F.O.M.#1: My Parents Slept Naked

Up to no good

F.O.M. = Flood Of Memories

Writing a blog and posting it has brought back a flood of memories:  some of them initiate in my own brain, some of it comes as the result of other people.  Writing a blog has helped me reconnect with people and the result is often gobsmaking!

Such a gobsmacker occurred over the holidays when I received an email from Betty Barton, who was in my kindergarten class in Denver about 58 years ago.  She had randomly gotten to my blogpost titled “I am Gloria Etzbach” and she  emailed me to see if I was that Gloria Etzbach.

Could there be any other?  Well, there was my mother but she would never write a blog.  Beside the point.  Betty and I have a budding correspondence going and she is reminding me that I have always been that Gloria Etzbach.

to wit:  ” I also recall one time in class when, for god knows what reason, we were talking in class about night-time rituals or habits or something.  It may have been when John Glaser announced that he watched Jack Paar every night, which everyone thought was immensely cool and sophisticated.  In any event, you announced to the class that your parents slept without any clothing…..Do you remember that????  Too funny. Whichever teacher we had then kept trying to dance away from the topic and kept making little breathless comments like, “Oh, I’m sure they wear some…thing….” but you kept swinging back to it – fairly emphatically, in fact, with this enormous grin on your face. You probably advanced all of our collective consciousness in one fell swoop – and in a much more obliquely instructive fashion than the blasted birds & the bees chat we got later (you probably missed that experience as well…think that was in 6^th grade).” ~ Betty Barton

I am sure it was my mother’s idea, sleeping naked, because she always felt better without her clothes.  Still, in the times of Father Knows Best and Leave to Beaver, parents tucking into twin beds with full length pajamas … this is just another thing that points to the fact that we were not the all American family.  Or maybe we were, and other kids knew enough to keep it quiet.

This reminds me of a time I remember when Daddy took me and my brother Don out to breakfast on a cold and windy January first.  After we had settled in, I stood up and told the waitress, in my always unmodulated voice, that our mother couldn’t come because she was sick.  The entire restaurant burst out laughing.  This is how my unintentional sense of humor began to develop.