The Sumner Years, Part 1
Apr. 7th, 2007 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
perzephone
The two years I spent in Sumner, WA were basically the end of what I'd consider my childhood. Due to some of the things that happened, it's behind a cut. I had some involvement with a few mentally disabled people who lived nearby & there were some incidents.
After moving from Puyallup, I was in a new school, again, but still within the GATE program. I think that's why some of my social problems weren't as bad in Sumner as they had been in Puyallup. I also had two very good teachers, but I only remember Mrs. Campbell's name. They moved to ban it recently, but back then, in Washington, on Hallowe'en, all the kids would dress up at school & we'd have a parade at lunch & the rest of the afternoon was dedicated to serious Hallowe'en partying. I remember feeling bad for the couple of Jehovah's Witness kids I knew whose parents would come & pick them up at lunchtime. No psuedo-pagan revelry for them. It wasn't just a few elemenentary schools, either - we were in close proximity to the local high school & we'd take our little parade over to their campus & get to trick-or-treat & see the 'big kids' in their very scary costumes.
The apartment complex we lived in actually had small backyards. My dad talked the neighbor into taking down the chicken wire fence that separated our two apartments to have a bigger joint backyard. That was kind of neat. I had a hamster & I'd take her outside to graze in the mornings. We'd have barbecues w/the neighbors & the group of stoners that lived upstairs. They gave me a waterbed when they moved out. My mother was soooo pissed, all she saw in it was more work, but my dad thought it was hilarious so it stayed. I slept on it til my back started hurting & then it moved on to another neighbor. The complex was 'L' shaped & a girl named Doshia lived diagonally across the parking lot from us. I think she was about 10 or so because she went to the jr. high school ('middle' school, whatever they called it) - her family was Filipino, but her parents were still rednecks. Her dad used to call me 'Strawberry Shortcake' because I was fair & freckled. He was great unless he was drunk & Doshia & her mom used to spend a lot of time at our house. In the same building as our apartment, upstairs, were a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, Linda & David & their son... I can't remember his name - it might have been Todd or Tommy. He was 5 & I used to babysit him every once in awhile. David was the first person I ever knew who worked with computers & electronics. Their bedroom was full of oscillators & looked more wired than NASA. Linda was a heroin junkie according to my dad.
By her own words, Linda was a former witch. One morning, Doshia & I were at the house w/her & David was at work & Linda pulled out a purple cloth w/a silver star on it and some Tarot cards. I think I had asked her why her son didn't go trick-or-treating on Hallowe'en & she explained a little bit about the JW's beliefs on 'pagan holidays'. I ended up telling her about our haunted ouija board & that launched her into telling us about how she used to do witchcraft until evil spirits started tormenting her & how when she met David, he helped her get rid of all the evil & negativity in her life. (Doshia was mightily impressed & started hounding me to go to church w/her & her family. I went once or twice, but the services were in Filipino. I wasn't into sitting still for two hours while some guy screamed at me in another language so that was the end of that). Anyway, Linda also had a pet tarantula & my one encounter with it almost ended in disaster. She put the thing on my hand - it reared back & put two feet in the air & I threw it across the room. Luckily, the fragile spider survived, but she had blown off all her hair in the process. Linda was more than a little pissed at me for that, but she also never threatened to take the spider out of her tank again.
Sumner is basically where I learned to fear & distrust the mentally disabled. Now that I'm grown, the problem has subsided (to an extent... I'm still a little edgy & uncomfortable. It makes me a bad person, but I think it would take more therapy than I could afford to cure me of this problem. Considering what happened, I'm surprised I'm not afraid of water, too.), but when I was a teenager, they still terrified me. Up the road from the apartment complex we lived in was a half-way house for mentally disabled adults & young adults. As part of the program for teaching them life skills, the county had made arrangements with some of the local apartment complexes to let the mentally disabled live in the apartments. The county paid the rent & the disabled folk had an aide who would come out a couple of times a week to make sure they were doing okay. Anyway, this particular apartment complex housed a few of them, and two men in particular loved my mother. She still worked as the maintenance/apartment manager, people would come over & pay her the rent, she sprayed the weeds & took care of the pool. She was also getting sicker, and for the first year or so, she'd be out spraying for weeds with two tanks - one full of weed poison, the other had her oxygen. These two guys would follow her around, helping her by pulling weeds or carrying trash or skimming the pool. Because I was Judy's daughter, they loved me, too, only I got pinched, poked, tickled, picked up & thrown into the air unexpectedly (I was a fat chunk of a girl, but one of these guys was a big dude - he was almost as tall as my dad, and almost as wide as he was tall)... to the point where I would look out my bedroom window or kitchen window to make sure the coast was clear before going to school in the morning. I would take a precarious shortcut through an angry old woman's backyard to squeeze through a gap in her fence that opened behind our complex coming home to avoid them.
