Alice in Wonderland-Or, The World is So Full of a Number of Things, I am Sure We Should All be as Happy as Kings! (c) Nita Walker Boles

The course of day to day life when I was small was usually quite pleasing. To say that the world was my oyster would be accurate. Whimsy and mimsy were to be expected. Our sidewalks, leading toward the red Governor's Mansion, were red Slate. So when my little brother rode on his bullet-shaped vacuum cleaner/train each joint in the sidewalk made the appropriate clackety-clack sound and the wheels sort of created train-on-the-track noise as he went. David was usually deeply engaged in whatever endeavor he chose, a wrinkle of concentration on his brow as he imagined his role of engineer.

Mary Beth, my beautiful big sister had curly chestnut brown hair and a matched set of beautiful dimples. She was old enough to take the bus to her tap lessons at the YMCA. As with my brother, I was fascinated and in awe of her beauty,capabilities and accomplishments. We must have walked to school together although I remember that I walked home from pre-school and kindergarten alone.

My birthday came in late November, but because at the time, Colorado allowed enrollment from Jan-Dec of the year you were born, I was allowed to start preschool at age 3 and kindergarten at age 4. To say the least, many of my classmates were nearly a year older than I. It was some 7-8 blocks but I don't remember feeling lost or afraid, because I knew the street signs and landmarks.

Our proximity to the Capitol put us in prime seats for some excellent side shows. The sounds of a marching band drew me outside one spring morning, and I ventured to the corner east of us on Washington Street to look toward Grand Street, about 5 blocks away, where the parade was taking place. The green canopy of trees momentarily blocked my view but instead of a parade toward the north, just to the south I caught the astonishing vision of an Indian--that is, a Native American--in full War Bonnet and sitting atop or a beautiful brown horse. His horse had undoubtedly become nervous with the brash sounds of the band. Several yards behind him were two more of his tribe, less regally dressed and sitting motionless on their horses waiting for this one to calm. They all looked steadily, silently at me.

Even at 4, I thought to myself, "No one is going to believe this." After a moment I turned on my heel and ran to get my brother, calling his name as I went--and alerting the horsemen that trouble was surely coming. By the time I returned with him they had vanished, and I was left with an indelible, incredible memory.

Our mother took every advantage of the resources close by. We were enrolled in Brownies and Girl Scouts as soon as eligible. School field trips included the Colorado History Museum, Molly Brown's Museum, a trip to the Denver Mint. One special class trip was to the Hull House Museum, privately owned by the grandfather of a classmate. I was impressed to see baskets woven so tightly by the Native Americans that they held water. A beautiful white doeskin dress was displayed. Sadly, at the Museum of Natural History at that time, the bodies of Cliff Dwellers were still on display,including that of a child, and I remember thinking if I were dead I would not want my body put on display.

The Girl Scouts took us to the Supreme Bakery where Girl Scout Cookies were made. We went from room to giant room where great rollers cut quilt-sized sheets of dough into shapes with delicate impressions. In one room the creme was added to sheets of crisp wafers in various colors from a plastic tube descending from the ceiling. A woman with a hairnet controlled the flow of the white goo with a foot press.

Our guide was droning on about something and the other Brownies had their heads turned and listening attentively but I was quite interested in the goo dispenser, which had, to the consternation of its operator, stopped dispensing goo. It was just at a level with her head. She stooped beneath it and attempted to dislodge a clump with a wooden tool. Still nothing came out, so she placed her face beneath it to look for the problem just as....well,I don't have to write it, do I? I elbowed the Brownie standing next to me with her head pointed toward the boring tour guide.
She hissed at me while I kept my eyes fixed on the exasperated goo operator who was mopping her face with a rag. I looked around and not one of the other girls had seen! Why was I always the only one who noticed things??!!

The Museum of Natural History was so familiar to me that I could anticipate which room was coming up next. How could our eyes see enough of beautiful amethyst and rose quartz? The 12 foot long core samples that lay in the floors showed an amazing array of geological formations. Crystals in abundance, collections of staggering proportions all lay before us to absorb.

We lived in a wonderful world where there were so many insects, particularly beetles, moths, and butterflies, that Victorian collectors had sorted and classified them by rooms full. Our parents loved to take us there, and to the Denver Zoo. On one visit I observed a polar bear walk out in the summer heat to perch on a rock, but as soon as his bottom hit the surface of the rock he sprang up and jumped into the water. No stranger to cartoons at the age of 4, I burst into laughter and explained what had happened: "The bear sat down on the rock, set his hiney on fire, and made his britches smoke!"

