Here’s a Childhood Without Scandal
by Betty Lukas
Memoirs seem to be in fashion now. Book reviewers seem to revel in the muck. So do readers. The worst parents are showing up on page after page as detailed by the most facile of authors—usually the daughters of those parents—who manage, by their literary acumen (or lack thereof) to captivate their readers with the most intimate and sordid details of family life.
Perhaps my interest in this plethora of what I hope is at least accurate, if unsavory, information (remember, we have been frequently fooled in recent years) stems my own curiosity and, I admit it, envy at what appears to be total recall of every scalding event from wailing in the crib to budding boobies pubescence. I have to wonder how these tattletales can accurately remember each and every emotion-squeezing detail of their tortured life with father and or mother—or sometimes both. Maybe suffering is the cauldron that brews the scribbler.
As for me, I have no such memories, certainly not the ones of such emotional squalor as recorded in page after page of these lacerating revelations.
Actually, my recollections of childhood are brief and immensely boring, because they contain no tabloid intimacies –no incest, no ménages, no police intervention, no rehab duty. My mother didn’t run away with anyone. Neither did Dad. I mean, not one item would serve to sell a book.
I was raised in a WASP household in Toledo, Ohio. How boring can that be?
My parents were normal people, normal because they never tortured each other physically, verbally or emotionally. My father was a successful businessman, and my mother was a homemaker, who spent her free time at bridge clubs, garden clubs and church work. Neither was inordinately involved in religious activities and neither spoke about their faith. But Mother employed her prodigious cooking skill in the church kitchen where she spent countless hours preparing those fabled dinners while I hung around the pots and pans as she scurried from burner to burner making sure her meals came out just right. Father only attended church on Easter and Christmas. That was a given.
In summer, Dad golfed with his buddies at Heatherdowns Country Club where he served as president for several terms, and Mother appeared at the club on Tuesdays when women were permitted on the course. She was a Golferette. She and her Golferette friends chatted and cooled themselves with gimlets or whisky sours after the game. The men favored stronger fare. But it was all in good fun. I took golf lessons as a teenager, but wasn’t an apt learner because I had a crush on the teacher.
I never remember either parent being unfaithful or screaming at each other. Certainly not my mother, who was always home before 5 with dinner on the table even if she’d spent the afternoon shopping or socializing at the bridge table. And the only time Dad yelled at my Mother was when he couldn’t find his underwear. “Oh, Net,” he’d holler from the bedroom where he was dressing for work, “where is my underwear?”
Such was the substance of the conversations that I overheard. Hardly worth a book.
As the years passed and I moved away from home—to college and then marriage—they continued their predictable rituals as long as they could–the pinochle clubs, the conventions, the visits to their only daughter and their grandchildren in California.
And then they died with nary a word put to paper until now.
The thing is, their kind of life deserves attention, too.
Betty Lukas is the retired News Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times, a former journalism instructor at Cal State Dominguez Hill and in recent years, a regular contributor to Peninsula People and PV News. PEN