the ingenuousness of my entry for that day: "Were up at 7:30 to see us pass under the Golden Gate Bridge...
...Claudia Winkler...
...We spied on neighbors, hoping to "get into a mystery," but never did...
...It even began our initiation into the electronic culture: On the U.S.S...
...It was a kind of homemade Girl Scouts, with badges for tree climbing and cooking and sewing, rather gruesome "loyalty tests," a secret language, and prayers...
...In the two and a half years of my New Zealand diaries, I mention going to "the pictures" all of10 times...
...Mother and Dad took Fred and Riley out to dinner at Fisherman's Wharf while we watched TV at the apartment...
...It was lovely...
...Our mascots were small plastic ballerinas, and when the paint chipped off them, we cut off their heads to remember them by, then ceremonially cast the bodies, bedded in a box of seafern weighted with stones, into the Hutt River, a bike ride away...
...Our days were bursting with live action...
...On these excursions, we sang, "got the pip" with one another (NZ slang for quarreling) and made up, had picnics, and watched Nandi, our golden retriever, swim her heart out in ocean surf or inland streams...
...Super...
...She entertained me by the hour, drawing pictures to illustrate her stories as she went...
...For months beforehand, to get in training, we took Sunday hikes in the hills or around the undeveloped side of Wellington Harbor to Pencarrow Lighthouse— or, best of all, to Waitarere, where the beach boasted the steel hulk of a wrecked ship that we climbed on when the tide was right...
...Uncle Fred and Aunt Riley were there to meet us...
...Mari-posa, we watched a movie every day...
...Mary was 19 and had grown up in an orphanage in Guernsey before emigrating to New Zealand with her boyfriend to get married and start a new life...
...Our housekeeper listened to the radio, too...
...Steffy, the sister I shared a room with, was an inspired and prolific dressmaker for our old-fashioned dolls, Patience and Marilla, while I specialized in accessories: hats, parasols, strings of beads, and tiny books...
...Once, she sent in a request to a pop station, and we were thrilled when they played her song, "Red Sails in the Sunset...
...When I actually read them, I realized what gave them their piquancy: They're a window on a child's life before TV No, that doesn't make me 65...
...Saw Ed Sullivan and Lassie...
...I cried and cried...
...Had lovely lunch...
...There were also movies—a few of them...
...Took Nandi for a swim and had lunch at a tippi-cal American resteraunt...
...Steffy was also the prime mover of our nearly incessant dressups, pretend, and full-scale theatrical productions, as well as a fabled storyteller...
...In the years we had been gone, we'd kept in touch with home only by letter—no casual round-the-world phone calls, much less e-mail...
...Mother read us grownup books: Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, all of Jane Austen, and a history of Britain called Our Island Story...
...Took Nandi to the SPCA [for the night...
...We arrived in San Francisco on June 26, 1960...
...We got settled in the hotel and had dinner...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 41