Tommy/Todd/the kid got an Atari at some point & I offered to spend the night over there more often... that was kind of when our friendship structure changed. He was no longer my little friend, he was 'the kid with the Atari'. Linda & David caught onto this & I got lectured for hours about my being mean to him & that he idolized me & would follow me anywhere and I ended up making some lame excuse up about my mother being sick & I was having a hard time... yadda yadda yadda. In other words, I couldn't use him anymore for his Atari & our contact was severely limited and always supervised in outdoor activities after that. Which was actually more fun, anyway, because Linda & David let him stay up til midnight during the Summer, so we'd be the only kids out in the parking lot after dark. It also meant that since I was with Linda, who was mean to them, the disabled guys would leave me & her kid alone.
In the Summer, sometimes Lani & David would come over to use the pool, but we weren't friends anymore, and that activity ended before the first Summer did. One time, they & their parents & my family went to Kennewick State Park, which had a huge lake for fishing, boating & swimming, and docks out in the middle of the lake. Lani & I managed to find a drowned body tangled in the dock moorings & another older boy almost drowned trying to help us out of the water. There were no more trips to Lake Kennewick. More & more in the news were reports of the Green River Killer's activities. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I grew up in the Age of the Wolf... so many serial killers, the Jonestown Kool-Aid massacre, the Manson family still on everyone's lips, seems like all I ever heard about on the news was death. My mother just kept pounding the 'don't talk to strangers' lingo into my head.
My parents may have told me to not talk to strangers, but they couldn't keep up with my constant, persistent insomnia. I used to go roaming around at night, just walking in different directions from the apartment. I wasn't afraid to be out at 4am. Sumner was nice at night, it would get foggy & so many people had flowers and gardens. Sometimes I'd take the hamster with me, sometimes stray cats or dogs would walk with me for a ways. I got into this habit of picking flowers for my mother. Of course, they were the flowers that grew in people's yards. The man who lived next to the apartment complex had a huge front yard - he had lilac bushes & irises and lemon balm... (When I went back to live with my dad when I was 16, my dad finally told me that the old guy kept complaining to him dad that his flowers kept coming up missing. They'd be there when he'd go to bed & they were gone in the morning. One night, when my dad was home from the road, he followed me, completely amazed that I walked so far, picking flowers the entire time - that was how I got busted) - one morning, my mother finally had it out with me about the damned flowers. 'Don't bring anymore damned flowers home, they are filthy, full of bugs & you're dripping water everywhere, your allergies are costing us too much money, I hate flowers, keep them out of the house!!!" That ended my flower filching, but it didn't end my early morning walks. (When I saw The Ring & heard the line about how Samara never sleeps & it drove her mom crazy, I felt for her parents. It can be hard on someone when their kid never seems to sleep... At least they could lock Samara up in the stable - I went for walks.)
