1953 My Poor Puppy

After we had been in Colombia a month or so we got a little puppy.  He was a mongrel of some kind, brown, with floppy ears.  He was really cute and I loved him a lot.  

One day after the usual summer torrential rain, the pavement was steaming and had that unique smell of hot wet asphalt.  I looked for the puppy, and then I saw him in the street.  He looked odd, like he was sniffing the road, and then he fell over.  I couldn't imagine what was wrong with him, so I went to get him, and his face was stuck to the road.  He was looking at me with his big brown eyes and somehow even at age 6, I knew.  

I ran crying to the house to get my dad, and he went and picked him up and took away, and I never saw him again.  I couldn’t stop seeing those eyes looking at me, saying help me.  That smell of hot, wet asphalt, is burned into my memory even now.  

My poor little puppy, I can't even remember his name.

1953 Colombia, A Strange Place

We lived in Barrancabermeja, Colombia,  when I was about 6-1/2  I believe, because my sister was around 2.  That would have made it late 1953.  It was a very strange place and I knew it even then.  It was so hot and humid.  The windows had no glass, just screens.  Sometimes at night snakes and insects would crawl onto the window.  My dad slept with a World War II machete under his bed to kill snakes (learning later how terrified he was of them, I really admire his fortitude).  My mother would make bread from scratch and I remember watching her chase the flour across the counter because it was so full of bugs, they would be mixed in with the flour and covered in it, so the flour would just scamper away.  We lived in an oil camp for safety.  I remember a neighbor down the street had a black panther in a cage outside his house.  One day the panther was gone never to be seen again.  

We had 2 maids in Colombia.  I remember hearing them arguing and chattering in Spanish all day long, I imagine they were teenagers.  They taught me a lot and I spent a lot of time with them, until one of the got fired (I never knew why).  I remember them killing a rabbit and hearing it scream.

I remember my dad coming out and chopping up a snake under the carport which extended from our house to the maids' house.  Then he put it in the back of our pickup and we (he and I) drove it to a dumpsite.  I looked out the back window and I could see the pieces jumping around so I told my dad "it's alive, it's alive, and it's coming towards us".  Of course, I was joking but he was not amused.  He was so afraid of snakes.  I usually was looking for them until my dad told me they were poisonous.

Barrancabermeja is a city in Colombia, located on the shore of the Magdalena River, in the western part of the department of Santander. It is home to the largest oil refinery in the country and is the capital of the Province of Mares. Barrancabermeja is known as the Oil Capital of Colombia.

1953 Grampa Arthur

My Grampa Arthur died in early 1953 while we were in Normandy.  I remember my mother crying in her room.  It made me sad too.  I used to sit on his lap and comb his hair for him.  

My mother and I lived with her parents when my dad got out of Texas A&M and went to Abadan in Persia (now Iran), so I spent my youngest years there.   She said it was so sad that he never got to meet my sister Lydia.  

Back then, it wasn’t so easy to travel from Europe to the United States.  For my mother to have flown back to Boston would have been incredibly expensive, and it just wasn’t possible.  They were very close, so it must have been very hard for her to be so far away.