Making of a Writer (9780307820464) by Joan Lowery Nixon

Chapter Two
    When I was a baby my parents and my mother’s parents, Mathias (Matt) and Harriet (Hattie) Meyer, whom we called Nanny and Pa, bought a white stucco duplex on the corner of 73rd Street and Gramercy in Los Angeles. They added a large, square room that connected the two sides of the house through my parents’ and grandparents’ dining rooms. Since my mother had been a kindergarten teacher, the room was outfitted like her former classroom with an upright piano, a sturdy work table and chairs, easels and poster paints, a school-sized blackboard, a ceramic pot that held damp clay, a dollhouse, and a roomy space for toys. Everyone called it the playroom.
    My parents’ side of the house was arranged in a square, and my grandparents’ side of the house was shaped like anupside-down
L
. After my sister Pat was born, when I was five, she and my other younger sister, Marilyn, shared the second bedroom in our parents’ side of the house. My bedroom was on my grandparents’ side of the house, at the far end of the upside-down
L
.
    The two sides of the house were quite different, although both had chairs and sofas upholstered in the stiff, prickly plush fabric that was in fashion then. I can’t remember what color they were because they were all covered in homemade slipcovers of printed fabric that didn’t match but had been purchased at a “good bargain.” The object was to protect the furniture underneath. The slipcovers were removed only for special guests and parties at which there would be no children.
    I can see now that the slipcovers cut out a lot of the stress to which children are subjected. With the furniture well protected, no one cared if we climbed onto the sofa with our shoes on to color the designs in our coloring books, or sat there munching on saltine crackers.
    The gas stove in my mother’s kitchen was fairly new. It looked like a table on white enameled iron legs with the oven on top, next to the four burners. Nanny had an old, heavy iron stove whose oven was like a dark cavern underneath the burners. Mother had an electric refrigerator, but Nanny had a wooden icebox out on the service porch.
    Two times a week the iceman arrived in his truck, picked up a huge block of ice with tongs, and carried it on his back to replace the melted ice in the icebox. There was a pan underneath into which the melting ice could drip, and Pa had to empty this heavy pan at least once a day.
    The children in the neighborhood loved to jump into the open back of the ice truck, grab slivers of ice, and runbefore the iceman returned. If he came back too soon, this good-natured man would pretend to scowl. He’d shout, “Who’s taking my ice?” and then take a few steps toward us as we ran away squealing.
    Nanny loved to cook and to bake, so both sides of the house were rich with the fragrances of pot roast and onions, cinnamon-sugar cookies, rich chocolate puddings, and comforting chicken soups.
    Our grandparents and their activities played a big part in our lives.
    Each spring Nanny and Pa bottled their own root beer. We all loved root beer, especially in black cows, sodas made of vanilla ice cream and root beer. Nanny cooked the root beer mixture and scalded the bottles, and after the brew had been poured into the bottles, Pa would cap them with a small metal bottle-capping tool that could be operated only by exerting great physical strength.
    The bottles would be stored on the service porch, and after a certain period had passed in which the carbonation did its work, the root beer would be ready to drink.
    It was delicious, and to add to the fun and excitement of each summer, every now and then a bottle on the service porch would explode with a noise we could hear all over the house.
    It was best when I was young and could scream at the explosions. When I grew a little older I often had to help clean up the sticky mess.
    I watched Nanny make fudge, which, at an exact time in its cooling, Pa, with his strong arm,