Mountain Mouse City Mouse

allyphelps7
Oct 15, 2020
8 min read

"You don't need lots of friends, you just need a good friend." - My Mother

Sage advise from a woman that makes friends easily and instantly. Advise that has served me well all my life. She must have known her little girl was shy and introverted and maybe even a bit anxious.

This past summer Dave and I traveled to New Mexico. Part of what is becoming our joint August birthdays tradition. New Mexico is not terribly distant and yet in some ways feels like a whole other country.

Bandelier National Monument. It's not very pretty. Don't bother going there. (so I can have it all to myself :)

My happy place

One of my favorite things to do is to drive slowly through the cities that are familiar. Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and of course Bandelier National Monument where we lived as Daddy was a Park Ranger. We slowly hike down to Frijoles Canyon, go to the gift shop and buy a chocolate. We drive by the Jr. High, and High School and then make our way to the elementary school. Park the car and walk around the small campus. It's now a college. The playground equipment is gone, but strangely enough everything else looks the same. We check the front doors of the school. Unlocked. We open the door and walk in. Everything looks exactly the same. It was like having tunnel vision, or rather stepping back in time.

My elementary school. My picture was taken in this very spot for the City Newspaper years ago when I was in 4th grade.

After entering the front doors and passing what used to be the teachers lounge and the restroom, we turned the corner and saw down the long hallway a man pushing a mop. We asked him if we could roam the halls and find my old classrooms. He shrugged his shoulders and told us to take our time.

Earlier in the day while driving past our old house in the park, the memories of how our days were spent came flooding back. Before we had moved to New Mexico from a small Texas town called Dumas, my father had thrown our black and white television out the back door and onto the yard. Literally threw it. It made such a sound, that we knew once our behavior improved the T.V. still wouldn't come back in the house. We were out of luck. And yet....

Our home in Dumas, Texas

We moved to New Mexico mid-school year. I remember it was winter-time because just a couple of days after arriving my mother and her friend Pam who had come with us from Texas to help us get settled, slid off icy road down an embankment. They were uninjured except for huge bruise on Mama's thigh.

Unloading the moving van with the help of church friends. Yes. That's me. The shoes I'm thinking would be quite the rage these days. And also....the cot...that was my bed for quite a while. Could be a part of why I'm not super fond of camping and prefer hotels.

Of the five single family homes provided for Rangers with families, we had the most kids. Only one other house had two teen-aged boys. My little brother and I were it for each other. I was a pretty bossy eight-year old and he was a compliant five-year old grateful for a play-mate. Most days I'd come home from school, yell to my mother "Where are you!" She'd usually call out to me that she was in her room sewing. I'd grab a couple of cookies and head outside. Often hiking the groomed trail that led down to Frijole's Canyon. I'd call Mama from the gift shop and she'd drive down to pick me up in time for dinner. Sometimes I could talk Joel into dressing up like Pa from "Little House on the Prairie, I'd dress up like Ma, and my cat would dress up like a baby. Joel would push me and the cat-baby around in the Red-Rider Wagon. And sometimes we'd play with Joel's match-box cars on the dirt-track he'd built on the side of our house. Life was good, but I started yearning for girl-friends.

The cool kids on the block. Actually, the ONLY kids on the block. And dog too! (The knee-socks!)

One Wednesday after school, I was at our after-school kid's church program. I recognized a little girl from my school class. She walked straight up to me and introduced herself. We were a match! She the extrovert, and I the introvert. We were instant best friends. Carrie. Long blonde hair with large brown eyes and the biggest smile! She was the yin to my yang. The athlete to my ballerina. The Tom-boy to my love of baby-dolls. I was painfully shy and she was outgoing and fearless. I came from a large noisy family, and she had only one sibling. She was better than any Gilligan's Island, Brady Bunch or Partridge Family all rolled into one! We spent the Summer months switching off spending the night at each other's houses. At my house we'd hike for hours, catch lizards and horney-toads. She reveled in the chaos of our family's dinner-time and we'd drag bed-rolls out onto the front lawn and sleep under the stars. At her house, after eating a dinner of broiled hot-dogs split down the center and sprinkled with grated cheese and chopped green onion, broiled and placed on squishy white Rainbow bread, we'd stay up late watching "Happy Days", and "Laverne and Shirley", and make forts to sleep in out of every blanket from her mom's linen closet. We'd ride our bikes into town and go to Baskin Robbin's ice cream shop and order "The Matterhorn". A seven scoop ice-cream Sunday.

