Commuter Childhood

Compared to my own childhood, our children had a stable and predictable life, sleeping in the same bed every night, going to school from the same house in the morning. And the next generation of children enjoys a life where home is the same place every night. What we all have in common, all of the generations, is that the parents defined what home was. The parents are there in the night and the next morning.

From my earliest memories, we commuted from one home/bed to the next. We lived in DC in a rowhouse and we also lived in various rustic dwellings on various farms in the Virginia suburbs. Our parents piled us into the back of one vehicle or another and took us from farm to town, late at night usually.

I remember sitting with Lani in the little pocket that was behind the back seat of the VW Bug. It was a cargo space about the size of a small suitcase and it was lined with carpeting. The road I remember the most is the George Washington Parkway – at the time there was either Canal Road or the GW Parkway that would get us from DC to Virginia. Even 60 years ago, there were long traffic jams leaving town in the evening.

The first farm was in McLean, about 12 miles from the house on Q Street. It was The Corn Place – 40 acres of sweet corn. There was a run-down farmhouse where the one employee lived, and we also used that house as one of our home bases for the first few years, from when I was about 3 to about 6 years old. By the time I was six, there were four kids to move around.

No car seats, probably no seat belts. My father saw that they needed a way to move the baby from one place to the next without waking her up.  He modified a wooden crate, taking off one end and putting a fabric end on it so our feet could stick out as we got longer. We could sleep in the box, get moved around, and never need anything different. It was called the Newcomb Baby Box.

Most of the time, they knew where we were. One memorable time, they went back to Q St in two separate vehicles. Lani was 18 months old, so she was in the Baby Box. I was 3 and had been sitting on top of the ice machine, watching them pack corn in the night, for delivery to a supermarket. When they got back to Q St, they discovered they had left me asleep on the ice machine. They called Jerry, the employee, and he took me back inside to spend the night. No one was lost, just misplaced. The story is that I was not rattled, and we had oatmeal for breakfast the next day before they picked me up.

When our parents bought a wooded five acre property (1966: I was 6 years old), we shifted our camping/sleeping from The Corn Place to The New Place. This new place was within walking distance of our grandparents’ house.  Through all of this, our grandparents were the stable force in our lives. They too had a house in DC and a house in Virginia. They too traveled between the two houses (“the office” at 2015 N St and “the country” on Beulah Road) and they often helped us to commute between Virginia and DC.

The complexity boggles the mind but it explains so much about how our farm came to be the way it is. We had beds to sleep in at Grandma’s house, in the Tractor Shed at the New Place, at Q St and on the farm in Southern Maryland.  We had beds at the office on N St too.  When Lani and I went to Green Acres School in Rockville, the complexity deepened because we had to get to Rockville and back again every day. Either back to DC or back to Virginia. It was a puzzle that needed solving constantly – would we catch the bus at Holton Arms on River Road, or would we get on with Annie Morse at her house off Nebraska Ave or would we spend the night at our parents’ friends’ house and catch the bus in Cleveland Park?  People accommodated our parents’ needs every day.

Sometimes Grandpa and Grandma retrieved me at The Corn Place after I finished driving the tractor for a corn pick , bringing a hairbrush for the ride to school. Sometimes a British lady named Miss Horsey, who worked at Green Acres, brought us back as far as the front gate of Holton Arms and waited with us for our parents.

I don’t remember finding any of this noteworthy or troublesome. Our parents were doing all the arranging, and we just followed instructions. Our grandparents were the most worried and they did their best to make sure we were well cared for.

Yesterday I made breakfast for my own grandchildren and I remembered my grandmother and how she made our breakfast when Lani and I spent the night at the office on N St. This was in the days when we were going to Oyster School, so we had to ride the L4 instead of the L2 bus to get to Grandma’s work, and we would wait for her to finish teaching (the receptionist would give us tasks to keep us busy, like making little notepads out of stacks of scrap paper, with glue… this was before Post It notes were invented).  Our grandfather’s office was on the first floor of the small rowhouse and the apartment was on the second floor. The breakfasts she made were enough to feed a man who did hard physical labor all day – she started with half a grapefruit, then a bowl of oatmeal, toast and a soft-boiled egg. Lani and I dutifully at our breakfast, but it seemed like a lot to eat before school.

Looking back, I now see how much organizing our parents’ life choices demanded, and how much support they got from friends and family. Life was not random. We were on the move, but only in this small sphere – farm, school, town, Grandma, sometimes Cleveland Park.  Now I am amazed that our parents ever made it to any of our school plays.

We could have ended up as anxious children but we didn’t. It was instead another way of learning to be ready for whatever came next, and to be fine with camping.