They also finally gave up trying to make me sleep in my own bed. I didn't like being in my room at night because my mother's disabled friends were also night-owls. One night, I heard something scratching at my window (I'd had a pet lizard for awhile, but he escaped from the aquarium & I didn't know where he'd gone). I thought maybe it was the lizard so I pulled back the curtain to see two distorted moon-faces pressed to the glass. I had a hysterical fit, my mother went outside to have a word with them, but it basically boiled down to being my fault for being such a scaredy-cat. It also encouraged the two guys to continue trying to scare me - they thought it was funny to hide in the bushes & jump out at me, or hide in the garbage-dumpster, or anywhere they could fit unseen... and to keep up nocturnal window noises. I just stopped staying in my room after dark. I'd lay on the couch & watch t.v. I remember beginning to 'discover' myself during 'late, late night/early show' vampire movies. I also started tying myself up. The only time I'd ever spend any time in my own room was when I was exploring self-learned bondage. I vaguely remember one time my mother walked in on me, tied up and naked, doing something to myself. The next day she literally threw a book at me & said, "Have fun!" It was The Teenage Body Book. I learned almost everything a kid shouldn't know about all kinds of sex from that book. One of the most memorable things about it was that it had questions in it w/answers from other teens. One question was about how a guy could prevent chafing during masturbation & a suggestion to coat the inside of a toilet-paper roll with petroleum jelly & use that instead of a bare hand... and suggestions for better water-or-vegetable-oil based lubricants instead of petroleum jelly. (I don't know if the new, revised edition is still in the same Q&A format or not, but damn that was a fantastic book!)
During this time, my mother went through two more lung surgeries & my dad spent more time at home. One summer afternoon, during a Washington state heat wave (2 weeks above 80ยบ), we all went to the pool. My mother's fan club was there, in a large group, people were barbecuing, the pool was too crowded to use an inner tube... so I was swimming. My mother's largest friend kept dunking me under the water, splashing me in the face, stupid stupid crap like that. I was a strong swimmer & could hold my breath for a long time, but I was getting tired from fighting with this grown man. I tried to climb out of the pool & he grabbed my ankle and pulled me under, banging my head on one of the aluminum steps in the process. The more I fought, the further from the ladder he pulled me backwards & under. He was taller than me by about 2 feet, so he could have his head above water. I remember the burning, stinging pain of chlorinated water pouring into my nose & seeing silvery flashes of light in front of my eyes. The stairs seemed to get very far away & my vision closed in on me. I felt like I was being crushed with tremendous force and yet as light as air. Then it went black. The next thing I knew I was laying on hot concrete, someone was pounding on my chest and I was puking up water. There was a huge crowd of angry-looking people surrounding me & I was wondering what had I done now to piss people off? After that, I wasn't allowed to use the apartment pool - I had to find someone to go with me to the community center a mile up the road. I didn't realize, and no one bothered to tell me, that it wasn't my fault & I wasn't in trouble, but my parents were just trying to keep me safe. Shortly after that, the larger man was moved out of our apartment complex, anyway, but I still had to use the community pool. Even though I wanted to swim so badly, I had to shower first in the community center's locker room. I didn't understand at first that I could leave my bathing suit on. After I figured that potential embarrassment out, I loved the community pool so much - it was 12' deep and had high diving boards.
There was a park up the road, and one afternoon me & Doshia were playing on the swings. There was a group of teen-agers sitting at the benches, smoking & probably smoking a little pot, too, but oh well. We were just two little girls swinging, what did we care. A couple of younger people from the half-way house were in the park, too, and an older man was with them. He kept coming over trying to push me & Doshia on the swings, but Doshia kept yelling at him to stop. After my recent experience at the pool, I thought if she kept picking on him, we would be the ones to get in trouble, so I started trying to get her to go home with me. Our noise & arguing and her yelling at the man attracted the attention of the teen-agers. They all surrounded us & started egging her on to pick on the disabled man. They also started telling him to pull her shorts down, and things got progressively worse from there. When I tried to escape from the circle of people, I got thrown back & forth & ended up legitimately spraining my ankle in my scrabble to crawl between someones legs. I took off running, pain or no pain, and two or three of the older kids came after me. It was the strangest moment of deux-ex-machina I've ever experienced in my life - Doshia's dad pulled up to the curb by the park & started hollering at the kids to leave 'Strawberry Shortcake' the hell alone. He had one of his drinking buddies in the car w/him, and I told them that the kids were trying to get a guy to take Doshia's clothes off. He told me to get in the car & asked if my dad was home - which he just so happened to be. Doshia's dad took me home at about 200mph, hollered for my dad the minute we got to the door... and that was the last I saw of my dad until long after dark. Now the park was off-limits, too, but at least I knew that wasn't my fault. Doshia also went to stay with grandparents for the rest of the summer, so I was the only kid my age in the apartment complex. When David & Linda moved, I was the only kid in the apartment complex.
