Every month, I got something new in the mail -- The Crows of Pearblossom is one I will always remember
-- that snake swallowing the clay egg and writing in pain! What smart crows! Betty June of Lincoln, Nebraska, fled the Midwest at barely 17, maybe 16. She fell in love with Bud O'Hanlon, a "merchant seaman" (that's what I remember her calling him, when I finally pressed her). She ended up giving birth to my half-brother, David O'Hanlon, who I have not seen or heard from since maybe the mid-90's. (There is a story there, an unfortunately white-collar sordid type of story, but I won't relate it here.) Bud apparently liked to smack his woman around -- which she for some unfathonable reason tolerated, until Bud decided the kid might be an easier punching bag. Then Betty left him. Moved to Monterey, CA, worked for the US Army there, got pregnant by "an Army Major" (that's what I was told much later, after she had died) and gave the baby girl, my half-sister, up for adoption. I met her not long after my mom died, and she looked just like my mom.
Mom was Betty, not Elizabeth-nicknamed-Betty. I never met her mother, my grandmother. By the time I was born, her mother (I THINK her name was Dorothy) was long dead, replaced by a new stepmom named Ann. And, I think, Ann was actually married to my mother's step-dad -- so it was step-upon-step.
Ray and Ann lived in a tidy little ranch in Paradise, California. Yes, there is such a place -- though the name always puzzled me when we would go to visit. I grew up in San Francisco -- I thought THAT was paradise. This podunk little town in the Sierra mountains? The dirt was bright, volcanic red. Manzanita trees everywhere -- which my mom would routinely chop down and stick in the trunk, to turn into art projects for her friends -- gluing fake flowers to the ends of the elegant, dark-brown twigs, standing the branch upright in a nice urn filled with Plaster of Paris (THAT I remember -- it was always "Plaster OF PARIS" just like her favorite San Francisco store was "City OF PARIS". My mother never made it to see the actual Paris, though. Her exotic journey was to California, not Europe.
She made it as far as England -- and that's where she died. On my 15th birthday, on the trip that was my birthday present, because I was a budding teen Anglophile with A Thing for Sherlock Holmes.
(Tomorrow morning, I have to go play Sherlock Holmes for my boss's boss -- trying to find background info on a very old contract... she has NO idea what a trigger-phrase "Sherlock Holmes" is. My random but intense interest in the famed detective is part of what killed my mother, that's been stuck in my head since 15 and shaking it isn't something easily done.)
My mom was great. She left Bud, raised David mostly on her own, finally fell in love with my dad, a big, bear-hearted guy who in his early 30's still lived at home with his mom, married him and started a new life.
I was a total surprise to this late-blooming couple. My brother David was nearly 18 when I was born -- and he was my guardian after she died. We had a hard relationship when he ended up stuck with me... a three-year-old kid of his own, a spoiled and finicky Castillian-by-way-of-SnFrancisco wife who was sick of him and planning to leave, and he ended up dumped with a mourning, troubled teenage girl to finish raising. Which he didn't do.
I ended up living with my Grandma, who was born the exact same day as me, but in 1896.
