My parents met in high school and dated during college. They got married and then both pursued further degrees at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, NC. My father worked on a medical degree, and my mother got her Masters in Social Work. I know they spent at least one year abroad in the UK while my father got some work experience.
My mom soon found that the problem with being married to young doctors is that young doctors are very attractive to young nurses. My father was not a particularly loyal person, it seems. And so he cheated. A lot. Inevitably, this lead to an early divorce when I was still just an infant. I have no memories (and only a few pictures) from the time when my parents lived together.
Soon, my father was living in Richmond, VA, and I would see him at least once or twice a month. I have fond memories of watching Sha-Na-Na and eating Chef Boy-Ar-Dee cheese pizzas on the weekends I was with him. I have a scar in my right eyebrow from where I cornered a cat in an alley and tried to pet it. I’d spent summers with him as well.
My mother’s family was very close and lived about 1.5 hours away in Lexington, NC. My grandparents on my mom’s side were wonderful, warm people. My grandfather was a high school football coach and math teacher. He taught me basic addition and subtraction before I even entered kindergarten. As a result, I wound up doing 1st grade math work when I entered kindergarten and eventually skipped 1st grade and went straight into second grade at Carrboro Elementary.
I have a very clear foundational memory from this time. A driver’s car broke down outside our house, and he knocked on our door wanting to use our phone to call a tow truck. My mom, always an empathic person, generously let him in to use the phone and gave him a glass of water to drink while he waited in our living room for the tow truck to arrive. While he was waiting, however, he began talking in a very racist way about the black minority in North Carolina. My mother, incensed, threw him out of her house on the spot. Mind you, this was a single woman living with a young child, six years old or less, so I’m sure doing so would have been a very scary thing to do. This taught me that you should always speak up for what you believe.
When I was away one summer (probably 1979), my mother went to a continuing education course at Case Western Reserve University and met my stepfather-to-be. He was also a social worker, working with the US Veterans Administration in Leavenworth, Kansas. They developed romantic feelings for each other, despite living distantly from each other. At least once, my stepfather-to-be and his three kids came to visit us in Chapel HIll, but I really had very little contact with them, as they were all between 5 and 11 years older than me.
The following summer, my stepfather-to-be was transferred up to Anchorage, Alaska, by the VA. While he was there, he suffered his first major heart attack at age 35. Since I was with my father, my mother was free to fly up to Alaska and she nursed him back to health. A few months later, she made the decision to move us all the way cross-country from the east coast to frigid Alaska.
We drove, cross country, in a Plymouth hatchback, all the way to Seattle, where we visited with some of my mom’s friends and then took the ferry up to Alaska. My mom made a point of stopping at a bunch of kid-friendly and train-related destinations along the way. (I was big into trains when I was a kid. Sorta still am.)
We moved in the middle of my second grade year. I was 6 at the time. When I started midyear at Lake Otis Elementary school, none of the other kids knew I was younger or had skipped a grade. I was fortunately always big for my age, so I fit right in with all the other students.
The following year, my mother and stepfather married — and that is another chapter of my life (and, sadly, a much more turbulent time.)
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