There was a set of train tracks across the street from the complex. It was an active track, too. I still love the sound of trains in the night, even if they are close enough to make your house shake. There was some kind of industrial complex across from us, past the tracks. Kids used to play 'chicken' with the trains - at least when they were coming from the right, which was a long, straight run. To the left, it was a blind corner - the trains would have to round the industrial complex buildings to get a clear view of the crossing guards & they were basically in the crossing by that time. I never felt the need to play in the train crossing, but I also didn't know how to ride a bike, roller skates were not my strong suit, and I had not yet learned to ride a skateboard. One afternoon, a little blonde kid I'd never seen before was standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment complex. He seemed worried about something & I went out to the road to find out who the heck he was. He pointed at the crossing & told me 'he's going to get hit'. There was an older kid on a bike in the middle of the crossing, doing wheelies. I told the kid to go over & tell him to get off the tracks & the little kid told me he couldn't cross the street. So I grabbed his hand & told him to come with me. We went over to the grass on the side of the road by the railroad crossing & started yelling at the kid on the bike. He paid absolutely no attention to us. It was like he was in his own little world. Even when the ground started to shake, he kept attmepting to do bike tricks, riding around in circles. I heard the train whistle coming from behind the buildings to our left, & darted out to the middle of the crossing, trying to dodge the kid's bike & get his attention, but it was like he was deaf or in a trance or something. Finally, I grabbed the little kid's hand & we took off back across the street. When we hit the sidewalk & turned around, I saw the kid on the bike get plowed under the train. I know me & the little kid just stood there, dumbfounded. The train had pulled to a stop & people were getting off of it. A man wearing a uniform came across to us & asked if there was a phone & I took him to my mother. The other little kid didn't follow me & I never saw him again. My mother told me to stay in the house, but I talked to police & a couple of railroad officials later to tell them what had happened. About a week after it happened, we had a 'train safety' day at school. The boy had been a 'Special Education' student & he had been wearing a walkman, which is why he didn't hear anyone telling him a train was coming. I got sent to the school counselor for emotional trauma, but only saw her once or twice. It wasn't very traumatic, to be honest. It was fast, it was bloody, it was shocking, and I feel so sorry for the engineer of that train & the other people he was with when he hit that kid. They made no changes to the crossing or that blind corner, and the trains still screamed through that section of Sumner.
After moving from Puyallup, I was in a new school, again, but still within the GATE program. I think that's why some of my social problems weren't as bad in Sumner as they had been in Puyallup. I also had two very good teachers, but I only remember Mrs. Campbell's name. They moved to ban it recently, but back then, in Washington, on Hallowe'en, all the kids would dress up at school & we'd have a parade at lunch & the rest of the afternoon was dedicated to serious Hallowe'en partying. I remember feeling bad for the couple of Jehovah's Witness kids I knew whose parents would come & pick them up at lunchtime. No psuedo-pagan revelry for them. It wasn't just a few elemenentary schools, either - we were in close proximity to the local high school & we'd take our little parade over to their campus & get to trick-or-treat & see the 'big kids' in their very scary costumes.
The apartment complex we lived in actually had small backyards. My dad talked the neighbor into taking down the chicken wire fence that separated our two apartments to have a bigger joint backyard. That was kind of neat. I had a hamster & I'd take her outside to graze in the mornings. We'd have barbecues w/the neighbors & the group of stoners that lived upstairs. They gave me a waterbed when they moved out. My mother was soooo pissed, all she saw in it was more work, but my dad thought it was hilarious so it stayed. I slept on it til my back started hurting & then it moved on to another neighbor. The complex was 'L' shaped & a girl named Doshia lived diagonally across the parking lot from us. I think she was about 10 or so because she went to the jr. high school ('middle' school, whatever they called it) - her family was Filipino, but her parents were still rednecks. Her dad used to call me 'Strawberry Shortcake' because I was fair & freckled. He was great unless he was drunk & Doshia & her mom used to spend a lot of time at our house. In the same building as our apartment, upstairs, were a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses, Linda & David & their son... I can't remember his name - it might have been Todd or Tommy. He was 5 & I used to babysit him every once in awhile. David was the first person I ever knew who worked with computers & electronics. Their bedroom was full of oscillators & looked more wired than NASA. Linda was a heroin junkie according to my dad.
