My Mother Proved We Were Not Pitiful

My family lived in Argus, a suburb of Trona, California in 1947-48. Argus consisted of a gas station and a big water tower. We went to school in Trona. Trona was, and still may be, a company town. The company was a potash company that made 20 Mule Team Borax and other things. Employees were paid in company script and did their shopping in the company store, attended church in the company church, saw movies in the company movie house. Well, really it was a movie tent. Trona is in the same area of the California desert as Death Valley. In fact we were there because the paving company my father worked for was paving the road into Death Valley. We were there for an entire school year (a rarity) so I have lots of memories of my time there. I truly mean a school year, not a calendar year. I don't remember being able to attend any school for the entire school year until we moved to Palm Springs. We were able to shop and get things in Trona because people in Trona sometimes wanted cash they could spend in the nearest big city, San Bernardino. So we traded our cash for their script. All three of us kids learned to swim in Argus in the gigantic water tower with its mossy sides and no shallow end. My father would tread water and took turns holding us while we learned to swim. It was the only way to get cool. I trust this water was somehow filtered before it finally reached our little trailer home but I can't worry about that now. We were the only kids in Argus and had to have special permission to go to school in Trona with the company kids. None of the crew that traveled around the U.S. with the paving company had any children except for our parents. We learned to play poker at a very early age in order to have something to do with all the adults in our world. There was always someone to watch out for us and always some adult willing to play some silly game with us. It was a strange childhood but of course we knew nothing else.

To get to the point, my teacher that year was doing a social studies unit on the lives of itinerant farm workers and their children. She described their very sad lives of never staying in one place, sometimes not even long enough to bother to go to school. When they did go to school, they had a hard time making friends and by the time they did, it was time to move again. They couldn't really participate in any school activities because they were never there long enough to learn and play a part in any school plays or anything like that. This story of these pitiful children went on and on, every story a reflection of my life. Finally, she told how sometimes they could not go to school because they had no shoes to wear. Naturally, I went home that day and told my mother that we were pitiful children who lived sad lives. I knew it was true because my teacher said so. My mother listened patiently until I got to the part where these pitiful children had no shoes and she calmly said, "Well, Bobbie, you have shoes so you are not pitiful." She asked me if I felt sad and I said no, so we concluded together that the teacher was not describing our lives and we were not pitiful. What a relief.