T-Rex was a companion who followed me to the mountains. When we went to Evergreen for breakfasts with our extended family, my siblings and I climbed on and around him, his flesh frozen in rock formations, his bones displayed at the museum below on the prairie. During those years the sounds of the mountains were that of wind through a thousand trees, and water rushing over rock. From Red Rocks you could see a grassy expanse that led to a distant city. But we were within the walls of the mountain fortress, where granite and quartz made climbers of otherwise sane men, and where roads wound in predictable, tight turns, taking you higher and higher, past buffalo that spoke of days not long ago and streams that turned into rushing rivers below.

We ate and drank of the feast before us. Anything was possible.

So I admit it: not only am I an anachronism, I'm a writer and a poet. (c) Nita Walker Boles

My life began on a little farm in the Ozarks of Missouri. I was the third child born on that farm in Exeter, the second to live, and the first to thrive from the beginning. My oldest siblings could still cry at the thought of Betty Ann's death forty years later. My mother would later tell me of the near death of my sister, Mary Beth, who was not able to tolerate any form of cow's milk or formula. So dire was the situation, she said, that her sister sent a dress to bury her in. But she lived, and thrived when someone thought to try goat's milk. The pictures of me show a very plump baby...Mother must have been giddy to have a baby do so well.

The baby before Betty Ann was named Alma Jean, and she never came home from the hospital in Roswell, New Mexico. That is where my parents met, both single, each with two children of their own, and both working at the Air Force Base as civilians during WWII. After the war they bought a beautiful little farm near Exeter, Missouri. They had several years there to meld their families together, and to farm the beautiful land where my eldest sister says our father had to paint the fence posts to keep them from sprouting. But a drought set in and ravaged the area so long that we could not secure a living.

In a twist of hard fate, the drought drove us from the Edenic pastures of Missouri to Colorado. The older children scattered and the family was reborn in Denver with three young children. One older brother came home to finish high school but the rest progressed to adulthood living with relatives in Texas and New Mexico. In Colorado most of my memory of life as a thinking person begins. We did not know how poor we were, because life was too rich to imagine otherwise.

(C) Nita Walker Boles

The content of these pages are copyrighted. If you would like to link or email a post please feel free, but do not otherwise use any material including photographs without permission.

Azar, a Muslim Prince of India (c) Nita Walker Boles

The house on East 12th Avenue was just two blocks from the Governor's mansion. Since we lived there, rented or not, it was ours in my 3 year old mind. We lived there for several years, long enough for me to go to Pre-school, Kindergarten, and first grade at Dora Moore elementary school. The Arts & Crafts home was a staging place for fantastic beauty and wealth, yet our family, unbeknownst to our child-minds, was rather impoverished.

Our parents had left behind a bucolic farm in the Ozarks, driven out by drought, and their four older children, ranging from 12 to young adulthood, had scattered for material support to relatives--or to the Army, and the specter of the Korean war, in the case of the eldest. There were just three of us children, a brother and two sisters, as we started life in the house with benches built into the front porch and the first floor staircase landing.

It was a place of welcoming, inviting you to sit and visit. The staircase alone would give you pause as you entered, oak banisters gleaming with the lemon oil polish my mother applied lovingly as she hummed in her quiet soprano vibrato. The glass from the dramatically placed windows streamed in light as if from heaven into a chapel. A simple Art Deco lamp hung from the ceiling of the foyer, not to detract from the understatement of the room.

Our feet fell on wooden floors, also polished with care. In the living room, a couch and a single chair framed the floor model Philco radio-phonograph that was tuned to KOA radio during the day and served Strauss and Sonatra at night. A Dutch door opened from the living room onto an encased porch, with green milk-painted floors and bead board, and screened windows that were kept open in the summer for ventilation.

A long, narrow dining room paralleled the living room and adjoined the kitchen where a butler's pantry led upstairs and down to the basement. From the kitchen door you could step out onto a fully screened back porch, also painted milky green from floor to ceiling.

