Because my parents were desperate to be seen as upwardly mobile—or "uppah middel clah-yass", in my mutha's particular accent—we moved around a lot during the first few years of my life. First, we lived in the projects of Queens, then Co-Op City in the Bronx, before my dad took a job with a family of crooks in a very small town in Pennsylvania that only lasted a year, before we finally settled down in Rockland County. The drama caused by so many moves was epic, and like any two real "drama queens", my parents played their new roles as stressed-out "Noo Yawk" parents to the hilt.
My mom caught a terrible cold that happily turned out to be a spot on her lung from a serious case of "Walking Pneumonia" (ooo, that sounds bad!), which cinched the deal for us moving right after my dad quit his job, pocketed by the money he got from shaking down the crooks he worked for, armed with my mom's bad health stories that served as convenient excuses for life's little problems. It wasn't exactly like becoming a superhero, but for my street-savvy parents, it could be worked into being told that way very easily to their hometown crowd, which is exactly what they did. "They'll get theirs, someday", said with a careless shrug of the shoulders, as my mom wrapped her precious antique glassware in newspaper and tissue, because, really, that was way more important than turning state's evidence against fraudulent thieves, in her mind. They got what they wanted. They also took whatever they wanted, like any city person on the make.
They took almost all of the house's original antique bronze fixtures, which they promptly packed away and never used again. I know, because I moved them around a few years back during my own horrible move from Brooklyn to here, which meant I worked to clean my mom's basement space for weeks, with her sitting there looking at everything, like any episode of the popular t.v. show "Hoarders". She'd packed up all of her stuff from the house in New City into big boxes ("Your grandfather was sick!") never to even look at them again, until the day I picked them up and moved them around, with her youngest sister's pile sitting near-by in the dank gloomy space that was crammed full, also similarly abandoned in the wake of my grandmother's death, because my aunt said she "needed room" in their apartment, which is crazy code for "hoard during times of great stress", for those of you still new to the language of the insane.
Nonetheless, I picked up a feel for the mountains of the Northeast that I still have. It helped prep me for the winters of upstate New York during college, which is "Canada cold", and for those of you who don't know how or why that is so cold, here's a handy map for you to see its relative position, as it is situated to the state of New York: http://www.canada-maps.org/canada-map.gif. It also meant that my parents almost immediately caved in to the weather, in dramatic outbursts designed to widely telegraph their ineptitude among the mountain folk of Coudersport, Pennsylvania (http://www.bestplaces.net/images/city/coudersport_pa.gif), just in case they wondered whether or not any of the stereotypes about city slickers were true, and they are.
We were smarter, faster, and funnier than the other kids, which got us immediate promotions in grade school, though I was still in pre-K nursery programs and reading classes before I attended Kindergarten, because I wanted to go to school to learn. I already knew how to read, anyway, which was the basis of my soundly reasoned arguments to my crazy-ass city parents stuck in the deep snow of the rural Pennsylvanian mountains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coudersport,_Pennsylvania). But, we loved it. We could walk around unmolested by strangers, and our neighbor's daughter Jamie (Hello to "The Peppers"!) was our babysitter, and she was a really nice girl (still is!). We could pile the autumn leaves as high as we wanted without anyone hassling us like they did in the city, and then jump into it as many times as we were willing to rake it back into a pile.
We walked around with our cute little snow doggie "Snowflake", feeling like we belonged there, because we did. The small towns of upstate New York are a lot like the classic main streets of other Northern towns throughout New England, each one as quaint and charming as the next. I actually met a girl from Coudersport at Oneonta State, a blond girl who looked Dutch/German; pretty but thick, which means farm life. We were both taking "Black and White Photography", which meant a lot of time in the darkroom to chat. We laughed about how the cold of Pennsylvania was almost the same as New York, and we were glad for the prepping. A lot of kids from downstate and other places couldn't handle it, my own parents included.
It's a cold so strong, it almost burns you like nitrogen. You just have to have the DNA for it, and I found that I did. It was similarly baffling to the Coloradans I met during my travels, who were mostly ignorant about the rest of America, like rural people in the middle of America typically are. I explained to them that I spent a year in the mountains of Pennsylvania, backed by my time in the mountains of New York, but it just didn't take. A girl I knew from high school worked at the same paper as me, and she was busy doing "schtick" for the blond crowd gathered around her, in a cheap "Seinfeld" imitation that she thought would give her safe passage through the hinterlands of America, an act she honed on the road after leaving Rockland County for Germany with her German-born parents, even changing her name to "Inga" from the plainer "Ingrid" we knew her as, like she was an exotic Swedish ski instructor instead of some loudmouth brunette from the desperate housewife town of a mostly Jewish New City in suburban New York.
Her bad act caused a lot of problems at work. "But, Marie doesn't act/talk/sound like that, 'Inga' and she's from the same area as you!", said with the same pseudo-quizzical tilt of the head, because those kids were full of shit, too. Acting awards all-around. Soon enough, they got it. I didn't use the backwoods as a "work-out" like some insane tourist from SoCal. No, they saw my version of a big blond in my Scotch boyfriend, and that lad don't feel the cold for nothing, with or without the kilt, kids. Ditto, bro. I got my own clan plaid, too: http://www.novastory.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/digphotos/id/1368/rec/1. Oh, and I saw online that it'll top out at a "high" of 72° F in Halifax this week! Brrr...stay cool, babies;) Mama's coming home, soon.
Congratulations, Natalie! "Mummy" loves you, too: http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1348725-doucette-becomes-first-first-nations-child-welfare-specialist-in-nova-scotia
