I’ve never been particularly earnest, so it’s a good thing my mother named me Deborah Valerie. She swears she meant to say “Valerie Jane” but got confused while heavily sedated. She was thinking of Debbie Reynolds’ latest movie at the time of my birth. “Debbie” left my signature upon arrival in Fort Smith, Arkansas at age 6 when I would be forever after “Valerie”.
My mother tells me that, as an infant, I would spend quiet mornings in a wooden playpen on the front porch. She came onto the porch one morning as my brother was just beginning to use my father’s hack saw on the bars of the playpen. “She wants out,” he told my mother. The same rationale was used when she caught my brother gently placing me on the roof of the third story porch of our house. He’d lifted me out of the window after removing the screen.
“She wants out,” he said, “to touch the snow.”
My father documented our childhood moments when he could. Poor guy was 43 years old with two toddlers 18 months apart. My mother developed an aversion to being the photographer — the family chronologer. Sadly, she was quite adept at cutting off people at the neck or photographing feet. When Daddy was around, camera in hand, he filmed “Debbie Being Angry” or “John on His Bike.” It is probably to my benefit that Mother never grabbed the camera to film “Debbie Bleeding Profusely.”
One of those thank you for not filming moments in my younger days–
My best friend in kindergarten was Elizabeth Steele. Being overly clever at age five, I nicknamed her Lizard Ironpants. Poor Lizzie became irate upon hearing her new moniker. She picked up the object closest to her and threw it at me. Unfortunately it was half a brick and it hit me smack in the face. I have a true memory of this incident. My mother’s retelling does not reinforce it. She wasn’t even home at the time. My father was. He and his friend Winton were tearing out the back porch of our house in preparation for a new screened in version.
I walked through the yards, home to Daddy with my hand over my nose and mouth. This became a familiar hand gesture throughout my childhood. Placing my hand over the injured area to stem the flow of blood.
My nose was broken, my upper lip split. I don’t know what happened to Lizard Ironpants. I don’t think anyone came down on her too viciously; her homelife left something to be desired, according to my reinforced memory files. Something looms in a forgotten place in my brain about guns with real bullets and a suicide in Lizzie’s house. And there’s a faint memory of Lizzie showing up at the front door at “six o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake, with no shoes on and it was snowing.”
Shortly after the Lizard Ironpants incident, but long enough for my face to have healed, my father bought a Bell & Howell movie camera. He missed a few classic shots of me. Like when I was sitting on the headrest of the front seat of my mother’s 1960 Chevy Impala convertible.
John and I were told to wait in the car while she ran into the store for milk. The 1960 Chevy Impala convertible did not have seats that locked in place like they do today. So, when my brother kicked the seatback, I flew forward. Face first into the radio. This is a true recollection, not reinforced. I remember an elderly woman grabbing Kleenex out of her purse to staunch the blood as she yelled to my brother to go into the store and get my mother. The memory stops there. I don’t remember the pain of childhood injuries.
I pondered pain quite a few times this week. Epidural steroid injections, Hepatitis A vaccine, more steroids in my poor torn rotator cuffs… it’s been a week in needle park.