Jeannie Out of the Bottle - Barbara Eden [8]
My grandmother may have been puritanical and a little stern, but she also loved me without reservation. When I was about three, she and my mother became worried that I was thin and listless, so they took me to a doctor. The doctor took one look at my white, pinched little face and decreed, “She’s a hothouse flower! She needs sun. Get her outside and let her play in the mud. She’s far too clean.”
So my grandmother took me into the garden, presented me with a spoon and a can, and showed me how to make a mud pie, while I squirmed in distaste. And even though I obeyed my grandmother’s instructions to the last letter, as soon as I’d finished making one pie, I’d run inside the house and plead for her to wash my hands immediately.
I still remember vividly my grandparents’ house on Upson Avenue in El Paso—where my red shoes disappeared. It was built in the Victorian style, with a little walkway going around the porch. About four years ago, I was booked to do a show in New Mexico, and flew into El Paso. A couple of sheriffs were on hand to drive me over the state line to the theater, and on the way I asked them to take me by my grandparents’ house. It was still standing, and I was pleased.
When I was five, we moved to 1207 Bush Street in San Francisco. I attended my first school, Redding, and my life began in earnest. Not that I was happy to leave home for school. I felt far too safe and secure at home to want to venture out into the world, and I would much rather have stayed at home with my mother and my grandmother.
In fact, leaving my serene cocoon of home and family and being hurtled into school was a severe shock for me. On my first day there, my only happy moment was opening my lunch box and finding the sandwiches my mother had so painstakingly made for me that morning—a little piece of home.
I might have eventually settled down in school, but one day—just after I started the first grade—I looked up at the blackboard and suddenly couldn’t see a single word written on it. My parents were petrified that I might be going blind, and although the doctor’s diagnosis of a lazy eye was a relief, my mother still cried bitterly.
At the time, I couldn’t grasp the reason, but when the very next day the doctor hooked a black patch onto my glasses (“We must cover the strong eye and make the lazy one work” was his edict) and ordered me to wear it all the time, I understood the reason for my mother’s tears.
Funnily enough, none of the other children at school gave me a hard time about the patch. My only worry, though, was that I wouldn’t be able to read properly. I loved reading so much, and still do. Learning to read had opened a whole new world up to me, and my mother always said that I went to school one day, and the very next began to read without stopping.
My mother and aunt got me my first library card when I was in the first grade, and I read The Wizard of Oz and all L. Frank Baum’s other books, and The Secret Garden.
Although I spent hours and hours reading, lost in my imagination and quiet as a mouse, I still wasn’t an easy child to raise. I always questioned everything. I’d usually end up doing what I was told, but not without running through a long list of questions first. In fact, I once overheard a relative clucking to another of the aunts, “Alice is going to have her hands full with that one!” I felt a flash of pride, but the reality is that I was never much of a rebel.
Part of the reason was that I loved my mother so much, but I also knew that rebelling wasn’t polite and, more than anything else, I’d been schooled in politeness. Right through my childhood and way into my teens, whenever I went out, my mother always reminded me, “Always make sure you have your please, your thank you, and your handkerchief in your pocket.”
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, I also had an innate sense that we were living in dangerous times and that my parents were struggling to survive;