Stupid Parents
My 1962 Bethesda bedroom was pretty comfortable, except on the bitterly cold pre-dawn winter mornings when my frugal father’s incessant fiddling with the thermostat turned the entire house into an arctic black hole. But, because my restless mother constantly rearranged, redecorated and rifled through it when my back was turned, my pretty comfortable bedroom wasn’t particularly private.
In our creepy dark basement, I curtained off the space under the stairs, creating a cozy nook into which my 12-year-old self could escape the stupid parents of my angst-riddled adolescence.
I padded my cell with Dad’s scratchy old wool pea-green army blankets and some musty feather pillows covered in ticking. I filled it with piles of beloved books, stacked my treasured 45-rpm records next to a portable record player, and tossed in a flashlight against the eventuality that the single hanging light bulb would suddenly spark and blow, leaving me petrified in the pitch dark.
One afternoon, following yet another squabble upstairs, maybe an argument over whether I would ever be allowed to shave my furry legs, the bane of my young existence, I retreated to my hole. I emerged when my peeved and indignant pre-teen self decided to search through all the boxes of important stuff stored in the basement, determined to find adoption papers proving that I wasn’t related to the stupid parents with whom I had absolutely nothing in common.
I was disappointed when instead of adoption papers, I discovered my birth certificate, but during that fevered hunt for a fairy tale family, I knew in my heart of hearts that my parents were my parents and that my search for adoption papers proving otherwise was futile.
Confirmation of my origins is my father’s face mirrored in my mustachioed one. My young friend and I perform a skit against the backdrop of my curtained room under the basement stairs, while out of frame, my not-so-stupid-after-all parents applaud earnestly from the VIP seats next to the washing machine.
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About Me
My father was a Consular Officer in the United States Foreign Service. He was first stationed in post World War II Berlin, where I was born in 1950. Subsequently, we lived in the Philippines; Jamaica; Guatemala; Washington, DC; Greece; Ceylon and Mexico; visiting many places in between. I was reared by my parents and nurtured by the various amahs, nannies, and housemaids who, every two years or so, entered and exited my little life.
I was educated in American Schools in “foreign lands,” but the most fascinating classrooms were the exotic locales where we lived, and the most inspiring teachers were the colorful people of those exotic and ancient cultures.
The bi-annual “home leaves” which my family spent at my grandparents’ homes in Los Angeles, California provided a sense of constancy to our nomadic lifestyle. My many aunts, uncles and cousins lived there and I eagerly looked forward to those vacations. We were 1st and 2nd generation Greek Americans (all 4 of my grandparents had immigrated at the turn of the century), and thus had foreignness stamped onto us even though we were Americans.
Two of my father’s siblings were also in the diplomatic service, and we world-traveling cousins were a source of endless curiosity to our domestic counterparts when we came home speaking English with unusual accents, reducing the statesiders to hysterics.With his various cameras, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, 16 millimeter, Super 8 and Polaroid, my father rarely lost an opportunity to document the events unfolding around us. After years of waiting patiently in boxes under the stairs, these photographic records are now fulfilling their purpose as mnemonic retrievals of my little life.
Mnemonic Retrievals 
Those were hairy legs, and, the mustache matched.
On a serious note, I’m sorry that I had to leave you alone.
Entertaining reading which brought back memories of myself at that age. We had some similar experiences when when we moved to Vt.