Read Online Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan - Free Book Online

news that a major Hollywood movie was being filmed there, The Yearling , starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, and introducing a young boy in his first acting role, Claude Jarman Jr. Hindsight focuses the motives for my mother’s and aunt’s choice of vacation site: I might be “discovered.” Indeed, every day they brought me to watch the filming along with the other gawkers. Apparently, however, something I’d eaten disagreed with me and caused me to lose my big chance at baby stardom; what’s more, it covered us all with shame and me with something more specific. The first memory of disgrace dates from this time, when I recall Mommie kneeling beside me in the ladies’ room, cleaning my legs with wet paper towels, and crying while she did it. I couldn’t have helped it, yet I knew I’d let her down.
    But there was a good vacation, too.
    I must have been no more than four when I was taken for a holiday in North Carolina. The particulars of how and why we went there are hazy—something about Uncle Aham’s having rented a house for the summer—but the sense of that holiday is anything but hazy.
    Whatever magic North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains must have worked on us, I remember only happy moments from that trip, at least until its ending. Was it a week? A month? An entire summer? I’ll never know, because those who could tell me are dead, and what I retain is a child’s sense of time, which is to say a sense of timelessness. Whenever I hear Samuel Barber’s poignant setting of James Agee’s “Knoxville,” especially the version recorded by Eleanor Steber, it throws me back in nostalgic yearning to that vacation, as if it were a memory of my whole childhood, not one unusual occurrence.
    There were early yellow mornings and long violet twilights, and in between the days were hot and slow and smelled like oranges and nobody shouted. When the dusk blued into night, I was allowed to stay up and see the stars—the first time I ever met them—and I was introduced to the Big Dipper.
    My lifelong love of gardening began on this trip. That love would remain abstract until my twenties and then, for the next thirty years, be confined to window boxes, potted plants, and city-rooftop planters until it could nestle into my own real earth garden at last, only a few years ago. It was my mother who unwittingly began this gentle obsession, by sharing with me what I now realize was her sole experience with nurturing plant life, one her mother had taught her . On discovering that one of the sweet potatoes she’d bought at the market had already sprouted “eyes,” she showed me how to prop it with toothpicks in a glass jar half-filled with water and promised that “sweet-potato ivy” would sprout and grow. She hadn’t anticipated that I’d promptly sit down to watch it happen, refusing to budge in case I might miss the moment of sprout. The sweet-potato jar of necessity became portable; otherwise, she would never have got me to the lakeside, or even out on the porch. And sprout it did, eventually. But only after we were back home, by then in Mount Vernon—and the ivy, grown long and lush, twined up and around the living-room window and remained such a delight to me that every windowsill in the small apartment held rows of differently shaped jars and glasses containing sweet potatoes in varying stages of ivyhood development.
    But that vacation was also the time of the puppy—one of a neighbor’s dog’s litter given to me. Oh, he was a classic: a golden, silky, loose-limbed, floppy-eared, eight-week-old cocker spaniel with enormous liquid brown-amber eyes that blinked at me worshipfully. I named him Happy, which he made me very. I carried him everywhere, slept with him, talked, played, and planned with him, and knew I’d made a friend for life.
    It wasn’t until the neighbor was helping Mommie pack the car to