At the upstairs landing was the bathroom and the door leading from the butler's pantry, a library with woodwork complementing the glorious staircase, and two additional bedrooms. In another time, the library would have been a refuge for study and quiet for our father, but in post-war America the competition for jobs was stiff. Our parents took turns selling vacuum cleaners and Tupperware to support us. And the library became the renter's room. Fortunately for us, for most of our years on East 12th Avenue, Azar was our guest.

From this stage, our lives intertwined with the Denver Public Library, the exquisite city parks, and the sounds of Strauss at night played on 78 rpm records. Azar and my father talked and listened to the music while Mary Beth finished her school work and my brother,David,and I slept. On one of those evenings, Azar taught my sister, Mary how to do the box waltz, so she in turn taught me the simple steps.
How beautiful our lives were!

Mother explained to us that among his own people, Azar was considered a Prince. He had been sent to learn how to better the lives of the people of India, she told us.
When later we saw Shirley Temple in "The Little Princess" on TV we were delighted to see that she, too had an Indian Prince living nearby.

I was very young when Daddy told me, "You know, Azar is a Mohammedan." *  I nodded. He went on, "Mohamed was their prophet, and they worship the God of Abraham, but they call him 'Allah'." Again I nodded. It seemed simple to me. I was being instructed that for the rest of my life I would respect all who worshiped Allah the same as I would respect Christians and those of the Jewish faith. Our God was one and the same.

Azar was a student at Denver University, where I am told he studied post-graduate Engineering. He was tall and dark, with a beautifully toothy smile. I only remember his voice and his presence in our home, especially at mealtime, as though a member of the family. He was courteous and gentle, but as all students, more engaged with studies than anything else. Appropriate that his room was the library.

Azar was called home to marry and sent a wedding invitation to my delighted parents. Unfortunately, Lucknow, India was far, far away. Although they did not go to the wedding they corresponded for years with him. Azar stew always brought mention of his time with us.

I remember Mother putting up the Room for Rent sign that brought another polite student, whose name and fame did not carry with our family. Soon we were renting another house not far away, and a big brother who went to high school, worked ad a car wash, and drove a '57 Chevy was living with us. Time was pushing us, ever forward, enriching us as we went.

*  Since I wrote this memory, I have learned that Muslims do not like the term the English formerly  used to describe them because it implied they worshiped their Prophet, Mohammed. Daddy thought he (in 1953) was being quite urbane using this term, respecting that they believed their Prophet and worshiped quite the same God as we do.  Certainly his instructions for respect toward others were nothing but sincere. But Daddy was born in 1909. 

I include the conversation in it's context now with this footnote because it irks me the same way when others presume we who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint either presume we worship our own founding Prophet, Joseph Smith, or that we don't believe the Bible and are not Christian because we believe also the writings in the Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Apologies to my Muslim friends for my previous ignorance.

Food and Soft Cloths (c) Nita Walker Boles

Why do I remember so well the summer light angling from the west and our south-facing dining room window, and the presence of other people who I knew were at the table, but the feeling of being in that moment as though it was gladly never going to end? With me was my sister, Mary, who reports she remembers it about the same way—a verifier of facts, of a truth that I did not imagine any of it, and the sights and sounds and smells and tastes were all true, very, very true.

We were seated at the table with Azar. Like the Little Princess Shirley Temple movie, we had our own Indian Prince living just upstairs. With him he brought a love of spices and tastes my family so enjoyed that we regularly made something called 'Azar Stew'. He and our father often met in the kitchen brandishing the tools of chefs and cooks, stirring up smells to make our bellies churn with hunger.

Tonight there was other food to eat as well, but Daddy entered the room from the kitchen carrying the Piece de Resistance, a great big smile, not a grin, but a smile of pride and joy on his face. “Oh, you are going to like this!” he prophecied. Whether it was Azar who was getting his first taste, or we, his children, Daddy was the true Prophet that day.

The bowl of greens was beautifully presented, a boiled egg chopped and scattered over its leafy tufts. The smell of cured bacon wafted up mixed with a faint vinegar strain. I knew and believed everything my father ever said was true, and that this was going to be true as well.

He sat down at the head of the table and dished out our servings. I eagerly took a forkful and stuffed it in my 4 year old mouth. Any other 4 year old would have spat and sputtered, but for me the mix of flavors was heavenly. Raw mustard greens, finely chopped, mixed with a slurry of red-eye gravy and vinegar, topped with chopped egg and bacon was absolutely heaven! It was true. I loved it just as he said I would. It was not a show of willful compliance because you had to do what you were told, or because of adoration of a beloved parent. It was a simple truth. It tasted REALLY good.

