Helen, Martina, and the Purple Teddy-Bear Bank

I wish I could remember Helen and Martina's last names. I would love to look them up on facebook. But as the case is, I only knew each of them during part of fifth grade while living in Azusa, California—one of the brief stops of the 16 different schools I attended from first grade through twelfth grade.
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I didn't know anything about being gay as a child, except, I knew I liked Helen and Martina better than I liked any of the boys at my school. Helen was so beautiful. I can still remember her face. She was Spanish I think, perhaps from Mexico, because she had such bronze-tan skin. I learned later in life that most Mexican persons don't like being called Spanish because of the long history between the Spaniards and the Mayans of Mexico. And although I was aware of discrimination against blacks at such an early age during school I learned also that Mexicans out West and American Indians, too, were treated just as bad or worse by whites. Helen had a mature face for a fifth grader, but she was petite and very athletic. She could do eight to ten pull-ups on the high bar during P.E., whereas, I could only do maybe three to five. I wasn't obese as a child. I was slim. But, I came face to face with my own lack of strength when my class had to do those pull-ups. Helen had a crush on a sixth grader named Gavin. Martina was just as athletic and just as bronze as Helen. But, she had more of a baby face. And a smile that lit up the whole playground. She liked a boy named Gabriel. Helen and Martina were best friends. I longed to play with them and be in their crowd.
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One time all of the fifth grade classes took a field trip to Olvera Street in Downtown Los Angeles. My mother literally scraped up all the pennies she had so that I could have a little spending money for the trip and I took them across the street to the little bodega and cashed them into about three dollars. I remember my step-father being angry at my mother for letting me have the money, saying that we ought to save it to buy something more important. The next day my teacher, Ms. Gerubel, assigned Helen and Martina partners for the trip. I was placed with another girl in my class whose name I can't recollect, either. She was a little paler than me and she was chubby. She wore round wire-rimmed glasses and wore her light-brown long hair pulled back at the sides. I was upset that I had been partnered with her, although I tried not to show it. I wanted so much to sit next to Helen or Martina on the long bus ride and walk with either of them through Olvera Street. This girl was a little bossy, too. Reflecting back she really liked me and longed for my friendship the way I longed for Helen and Martina's friendship. That day at Olvera Street I saw a purple ceramic teddy-bear bank I fell in love with. However, I was about two and a half dollars short of being able to buy it. And this sweet traveling partner of mine gave me the rest of the money plus a little more to buy some candy for the bus ride back. I gave the purple ceramic teddy-bear bank to my mother when I got home that evening so that she would have something nice to save her pennies in. If I knew this girl's name and her last name I would find her on facebook as well and thank her for showing such kindness to me when I was a little mean to her.
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Ms. Gerubel was a great teacher. She let my class listen to her albums she brought in while we did our projects in the afternoon. I remember listening to Neil Diamond's "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" and Marlo Thomas's "Free To Be You And Me" that my twin sister's teacher next door let our class borrow. My twin sister's teacher let her take that particular album home and she and I played it over and over again until we learned all of the songs by heart. I think back and really believe Marlo Thomas set the stage for how my life played out. Still, I am just now coming to terms with my own sexuality and I am just now, finally, feeling free to be me.
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Ms. Gerubel was very kind, but she was also very strict about attendance. She made her students stay after school to make up the time they missed. My twin sister and I walked at least a mile or more to school every day and so I was late a couple of times. One day I stayed after school to make up for the time I was late. The fifth graders were assigned a certain picnic table to sit at while the sixth graders at the next table watched out for us. Gavin was there that day. He was bronze-tan skinned also. His black silk hair was feathered away from his face and was a little longer than the other boys' hair. He was attractive and all the girls liked him. I knew Helen liked him a lot. He sort of liked me with my platinum blonde hair and green eyes and fair skin. I was shocked when he came over to my picnic table and asked me if I was a virgin. I never answered him. I couldn't answer out of shock, for one reason, but also because he brought up all of a sudden a painful memory of my sexual abuse by my oldest half-brother that I somehow blocked out of memory until then not knowing for sure all the facts surrounding the abuse that later would be confirmed when I was a teenager. So I didn't answer him. And that day when I walked home all alone I was so sad. I told my twin sister, Stephanie, when I arrived home about the incident, but no one else, not even my mother, who was suffering from major depression most of that year and was passed out on the couch when I got home. I went into the bedroom that my twin sister and I shared and I just cried. I have thought back on that day a thousand times. I wasn't mad at Gavin. I imagine he probably had been abused himself.
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If I could ever pinpoint a time that I knew I liked girls better than boys it would have to be that year, although, it's something I've been aware of my whole life, and it can't really be pinned down to one particular instance in my life. That year before June my family and I were packing again to move back home to West Virginia. And I never saw Helen and Martina or any one of those precious kids again. But each of them, faces I can see just like it was yesterday, all hold a special place in my heart. And I will remember them as long as I live.

