Pros and Cons of Getting Out of the Ghetto

Moving up to the top of Queen Anne Hill

We stayed in the dilapidated flat across the street from the Fremont Bridge for several years even after my father left home, because all he left us with, was $5000 of debt and a pile of tubeless tire repair kits that he bought because it was going to be the next great thing. At the time people scoffed, “How would you keep a tire inflated then?” All tires had inner tubes back then.

But he was correct and never followed through with selling the kits despite having the only distributorship in Washington. He also created years before, in the 40’s, a cart covered in metal with two rear doors to haul things safely behind your car. He sold the plans to a guy for $300 and it was rumored that the guy started a business called UHaul.

Finally, Mom was debt free, while entering grade 6, we moved. I will tell you now, if you have a child who is 12, changing schools is a nightmare. I ended up doing the same thing to my youngest, but she had a tough time with it too. You are an outcast in a sea of the meanest humans on earth. Cliques have long been formed. Unless you fortunately have parents with buckets of money and you happen to look like Heidi Klum, you are sunk. I did not have either of those things. but did have a nice normal looking craftsman house. I was grateful for that.

This was a two bedroom so I was till sleeping with Mom but eventually my brother, who was golem anyway, went to sleep in the basement and I got my own room.

My mother was psychic although she refused to believe it. One night late, leaning far out my bedroom window, I lit a cigarette that my friend Marda stole from her parents. Not two drags in and I hear a scream from the other room. “FIRE! I smell FIRE!!!” There is no way she smelled it from her room with all her windows sealed shut. Pure psychic ability. She did believe in astrology and my Gram and my Great grandmother both could read fortunes playing cards. For Christmas, my mother got me a Ouji board.

At first, the letters would come into my head and I would push the oracle to where they were, but as time went on it shifted and the letters would come so fast that the oracle just moved on its own. I answered all my mother’s questions. It told her she would meet a tall man, with dark hair named George. That he would be a Boeing employee and that he lived nearby. All of that came true and they dated for a while but he was impotent and my mother couldn’t live with the prospect of marrying someone who couldn’t perform. Also, he had 4 grown children that he spent lots of time with.

When the oracle started to identify himself, that’s when I quit. My mother was livid with me, but I could not be budged. That spirit guide Jimmy was not something a twelve-year-old could control. I still to this day will not touch a Ouji Board, I feel like it is a door to a bar, full spirit world of drunks. You open that door and God knows who will pop in!

I tried to fit in, but I was in that chubby, prepubescent age. My mother still picked all my clothes and when the popular girls were wearing Twiggy Fashion, go-go boots and mohair sweaters - I was wearing mid-calf brown corduroy gathered skirts and the most hated - saddle shoes. During this time, I was also diagnosed with “Lazy Eye” and got a pair of glasses that were cats’ eye framed in brown with one lens like window glass and one lens like the bottom of a coke bottle.

I did volunteer to go help out at the blind portable. We actually had a program for the blind at John Hay Elementary. They had their own separate building, and I became friends with two girls in particular, Pandy, short for Pandora and Shannon. They didn’t care what I wore. Once, we went on a field trip to the Olympic Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. It was just for our unsighted students, and I got to be a guide. The textures and the smells are so deep and unforgettable in this moss-covered paradise, a wonderful sight to see Pandy’s nimble fingers and delighted face and she admired the delicate mosses and bark. It contains many of the virgin trees on earth - some of the Western Hemlock were 300 feet tall!

The Seattle Times covered the story and put it on the front page, with a large picture of me and Pandy, petting a tree. I had a scarf tied around my head, my thick cats eyeglasses, bundled in a coat that may have been my grandmothers. I looked like a 40-year-old, 200-pound hygiene teacher. I prayed to God that no one would recognize me. But there was my name, Pamela Wheeler - right on the front page.

Good thing my friends were blind. I told them about it anyway and they both howled with laughter. I started right then, eating celery and begging for a mohair sweater.