By her own words, Linda was a former witch. One morning, Doshia & I were at the house w/her & David was at work & Linda pulled out a purple cloth w/a silver star on it and some Tarot cards. I think I had asked her why her son didn't go trick-or-treating on Hallowe'en & she explained a little bit about the JW's beliefs on 'pagan holidays'. I ended up telling her about our haunted ouija board & that launched her into telling us about how she used to do witchcraft until evil spirits started tormenting her & how when she met David, he helped her get rid of all the evil & negativity in her life. (Doshia was mightily impressed & started hounding me to go to church w/her & her family. I went once or twice, but the services were in Filipino. I wasn't into sitting still for two hours while some guy screamed at me in another language so that was the end of that). Anyway, Linda also had a pet tarantula & my one encounter with it almost ended in disaster. She put the thing on my hand - it reared back & put two feet in the air & I threw it across the room. Luckily, the fragile spider survived, but she had blown off all her hair in the process. Linda was more than a little pissed at me for that, but she also never threatened to take the spider out of her tank again.
Sumner is basically where I learned to fear & distrust the mentally disabled. Now that I'm grown, the problem has subsided (to an extent... I'm still a little edgy & uncomfortable. It makes me a bad person, but I think it would take more therapy than I could afford to cure me of this problem. Considering what happened, I'm surprised I'm not afraid of water, too.), but when I was a teenager, they still terrified me. Up the road from the apartment complex we lived in was a half-way house for mentally disabled adults & young adults. As part of the program for teaching them life skills, the county had made arrangements with some of the local apartment complexes to let the mentally disabled live in the apartments. The county paid the rent & the disabled folk had an aide who would come out a couple of times a week to make sure they were doing okay. Anyway, this particular apartment complex housed a few of them, and two men in particular loved my mother. She still worked as the maintenance/apartment manager, people would come over & pay her the rent, she sprayed the weeds & took care of the pool. She was also getting sicker, and for the first year or so, she'd be out spraying for weeds with two tanks - one full of weed poison, the other had her oxygen. These two guys would follow her around, helping her by pulling weeds or carrying trash or skimming the pool. Because I was Judy's daughter, they loved me, too, only I got pinched, poked, tickled, picked up & thrown into the air unexpectedly (I was a fat chunk of a girl, but one of these guys was a big dude - he was almost as tall as my dad, and almost as wide as he was tall)... to the point where I would look out my bedroom window or kitchen window to make sure the coast was clear before going to school in the morning. I would take a precarious shortcut through an angry old woman's backyard to squeeze through a gap in her fence that opened behind our complex coming home to avoid them.
Tommy/Todd/the kid got an Atari at some point & I offered to spend the night over there more often... that was kind of when our friendship structure changed. He was no longer my little friend, he was 'the kid with the Atari'. Linda & David caught onto this & I got lectured for hours about my being mean to him & that he idolized me & would follow me anywhere and I ended up making some lame excuse up about my mother being sick & I was having a hard time... yadda yadda yadda. In other words, I couldn't use him anymore for his Atari & our contact was severely limited and always supervised in outdoor activities after that. Which was actually more fun, anyway, because Linda & David let him stay up til midnight during the Summer, so we'd be the only kids out in the parking lot after dark. It also meant that since I was with Linda, who was mean to them, the disabled guys would leave me & her kid alone.
In the Summer, sometimes Lani & David would come over to use the pool, but we weren't friends anymore, and that activity ended before the first Summer did. One time, they & their parents & my family went to Kennewick State Park, which had a huge lake for fishing, boating & swimming, and docks out in the middle of the lake. Lani & I managed to find a drowned body tangled in the dock moorings & another older boy almost drowned trying to help us out of the water. There were no more trips to Lake Kennewick. More & more in the news were reports of the Green River Killer's activities. I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I grew up in the Age of the Wolf... so many serial killers, the Jonestown Kool-Aid massacre, the Manson family still on everyone's lips, seems like all I ever heard about on the news was death. My mother just kept pounding the 'don't talk to strangers' lingo into my head.