The Rock of Gibraltar, the Missing Link

My mother was the youngest of twelve children. My grandmother had six girls and six boys. My grandmother was a strong woman, the strongest influence in my life. She was like the Rock of Gibraltar. I never got to meet my grandfather. He died of a heart attack before I was born. My grandmother had lived decades before I was born, so she had a long life that I hardly know about, except that she and my grandfather loved each other and their children dearly. They worked hard all their life, raised their children, raised a garden every year and were self-sufficient. My mother was born when my grandmother was 45 years old. My grandmother thought she had gone through the change of life. My mother was born during the depression and the exact night she was born she, my grandfather, grandmother and my uncle who was still at home at the time all moved from a ten room house into a three room house. Eventually after my uncle got married my grandfather and grandmother had to move into different homes of their children. They were very poor and ended up moving into government housing. This was during my mother’s sophomore year of high school and she felt a tremendous burden to get married and move out because the housing was only for senior citizens. My mother quit school and got married to an older man. She had three children before she turned 19. Thus her dreams of joining the glee club and her hopes of becoming an actress on Broadway or becoming a nurse were abruptly halted. She always says to me, “I was born during the depression and have been depressed ever since.”
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My grandmother lived in the subsidized housing until she died. She lived alone after my grandfather died and in time remarried. I do remember my step-grandfather, but he was a very ill person. He got so ill that he moved out of my grandmother’s apartment and lived with his sons in a two story house just across the back alley where my grandmother lived. He died not too long after that.
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My grandmother’s apartment was the place where everyone gathered during the holidays and reunions. I remember the times when my uncles, aunts and cousins would come to visit. My aunts and my mother were all very close. They would do each other’s hair and help my grandmother do her hair. My uncles would talk about their jobs, the latest in the news and the weather. Most of the time my grandmother was by herself. One of my aunts did stay with her during the day, and on several occasions my mother and my twin sister and I stayed with her after having moved back from wherever we had moved away to in order to take care of her. My grandmother lived on a limited income of her social security check, but she paid all of her bills on time, had credit with several department stores, and always at the end of the month would have some money left over to help out one of her children or grandchildren. She had the same telephone number until she died. I can actually still remember it—523-8627. This stable quality of hers is something I have struggled to attain in my life, many times just wanting to pick up and move away from my problems thinking that will solve them.
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I think back now on how much time my grandmother did spend alone, considering how many children she had and I realize that she had such a strong spirit and determination to live. She made many quilts and seldom sold them. She gave most of them away to her children or grandchildren or friends in the community. Even though she couldn’t get out of the house to go to church in her later years, she would wake up early every Sunday morning and watch the sermons on TV. My grandmother was the center of the family. She lived to be almost 87 years old. When she died I had just started my senior year in high school. At the time of her death she had all but two of her children living, 48 grandchildren and over 100 great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.
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As a teenager I felt so unfortunate to be a young woman. I remember thinking that the guys have it a lot easier than the girls. They didn’t have that monthly ordeal like us; they didn’t have to bear children. They could go evenly through the month playing football or basketball and not suffer like I did. As an adult though I have learned and now realize that men go through their own cycles, which are difficult to get through. They have feelings and get sad or moody. I always hated the fact that young men had to register for the military service when they turned 18 and felt very fortunate to be a woman. I feel now, though, that if I believed in a cause so great to go to war for, like the Holocaust that happened in Germany during World War II or what happened in Kosovo, I would sign up and go fight with every ounce of energy I could find. My uncles fought in World War II and two of my uncles were on ships off of the shore of Normandy. One was a gunner’s mate. He told my grandmother when he returned home that he didn’t think he would make it home alive. The family didn’t even know where he was for two years or even if he was alive. I never realized how much danger he and the other soldiers were in until I saw the movie Saving Private Ryan with Tom Hanks. Although I was taught early on in age that a Christian should stay neutral in wars or politics, I believe now that this is misinterpreted and that if someone doesn’t stand up for what is right and fight for others whose freedom is being threatened by torture or genocide then they are actually participating in the evil itself. My mother has told me the story of her favorite brother who was such a sensitive and kind person. He had been drafted to fight in World War II. He cried because he didn’t believe in killing anyone. He had a wife and a little boy. The weekend before he was supposed to register he came down with spinalmengitis and died at the hospital when the doctors were trying to do a spinal tap.