I never forgot it, and wondered later why we didn't have it more often. He had gone, he explained as we ate, to the “Jap farm” on the edge of town to get the greens. “The Japs”, we later learned, were part of the Nakamura family, whom my father had befriended. In post WWII, they were probably just emerging from the camps where they had become destitute of their belongings and means of making a living. Our father sought them out to buy first from them, yet he found no inconsistency with using the denigrating term common to the time to describe their race.

Thanks to them, for the rest of my life I would love the taste of raw greens and think of them as an exotic food, grown first for me by the good people of Japanese descent.

In about 15 years we were living in Lubbock,Texas when Daddy called me up one afternoon and said, “Nonnie, how would you like to go and pick some greens with me?” I was a young married woman, living in my own home. He came by to pick me up, and we drove south of town to a sandy Field of Greens.

For a dollar a sack we could pick all we wanted. I had a freezer, and I loaded my sack eagerly as Daddy exclaimed over the quality of the bounty. We squatted on the ground together, our backs bent over, our fingers running through the sand in the dry heat. I understood his love for the soil, for growing and farming. The giant leafy fans plucked easily and became the promise of a salad revisited.

In just a few more years I was a young mother and I saw the evidence that my father was not going to be with us much longer. I took every opportunity to quiz him about his life, his past. He sat one day in my kitchen as my son came through with a dirty face. As we talked and I cooked fresh beans from our garden, I reached for my son and delayed his travels long enough to grab a wash cloth, wet it, and clean him up in a matter of seconds.

My father paused, eying me, “I used to hate it when my Ma would get a cold rag and screw my face off like that. My grandmother kept a bucket of warm water on her wood stove, and she would say,'Come here and let Grandma wash your face.' Then she would take a soft cloth and dip it in that warm water and gently rub my face clean.”

Of course after that I could never just quickly clean a kid of any kind. I always had to run the water through the pipes and wait for it to get comfortably warm before coaxing them to cleanliness.

He went on, “She kept sweet potatoes in her coals, and she would fetch one out dripping that brown syrup and ask, 'Do you want one of Grandma's sweet potatoes?' Lord! They were the best sweet potatoes anybody ever grew!”

At my own table I had enjoyed the brown sugary oozing volcano of flavor when just the right sweet potatoes were found. My mother's father seemed to grow them effortlessly, but I was not to learn the art of growing them, only eating them.

It was a matter of a year or two it seemed before my father was gone. I knew where he was—we had a long goodbye. At his graveside I pictured the morning of the Resurrection and his healthy body coming forth, a smile of amazement and joy on his face. The things of the flesh were gone for now, so far as he was concerned.

For a long time I could not eat sweet potatoes without thinking of him, and they simply did not taste good for years, and for that matter, neither did fresh mustard greens in a salad.

Then came the comfort of laughter as life's moments brought memories of what Daddy said about this and that situation. We could sit back at a table in satisfaction together and remember good stuff, really good stuff. I could enjoy the greens and the oozing sweet potatoes once again.

I am reminded of a call I once took at my Pediatric office from a mother concerned that chocolate milk might cause a problem for her 1-year-old. The nurse in my head was wondering what would cause a mother in her right mind to start offering chocolate milk to a baby so young. But it wasn't the mother, she explained. It was the father!

Then a picture of hilarity unfolded. She had gone to the store leaving the baby with Daddy. Dad had decided to let Baby try a little chocolate milk. The baby had a taste, then chugged it down, draining every last drop and leaving an imprint from the glass on his forehead and nose.

Mom wasn't planning on coaxing her baby to drink milk by flavoring it—Dad was just enjoying Baby savoring the fabulous taste he could never have imagined. “No,” I laughed. “No harm done.” I didn't bother to instruct her to avoid letting this scene repeat itself since the edge in her voice assured a severe consequence awaited the indulgent father.

It is the really good stuff of life we crave and need. It is the companionship of dirt touched together, or food passed around the table, of a good drink of cold mountain water, or thick chocolate milk when we are thirsty.

It is the stories of our never-known relatives and their soft cloths on little faces, and gooey sweet potatoes drawn from warm hearths that make us want and pray fervently, oh please let me be like that!