Melon Field

Out across the long furrowed fields, miles of dark green watermelons rise above the ruffled leafed plants. Dew wets the fields, our truck and the workers waiting to start as the morning sun pushes through the California haze. Our family crossed the rolling hills east of Los Angeles in early darkness to fall in line with other empty trucks. We waited to have our truck loaded by the Mexican field hands who worked from daybreak to sundown loading the endless line. This was before Caesar Chavez and the farm workers movemement in Southern California.

Told to stay out of the way, I sometimes played with the field owner's children or I hung around the truck and the melon field watching the men work. As a small girl-child and with no other little girls in sight, it was easy not to be noticed. I could hide in the shade of the truck and watch the beautiful rhythm of the workers as they bent over the dark green melons. They were fluid motion as a one man bent over, reached down to break the stem, then quickly toss the melon into the waiting hands of someone who passed it down to someone who passed it down, endlessly, to someone who stacked them at the end of the long rows. On and on the movement made a thumping rhythm as the sound of melons landed in waiting hands. The beat changed only when the first man paused long enough to wipe the sweat from his face with a dirty rag hanging around his neck. Throughout the field others like him moved down the waiting vines, as the stacks of melons grew higher and the trucks moved into position for loading.

This was our every day existence for the first six or so years of my life. We were itinerant roadside peddlers. My father paid thirty-five dollars for several tons of watermelons and we sold them on a street corner in the city at three for one dollar. Sometimes we sold cantaloupes this way, too. A truckload of watermelons could sell in a day and brought hundreds of dollars. These may have been our most stable years as a family. My parents worked hard seven days a week. When the last of the melon was sold, we turned around the next day for another load of melons. I went with them everywhere, to the fields, to the roadside to sell. My parents had not started drinking in earnest yet and my mother had not started leaving, so maybe she wanted this tenuous stability too for a while before the monotony descended.

These years blur in such sameness that I can only remember time by the houses where we lived. First the blimp house, then another where my mother cried when our dog was hit by a car, then we lived in a trailer for the first time and I started school.

If I threw a deck of paper cards into the air and watched them twist and turn in the light as they slow motion somersault to the ground, I can say my memories of these years are like the fleeting images on the falling cards: My cousin Robert gave me a black eye, I started school in Gardena, we rode in an air plane to Houston after selling everything we owned, I slept curled up in the back seat of cars in honky-tonk parking lots as Hank Williams sang in the darkness, we came back to L.A. in three weeks broke, I walked to school through an open field of wild yellow mustard plants and gray-green anis, Mrs. Drysdale was my first grade teacher, she held me on her lap and brushed my hair during recess, they wanted to skip me a grade but didn't when I cried, my mother started leaving, my first grade love was Dennis Munsie, my first two-wheel bike was a Red Ryder bicycle with a BB gun in a leather scabbard, there were wonderful yellow pears in my lunch box and clear glass bottles of white whole milk, the bottle stoppers tasted waxy when licked, the smell of the pears filled the room when I lifted the metal lid, a birthday party for a Japanese friend whose grandmother and mother worked in the kitchen of the airport, my father had an ulcer and drank endless glasses of buttermilk mixed with white bread, the Pacific Ocean was cold, my father taught me how to play dominoes, Dean Martin sang That's Amore on the car radio, eucalyptus trees swayed their scent, I sang a solo of Silent Night at the school Christmas program, the whole school lined up in the playground for small pox shots, the kindergarten teacher had a box of silk scarves, we danced around the room pretending we were butterflies with jewel toned silk wings, we danced to the Los Angeles City Symphony Orchestra piped into the classroom, Mozart, Beethoven, Puccini, we went to the downtown city library, I fell in love with books, I don't remember learning how to read.

The last card tumbles to the ground and a defining moment happens: My parents fall in love with drinking, my father becomes a professional gambler, we sell everything again, buy a small travel trailer and hit the road, I leave traditional education in the second grade and don't return until I am eleven.

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