My parents may have told me to not talk to strangers, but they couldn't keep up with my constant, persistent insomnia. I used to go roaming around at night, just walking in different directions from the apartment. I wasn't afraid to be out at 4am. Sumner was nice at night, it would get foggy & so many people had flowers and gardens. Sometimes I'd take the hamster with me, sometimes stray cats or dogs would walk with me for a ways. I got into this habit of picking flowers for my mother. Of course, they were the flowers that grew in people's yards. The man who lived next to the apartment complex had a huge front yard - he had lilac bushes & irises and lemon balm... (When I went back to live with my dad when I was 16, my dad finally told me that the old guy kept complaining to him dad that his flowers kept coming up missing. They'd be there when he'd go to bed & they were gone in the morning. One night, when my dad was home from the road, he followed me, completely amazed that I walked so far, picking flowers the entire time - that was how I got busted) - one morning, my mother finally had it out with me about the damned flowers. 'Don't bring anymore damned flowers home, they are filthy, full of bugs & you're dripping water everywhere, your allergies are costing us too much money, I hate flowers, keep them out of the house!!!" That ended my flower filching, but it didn't end my early morning walks. (When I saw The Ring & heard the line about how Samara never sleeps & it drove her mom crazy, I felt for her parents. It can be hard on someone when their kid never seems to sleep... At least they could lock Samara up in the stable - I went for walks.)
They also finally gave up trying to make me sleep in my own bed. I didn't like being in my room at night because my mother's disabled friends were also night-owls. One night, I heard something scratching at my window (I'd had a pet lizard for awhile, but he escaped from the aquarium & I didn't know where he'd gone). I thought maybe it was the lizard so I pulled back the curtain to see two distorted moon-faces pressed to the glass. I had a hysterical fit, my mother went outside to have a word with them, but it basically boiled down to being my fault for being such a scaredy-cat. It also encouraged the two guys to continue trying to scare me - they thought it was funny to hide in the bushes & jump out at me, or hide in the garbage-dumpster, or anywhere they could fit unseen... and to keep up nocturnal window noises. I just stopped staying in my room after dark. I'd lay on the couch & watch t.v. I remember beginning to 'discover' myself during 'late, late night/early show' vampire movies. I also started tying myself up. The only time I'd ever spend any time in my own room was when I was exploring self-learned bondage. I vaguely remember one time my mother walked in on me, tied up and naked, doing something to myself. The next day she literally threw a book at me & said, "Have fun!" It was The Teenage Body Book. I learned almost everything a kid shouldn't know about all kinds of sex from that book. One of the most memorable things about it was that it had questions in it w/answers from other teens. One question was about how a guy could prevent chafing during masturbation & a suggestion to coat the inside of a toilet-paper roll with petroleum jelly & use that instead of a bare hand... and suggestions for better water-or-vegetable-oil based lubricants instead of petroleum jelly. (I don't know if the new, revised edition is still in the same Q&A format or not, but damn that was a fantastic book!)
During this time, my mother went through two more lung surgeries & my dad spent more time at home. One summer afternoon, during a Washington state heat wave (2 weeks above 80ยบ), we all went to the pool. My mother's fan club was there, in a large group, people were barbecuing, the pool was too crowded to use an inner tube... so I was swimming. My mother's largest friend kept dunking me under the water, splashing me in the face, stupid stupid crap like that. I was a strong swimmer & could hold my breath for a long time, but I was getting tired from fighting with this grown man. I tried to climb out of the pool & he grabbed my ankle and pulled me under, banging my head on one of the aluminum steps in the process. The more I fought, the further from the ladder he pulled me backwards & under. He was taller than me by about 2 feet, so he could have his head above water. I remember the burning, stinging pain of chlorinated water pouring into my nose & seeing silvery flashes of light in front of my eyes. The stairs seemed to get very far away & my vision closed in on me. I felt like I was being crushed with tremendous force and yet as light as air. Then it went black. The next thing I knew I was laying on hot concrete, someone was pounding on my chest and I was puking up water. There was a huge crowd of angry-looking people surrounding me & I was wondering what had I done now to piss people off? After that, I wasn't allowed to use the apartment pool - I had to find someone to go with me to the community center a mile up the road. I didn't realize, and no one bothered to tell me, that it wasn't my fault & I wasn't in trouble, but my parents were just trying to keep me safe. Shortly after that, the larger man was moved out of our apartment complex, anyway, but I still had to use the community pool. Even though I wanted to swim so badly, I had to shower first in the community center's locker room. I didn't understand at first that I could leave my bathing suit on. After I figured that potential embarrassment out, I loved the community pool so much - it was 12' deep and had high diving boards.
