I still have memories of the stroller. It was a big clunky thing. A double-seater, with the seats font-to-back, not like the side-by-sides they sell today. The color of the vinyl canopy is lost (on me; it was) either navy blue or forest green. My mother would load my little brother and me into the stroller; my brother in front and me in back. Then off we would go. My mother couldn’t drive, so we walked everywhere. I don’t think she ever learned to drive.
The trips in the stroller were always an adventure for me. I got to see the big street and the cars. It seemed like we would walk for miles: (we would pass all the blinking) the traffic lights, the railroad tracks and the stores. It was all so different from the house and the yard, then we would get to wherever we were going. My mother would take my brother and me out of the stroller, and set us in the play area. She would then sit and read a magazine, smoke a cigarette, and wait for her turn. We barely noticed when she walked into a back room to see her doctor.
When my mother was done, she would load us back into the stroller for another adventurous walk home. Later, I would find out that these weekly trips to the doctor were (actually) visits to her psychiatrist. She was undergoing treatment for manic-depression. I have no idea if they called it that in the early 1970’s, but that’s what it was. There were many things in my childhood with these kinds of euphemisms. Like the days my father fell asleep on the living room floor in his underwear. He was “tired”, not drunk. “Tired” also described the times my mother would spend days in her room. It was never depression.
The times she spent in her room, locked away with the curtains drawn, became more frequent as I got older, as (it did with) my father snoring on the living room floor. Still, the days my mother brought out the stroller were good days. These were the days when she was active and happy. These were the days she baked and cleaned and made June Cleaver look lazy. The “stroller days” lasted after the old double-seater disappeared and my brother and I were old enough to walk with her when she took her trips to the doctor, the store, or even just to go walking.
These days finally ended when my brother and I started school. Being only 10 months apart, we started kindergarten at the same time. For the first week or so, my mother walked with us to kindergarten, and then we would walk on our own both ways. The stroller days were entirely over, we were big boys and in school, we didn’t need the stroller days anymore; and my mother was alone in the house all day. I think she missed the stroller days, and the loneliness contributed to her being tired more and more often.
Petey's Place 