Getting up the college doorsteps

An image today at the office, of. . . . . a staff person "graduating" to get to ride the chairlift snowboarding on the mountain, reminded me of trying to get up the college doorsteps with Alona.

Tara Boudreau is wearing pink stretch pants, walking on top of the 4 foot tall corrugated aluminum pipe that dominates our playground.  In first and second grades, these three lengths of pipe are much more enticing than any other playground features.  Tara commands control of the pipes, singing "I am a material girl", followed by her lemmings.  I wonder what a material girl is.  Someone who wears pink, I think.  I have no interest in being a material girl.

When Tara's interest in the pipes runs out, Alona & I approach.  The 3 and 4 foot tall pipes are easily mounted.  The 5 foot tall pipe, however, is a challenge, especially being small for my age (permanently I now know).  So we decide that getting on top of this pipe, smelling of metal and sand dust, was akin to getting up the college doorsteps.  While, at first futilely, trying to heave our bodies on top of the pipe and taking running starts, we sang, "get up the college doorsteps, get up the college doorsteps."  Whatever that means.  Who can guess at the mind of a 6 year old?  By the end of first grade, we were regularly getting up the college doorsteps.

This reminded me of other funny ideas I hatched as a child.  It's wily how an idea can sit up there, unchallenged, for an entire lifetime (so far).  Until that idea is accessed again, and pondered, I take it for granted that the world really was as it exists in my memory.  It's both charming and world-breaking to look at childhood memories as an adult and to say, "oh. . . OH!" 

When we moved from California, I missed my Granny.  I missed visiting the La Brea tar pits and getting sandwiches at Trader Joes and hearing the planes land overhead and shopping for art supplies at Flax and going to mommy's beach (now too polluted for swimming, I hear).  So I melded my initials and formed Enid, my own travel agency.  Since I'd been alive, my father's sole career had been in tourism.   I set up shop next to our back steps, in the driveway, at the end of my dead-end street.  I had arranged with Granny that she would take the tourists around Los Angeles.  This was while Granny was still driving, before she crashed her pumpkin-pie-colored little car and couldn't drive anymore because of her back pain. 

Today, as I told this story, following the story of getting up the college doorstep and preceding the story of when I formed my very own Babysitters' Club, my brain went thud.  Before, when thinking of my first venture, I had always felt proud and charmed.  Today, this cutesy happy memory took on a slightly tarnished tone.  I so missed my old Los Angeles home, I designed travel packages so tourists could go visit all the places I wished I was.  Why did it take me so long to realize this?

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula

"The woman I'm thinking of, she loved me all up, but I'm so down today.  She's so fine, she's in my mind, I hear her calling"