There was a park up the road, and one afternoon me & Doshia were playing on the swings. There was a group of teen-agers sitting at the benches, smoking & probably smoking a little pot, too, but oh well. We were just two little girls swinging, what did we care. A couple of younger people from the half-way house were in the park, too, and an older man was with them. He kept coming over trying to push me & Doshia on the swings, but Doshia kept yelling at him to stop. After my recent experience at the pool, I thought if she kept picking on him, we would be the ones to get in trouble, so I started trying to get her to go home with me. Our noise & arguing and her yelling at the man attracted the attention of the teen-agers. They all surrounded us & started egging her on to pick on the disabled man. They also started telling him to pull her shorts down, and things got progressively worse from there. When I tried to escape from the circle of people, I got thrown back & forth & ended up legitimately spraining my ankle in my scrabble to crawl between someones legs. I took off running, pain or no pain, and two or three of the older kids came after me. It was the strangest moment of deux-ex-machina I've ever experienced in my life - Doshia's dad pulled up to the curb by the park & started hollering at the kids to leave 'Strawberry Shortcake' the hell alone. He had one of his drinking buddies in the car w/him, and I told them that the kids were trying to get a guy to take Doshia's clothes off. He told me to get in the car & asked if my dad was home - which he just so happened to be. Doshia's dad took me home at about 200mph, hollered for my dad the minute we got to the door... and that was the last I saw of my dad until long after dark. Now the park was off-limits, too, but at least I knew that wasn't my fault. Doshia also went to stay with grandparents for the rest of the summer, so I was the only kid my age in the apartment complex. When David & Linda moved, I was the only kid in the apartment complex.
There was a set of train tracks across the street from the complex. It was an active track, too. I still love the sound of trains in the night, even if they are close enough to make your house shake. There was some kind of industrial complex across from us, past the tracks. Kids used to play 'chicken' with the trains - at least when they were coming from the right, which was a long, straight run. To the left, it was a blind corner - the trains would have to round the industrial complex buildings to get a clear view of the crossing guards & they were basically in the crossing by that time. I never felt the need to play in the train crossing, but I also didn't know how to ride a bike, roller skates were not my strong suit, and I had not yet learned to ride a skateboard. One afternoon, a little blonde kid I'd never seen before was standing on the sidewalk in front of our apartment complex. He seemed worried about something & I went out to the road to find out who the heck he was. He pointed at the crossing & told me 'he's going to get hit'. There was an older kid on a bike in the middle of the crossing, doing wheelies. I told the kid to go over & tell him to get off the tracks & the little kid told me he couldn't cross the street. So I grabbed his hand & told him to come with me. We went over to the grass on the side of the road by the railroad crossing & started yelling at the kid on the bike. He paid absolutely no attention to us. It was like he was in his own little world. Even when the ground started to shake, he kept attmepting to do bike tricks, riding around in circles. I heard the train whistle coming from behind the buildings to our left, & darted out to the middle of the crossing, trying to dodge the kid's bike & get his attention, but it was like he was deaf or in a trance or something. Finally, I grabbed the little kid's hand & we took off back across the street. When we hit the sidewalk & turned around, I saw the kid on the bike get plowed under the train. I know me & the little kid just stood there, dumbfounded. The train had pulled to a stop & people were getting off of it. A man wearing a uniform came across to us & asked if there was a phone & I took him to my mother. The other little kid didn't follow me & I never saw him again. My mother told me to stay in the house, but I talked to police & a couple of railroad officials later to tell them what had happened. About a week after it happened, we had a 'train safety' day at school. The boy had been a 'Special Education' student & he had been wearing a walkman, which is why he didn't hear anyone telling him a train was coming. I got sent to the school counselor for emotional trauma, but only saw her once or twice. It wasn't very traumatic, to be honest. It was fast, it was bloody, it was shocking, and I feel so sorry for the engineer of that train & the other people he was with when he hit that kid. They made no changes to the crossing or that blind corner, and the trains still screamed through that section of Sumner.
