Why Did I Cry?

          Way back in Neanderthal days when I was two years old or so. I remember having a
birthday party. I do not remember who was there, or if I even had a birthday cake. I was wearing a violet dress; one that I remember wearing on stage in a Shirley  Temple contest at a movie theater down by my Aunt Hedwig's home. 

          All I remember about that day, was that I was crying about something. I do not know why. Modern psychology indicates that I was too young to have such a party and it was "nerve wracking" for me. I did survive that party and continued on to have other kinds of adventures.

          During that May, the twins (my brothers) were born. Mom had started the wash as usual and I was trying to help. The twins started to cry and Mom went upstairs to take care of them.  I, thinking I would be helpful, started to lift a sheet out of the wash tub into the wringer. I seem to have tried to help the sheet along and suddenly I found my hand went with the sheet under the wringer. I know then why I cried. It hurt.  

          A neighbor boy jumped a fence between his house and ours, and I was whisked away to the hospital. It was my very first experience hitchhiking. Of course, the boy had no car at that time, very few teens did. So hitchhiking was a normal thing for him to do. The trip to the hospital was quick and I was bandaged up and returned home. Because I was trying to help Mom, I did not get a spanking or a scolding. 

          My life from that point, [until the next adventure] was quiet and uneventful. I became an ordinary little girl in "Shirley Temple" curls. I even had a best friend called Ann Lavin, who was lucky enough to have gotten a Dutch haircut (no metal curlers to sleep on at night].  It was nice then being a young "grown-up" in the house. I helped Mom doing small jobs that she no longer had time for. The twins took up a lot of her time. 

          My dad would read the comics to me every day.  Some I remember very well, and others, not at all.  Those were the days, when comics were about real people and real events. They were not what we see today, as ugly cartoons, with weird clothes and supposedly "funny" one liner jokes that are not so funny any more. University comics now are even uglier and make no effort at being funny. Oh, well. It was a time of growing up for me and I was not unhappy with life as I found it then.