Carrie is standing in front of me in this photo. If I can find her and get her permission to show her in this picture I will edit this. She is the cutest lil' thing and her personality just oozes out of this picture! (Me flexing and trying to be a strong as she is)

Carrie was endless amounts of imagination and I was practical. We would ride bikes across the bridge into Los Alamos and go to the city library, or the drug-store. We purchased a box of molding-clay and took it back to her house to entertain ourselves the rest of the day.

Her bedroom was everything I wanted and never could get. I shared a room with my teen-aged sister and as my grandmother always said "R.H.I.P!" (rank has it's privilege's!") Carrie had her own little T.V., her own record-player, cool bedding, and even a little table and chairs. We put a Vicki Lawrence album on the record player "God Didn't Make Little Green Apples", and set the clay on the table and busied ourselves for hours, only stopping long enough to get a scoop of Kool-Aid mix to lick like a candy. We made clay animals. Clay Jewelry. Clay doll furniture. Running out of idea, we started to make clay tiny little balls. Zillions of tiny balls. Carrie tossed a little clay ball onto the ceiling. It stuck. Completely stuck. We giggled a little bit, and feeling caught up in the moment I tossed one of mine up. It stuck too! So she did another. I did another, until after several minutes her ceiling had become completely transformed. It was now a clay-ball polka-dotted wonderland!

After we exhausted our last ball, we sat in our chairs and stared at the ceiling in amazement of our handy-work. Just when we thought life could get no better than this, we heard her mother call to us from the kitchen that it was time to leave for her brother's performance at the High School. I saw the blood rush from her face. This was not good. Her mother kept an extremely clean home. This bedroom ceiling was, well....it was not clean. We stood on our chairs and tippy-toed to try to touch the ceiling. Nope. Only about two feet shy of where we needed to be. I could feel her panic setting in. She hissed at me to climb up on her shoulders (she's the athletic one don't forget), and told me to knock all the balls down while she moved around the room. I was feeling her fear big-time and so did as I was told.

I climbed from the little chair to the little table and then hoisted myself up onto her shoulders. She held very steady, and I proceeded to pluck the little balls off the ceiling one by one. Hey! This was going pretty well! I was so impressed with our ingenuity. I was quite impressed with us period! Actually, I was thinking how very odd we must look. I could feel her shoulders starting to shake just a little bit, and I knew that even though neither of us weighed much, she wasn't going to be able to hold me up much longer. I said, smiling, "Carrie! I can't BELIEVE we are picking clay balls off of your ceiling!" She just said "HURRY! My mom's gonna KILL me!" And now she's starting to shake just a little bit. I can't tell if it's from her shoulders getting tired, or her trying to hold back her laughter. The same way I was trying to hold back my laughter. I assumed it was the latter. I kept picking off the balls and started to snicker a bit. But the more I snickered the more I started to shake.

She kept telling me to HURRY! HURRY! But all that did was to inspire more laughter from me. I told her she better let me down or I was going to wet my pants. She was less interested in my toilet needs than in her need to preserve both of our lives. "NO! You have to get ALL the balls down HURRY!" I had warned her. I kept picking the balls off the ceiling, kept laughing and now proceeded to pee. All down her neck and shoulders. She was stoic. Goal oriented. The clay must. come. off. the. ceiling. All of it. Her mother is giving warning calls. The last ball was off. I didn't dare tell her that I could see where each little piece of colored clay had left a little colored mark on the ceiling. I climbed back down onto the table and we dashed into the bathroom to get cleaned up. Her face never really lost it's redness the rest of that evening. I'm sure she was pretty upset with me. But she knew it had all originally been her idea, so I'm sure she was equally upset with herself. By the next morning, all was forgiven and we back to our regular program of mountain mouse/city mouse biking and hiking. That was the summer of 1975.

When my children were little they would ask me if I had balls to play with when I was a little girl. I'd smile at them, "What do I look like!? I'm from cave-man times?! Yes, of course we had balls, just like we do now. Basket-balls, foot-balls, tennis-balls!" I'd tell them. (We even had tiny little clay balls). I wonder if we'd had cell-phones, on-line games, and social media if Carrie and I would have made little clay-balls. I wonder if we would have ridden into town to share a huge bowl of ice-cream. Or hiked and caught lizards and toads and gave them names and caught ants to feed them.

Our family moved the summer of 1976. Carrie and I only saw each other again once more about five years later. We had both changed of course. But it was good to see each other again. Over forty years have passed.

We can go back to the places we've lived and the places we've loved. But we can't go back in time. If we could, what would we change. What would we do the same. One thing is for sure, I'd still keep that part where my Dad threw the television out into the backyard.