After seven years in the sticks, in trailers (but on land we owned) our family bought our first real house. The place in the boonies was sold, and we moved into a nearly 1900 sq ft 4-bedroom, 2-bath stick-built home with an attached garage on 3/4 of an acre. Dad actually bought a brand-new Toyota Land Cruiser (in those days, think Jeep CJ form factor). Mom grew tomatoes. Dad planted fruit trees. Mom took painting classes and took up drawing and painting, and was damned good at it. She won prizes for her pictures at the county fair.

We began to take 2-week driving vacations every year, and Mom & Dad bought vacant land in a neighboring state, where we eventually built a cabin and had a well drilled, and we saw the sights and “got away” for a solid two weeks each year. We even made lifetime friends near our cabin, and saw them at least once a year. It felt like things were looking up. When I say “we” built a cabin, we literally did. Our hands, our tools, and everyone pitched in except my baby sister. It was small, but weather-tight, and we kids had a sleeping loft. I kind of loved getting away to that place. It took a couple of days to drive there, so we would camp in state or national parks along the way, and see even more of the country. While camping, Mom would often break out an instrument (or two) and we would sing around the campfire and nearby campers would come to listen.

We were living in a real house and taking vacations. At Christmas, we had a real Christmas tree. Often, we had new clothes. Family and friends came to visit us and hang out with our family. My older sister, to whom I had grown close by this time in our shared introversion, entered and won a beauty contest. She met a guy with whom she took ski trips, and they got married in our front yard. My paternal grandmother, whom I’d never met (and who was going blind) came to visit on her last cross-country trip from Ohio. (My paternal grandfather had passed when I was four, and I actually never met him that I can recall.) My maternal grandfather, a noted sportsman and inventor whom I’d met but once, could no longer tolerate a lingering and painful illness, and killed himself. Shortly thereafter, my maternal grandmother came to live with us.

We were, it seemed, a sort of stable point, safe harbor, for the extended family. It was a warming feeling to welcome our kith and kin to our “real” house.

And it all changed. I was never entirely sure why. I think it may have been because Aerojet General was going to lose their Atlas contract, the rank and file had been forewarned, and Mom & Dad decided they had to cut back and be ready to move. We sold the house, bought another trailer, and moved onto a rented lot in a trailer park well out of town, in the middle of a school year.

This was a nice trailer park, in that the lots were pretty generous, it was remote, on a quiet road, on a creek, had a lake we could fish in, and blackberries grew in abundance down by the creek. Grandma bought a smallish trailer (which if I’m right, she lived in the rest of her life), and put it on the lot next to ours. I would nip over for chowder or tomato soup and oyster crackers and even an occasional sip of white Port wine. Grandma smoked like a chimney, and I grew used to it. Mom hated the smell of cigarettes, but it didn’t bother me. We grew flowers, but no food.

I had, during my final year at my last school, stopped using my first name and began using my middle name to be more “normal.” I use that name to this day, as far as most people are concerned. At the new school, I found myself ahead of most of my classmates, began to participate in sports (basketball and softball and flag football), I had good clothes, a good name and solid performance in classes, and for the first time in my school career was not bullied. I had my first “girlfriend” (for a few weeks) and some money from delivering newspapers, and graduated Salutatorian, second-highest in my class, from eighth grade. My mom had taken up singing for tips at a local coffee house and I would sometimes go and sing with her. I organized and ran a huge easter egg hunt for all the younger kids in the trailer park. Everyone had to pay a dollar to enter, and I bought prizes for those who found certain special eggs. The managers of the park hailed me as some sort of minor hero. Socially, at least, things were again looking up.

Then, the Atlas contract at Aerojet General was lost, 60% of the personnel were laid off (including my dad) and it was, once again, time for him to find a new job. we school-aged kids stayed in school while he went out job-hunting. He left the house for some months, driving to interviews at aerospace companies around the Southwest, and eventually landed a job in Arizona. This was during Christmas break, the break between school semesters, and Mom quit her gig at the coffee house. They threw her a huge Christmas-themed going away party. Whereupon, a new chapter begins. Adios California, hola Arizona. We wanted for nothing between his jobs, so I suspect he and Mom had put by savings from the sale of the house, which tided us over. But now it was time to pack up the trailer and move on.