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The missing link in my life is one man who is always on my mind and that is my real father. I find myself searching for him in others to no avail. He never married my mother when he found out she was carrying my twin sister and me. I can count the times I met him on one hand. I don’t have any bitterness toward him though. I only wish I could have spent more time with him. In my senior year of high school he came to visit my twin sister and me. I gave him a pastel of the Grand Canyon I had done in colors of burnt sienna, oranges, and lavenders that he said would go perfect in his living room. I know from my mother that he was a very hard worker. He worked as an overseer in a plant down in North Carolina where he was born. His parents were from Ireland. His father left him when he was a young boy and he spent a lot of time at his grandmother’s house. I guess that he had issues about his father and mother too. We never talked about that the times we spent together. He was Catholic and had married before he met my mother. They were separated at the time. He didn’t divorce her because of his faith. Yet, from what I know he fathered several children out of wedlock. I still believe he was a spiritual person. One time my mother, my twin sister and I went down to North Carolina and visited him. I had an interview in a town close to where he lived, so we combined the trip to visit my father. He seemed so sad and lonely. I looked for the pastel I gave him, but didn’t see it. He knew my twin sister and I loved Pizza Hut as he had taken us there when we were about ten years old on a surprise visit. That evening, though, he gave us money for my mother, my twin sister and me to go out to eat on by ourselves at Pizza Hut. He had to work the overnight shift so he didn’t go with us. One time before this, when my twin sister and I had come back to our hometown, Huntington, West Virginia, while on break from college, he ran into my older half-sister (on my mother’s side). He took my twin sister, my niece and me to Pizza Hut and for a drive in his custom van and we listened to his favorite singer, Neil Diamond. My mother told me that he did take her to Midnight Christmas Mass when she was pregnant with my twin sister and me. I grew up thinking that perhaps if I would convert to Catholicism and become a nun he would love me more and be proud of me and would be more involved in my life. He died in 1995 of a brain tumor and requested that my twin sister and I not come to see him. He said that he didn’t want us to see him in that condition, but sometimes I wonder if he was embarrassed of us and didn’t want his family to meet us.
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It goes without saying that most of the women in my life have been a more positive influence in my life. My mother, with as many imperfections that she has, has been a great influence in my life. She encouraged my twin sister and me to follow through with our desire to go to art school when at the time I was considering instead to become a full-time evangelizer. She wanted us to become independent from the welfare system that we were raised on the times my mother was too sick to work. She wanted us to have a better life than hers. My older half-sister and older half-brothers were a positive influence in my life although they didn’t have it easy themselves. Sometimes I feel that where my twin sister and I were lacking in my father we were blessed to have them as older siblings. They took on a responsibility toward us that they themselves needed from their father. My older half-sister taught my twin sister and me the alphabet and how to write and read before we started school. She worked as a dancer most of her life and helped my mother, my twin sister, me and Her daughter who my mother was raising. My older half-brothers were very outgoing and loved the outdoors. One half-brother set up a tetherball pole to play with. He took us to see Star Wars. He bought our first album of the Bee Gees because we loved them so much. My other older half-brother took us camping, bought us our first ten-speed bicycle and took us to the Cleveland Clinic when we first found out about my twin sister having a serious congenital heart defect. All three of them never really considered us as their “half-sisters.” We were all very close. They all grew up fast. My half-sister got pregnant at 15 years old. My two older half-brothers joined the army at early ages, going against the beliefs of their faith also. For them that was the only way to get an education and the Army seemed like their only way out of poverty. One was stationed in Lawton, Oklahoma and the other went to Germany. Recently, before he died, he told us that he went to Vietnam for a while, but never told our mother at the time because he didn’t want her to worry.
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Two of my teachers from school stand out in my mind as having a great impact on my life. One was my sixth grade school teacher. She made an effort with the principal to have both my twin sister and me to be in her class. I suppose she thought we had moved around enough and could see that we needed the support she so kindly gave to us and the other students in her class, most of whom were from broken homes also. Every day after lunch and recess she read to us with our heads placed down on our desks. She read books that some of the students had brought in for her to read. She read a couple of books that my mother had ordered: Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan. This effort on her part seemed to calm the class down and prepare us for the rest of the afternoon. I think back and wonder if she knew that many of us had never been read books at bedtime by our mothers or absent fathers. One time she and our art teacher had a slumber party for all of the girls in the class. She was the best teacher I had all throughout my grammar and secondary schooling.
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Another teacher that made a tremendous difference in my life was my teacher at art school. She radiated an air as if she was always walking on cloud nine. She was so expressive and outgoing. She was the teacher who inspired me to do a painting that was on the topic of starvation. It contrasts the extremes of abundance and poverty. The situation that was happening in Ethopia at the time brought tears to my eyes every night on the news while I would be doing my art projects and this painting was an excellent expression of how I felt about the trauma going on for millions of Africans. When she saw my preliminary sketches she said, “Close, but keep working.” When I showed her the next sketch she lost her breath, gasped and fell back in a chair behind her. She helped me put the canvas together on a frame and even permitted my niece while on her breaks from school to come in and pose for some of the characters in the painting in order to get the correct angles of the imaginary figures I combined by looking at the anatomy book.
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Feast Amidst Famine, Oil on Canvas (4' x 5'6")
by Kimberly Ann Hodgson 1985-1987

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I personally have carried these men and women in my mind and reflect back on them with great admiration. My grandmother taught me the quality of stability and endurance. My father’s hard working ethics are in my genes and even though I struggle with work at times I am an industrious person and even work better on the evening shift myself. My mother too who worked as much as she could while raising five children is an encouragement for me to keep going on despite how I feel sometimes. My older siblings and my twin sister all had rough childhoods, but we never stopped loving our mother or father, knowing they too carry the burdens of generations past. My teachers who took a special interest in me contributed to my success as an artist. I feel that the gap between men and women is closing and that neither have it easier than the other. We are all unique individuals with strengths and weaknesses.