Read Online A Thorn in My Pocket: Temple Grandin's Mother Tells the Family Story by Eustacia Cutler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Eustacia Cutler
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my consciousness slides a recollection of myself at Temple’s age.
I’m exploring with my cousin on a golden afternoon like this one, pleased beyond words that he’s allowed me to tag along. We’ve climbed the stairs to a little windowed tower at the top of a once beautiful summer mansion, now abandoned and boarded up, a white elephant brought low by the Depression. Already we’ve roamed the peeling main floor: drawing room, dining room, butler’s pantry, kitchen, back pantry, and maids’ dining room. Up the grand front stairs to the second floor expanse of master bedrooms; then to the third, where the floorboards of the maids’ rooms squeak under our sneakers, scaring us silly. We brace ourselves, ready to run in case there’s a caretaker, praying it’ll be a caretaker and not a ghost lurking in these last shadowy rooms where cracks of sunshine beam through the broken window shutters. The house entices us up one last staircase, steps no wider than our feet and steep as a ladder.
Up we climb to a hot little turret, bright with sun and hung with spider webs long deserted by their spinners. We peer out the smudged turret windows and there, spread below us, is our countryside dusted with Queen Anne’s Lace: fields, hilltop, stables—all of it made strange from this wild height. On the turret window ledge is a wooden box with a glass cover; in it, nesting on wads of sun-yellowed cotton, a collection of blown bird eggs. Had they once belonged to some boy? Did he lose interest and leave them to the spiders? Carefully, we take out the eggs one by one, light as air, with their tiny pinprick holes at each end. The last egg gives out a papery thud when we shake it. Unable to bear not knowing, we crack it open and inside is the dried mummy of a baby bird.
Why now, twenty years later, do I remember the touch of that tiny mummy, brittle as the ancient flies upside down on the window ledge—flies that once bumped against the hot dusty windows, believing that because they could see the sun they could escape to it? Am I doomed like the bird mummy never to hatch, left to dry up in an empty tower room, turned to nothing but a papery thud inside a shell? I must make something happen, make life wink and beckon again. If I lose track of my own life, how can I coax Temple to look for hers? Temple is in school all day now. Though I can’t take on a full-time job, I can make the free afternoon hours count.
Everybody ought to have a tacky dream to start off with. Nothing distinguished like wanting to be Mrs. Roosevelt or Lena Horne, just a dream to get going. If anyone calls you dumb for wanting a Flokati rug or a rip-off copy of a Dior suit, tell them distinction will come later.
My tacky dream is film noir : a grade B movie dream, laid in cheap smoke-filled nightclub with me as the girl singer—but let me lead up to it.
I begin by singing in the afternoon for the Elks, I can’t remember exactly how I got there: something to do with the man in charge of putting on shows for hospital vets. He confuses my performance in the Vincent Club with the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Vincent Club is an old Boston institution that puts on the female equivalent of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Show in order to raise money for the Vincent Memorial Hospital (part of the Massachusetts General). It’s an honor to be in it, and the show’s run is a social plum. All this is too complicated to explain to the Elks’ man, and who am I to argue with him when he’s beckoning me in?
“Sure you can sing for us, I know you St. Vincent girls. You’re all right.” I sing him a calypso song in the auditorium of a veterans’ hospital. Very nervous, very bad, but the nurses applaud. Anything to break the monotony.
The Elks’ man sets me up with a guitar player and puts us to working the vet wards where the wounded from the Korean War are being stitched back together again.
I soon learn that every ward has a “card”; he’s the guy who leads the
I’m exploring with my cousin on a golden afternoon like this one, pleased beyond words that he’s allowed me to tag along. We’ve climbed the stairs to a little windowed tower at the top of a once beautiful summer mansion, now abandoned and boarded up, a white elephant brought low by the Depression. Already we’ve roamed the peeling main floor: drawing room, dining room, butler’s pantry, kitchen, back pantry, and maids’ dining room. Up the grand front stairs to the second floor expanse of master bedrooms; then to the third, where the floorboards of the maids’ rooms squeak under our sneakers, scaring us silly. We brace ourselves, ready to run in case there’s a caretaker, praying it’ll be a caretaker and not a ghost lurking in these last shadowy rooms where cracks of sunshine beam through the broken window shutters. The house entices us up one last staircase, steps no wider than our feet and steep as a ladder.
Up we climb to a hot little turret, bright with sun and hung with spider webs long deserted by their spinners. We peer out the smudged turret windows and there, spread below us, is our countryside dusted with Queen Anne’s Lace: fields, hilltop, stables—all of it made strange from this wild height. On the turret window ledge is a wooden box with a glass cover; in it, nesting on wads of sun-yellowed cotton, a collection of blown bird eggs. Had they once belonged to some boy? Did he lose interest and leave them to the spiders? Carefully, we take out the eggs one by one, light as air, with their tiny pinprick holes at each end. The last egg gives out a papery thud when we shake it. Unable to bear not knowing, we crack it open and inside is the dried mummy of a baby bird.
Why now, twenty years later, do I remember the touch of that tiny mummy, brittle as the ancient flies upside down on the window ledge—flies that once bumped against the hot dusty windows, believing that because they could see the sun they could escape to it? Am I doomed like the bird mummy never to hatch, left to dry up in an empty tower room, turned to nothing but a papery thud inside a shell? I must make something happen, make life wink and beckon again. If I lose track of my own life, how can I coax Temple to look for hers? Temple is in school all day now. Though I can’t take on a full-time job, I can make the free afternoon hours count.
Everybody ought to have a tacky dream to start off with. Nothing distinguished like wanting to be Mrs. Roosevelt or Lena Horne, just a dream to get going. If anyone calls you dumb for wanting a Flokati rug or a rip-off copy of a Dior suit, tell them distinction will come later.
My tacky dream is film noir : a grade B movie dream, laid in cheap smoke-filled nightclub with me as the girl singer—but let me lead up to it.
I begin by singing in the afternoon for the Elks, I can’t remember exactly how I got there: something to do with the man in charge of putting on shows for hospital vets. He confuses my performance in the Vincent Club with the St. Vincent de Paul Society. The Vincent Club is an old Boston institution that puts on the female equivalent of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Show in order to raise money for the Vincent Memorial Hospital (part of the Massachusetts General). It’s an honor to be in it, and the show’s run is a social plum. All this is too complicated to explain to the Elks’ man, and who am I to argue with him when he’s beckoning me in?
“Sure you can sing for us, I know you St. Vincent girls. You’re all right.” I sing him a calypso song in the auditorium of a veterans’ hospital. Very nervous, very bad, but the nurses applaud. Anything to break the monotony.
The Elks’ man sets me up with a guitar player and puts us to working the vet wards where the wounded from the Korean War are being stitched back together again.
I soon learn that every ward has a “card”; he’s the guy who leads the
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