~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Jefferson, Iowa, formed me. Growing up, I knew it was the center of the universe—we all know this, wherever we’re growing up. As I grew older and roamed a little more, I – and my sister Dee Dee – called it the Center of the Universe and never quit talking about it, wherever we went. It eventually (sometimes immediately) came up, and soon our new friends knew Jefferson as what it is, the Center of the University.
A friend of mine in Nevada teased me about my oft-repeated phrase and that I talked about it more than she ever talked about growing up in Hollywood, CA. Native that she was, she did not seem to have the tales to tell about her famous native land that I could impart about a mere speck on the prairie.
She became a believer when I gave her a tee shirt that front and back repeated Jefferson Iowa! Nice place. Nice people. She had it on when she went to the beach at Lake Tahoe, and a guy in the next row also unloading his car came up to her. “Are you from Jeff?” he asked, happy.
She unbent from her trunk and asked him warily why he asked.
“Your shirt!” he said. “It’s a Jefferson shirt. They sell ‘em at Potter’s. Or whatever it’s called now.”
She looked down, reminded of what her shirt said and told the guy she got it from a friend.
“From Jefferson? What’s her name?”
“Uh, Colleen.”
“Must be Colleen O’Brien. She’s the only Colleen I know. Does she live here? I was in the band when she was the majorette. She didn’t know me cuz I was a very short freshman.”
My friend said he stopped and mused for a second, then said. “You know, wherever I go, I seem to meet somebody from home.”
She told me later that he’d made her a believer – the Center of the Universe must be Jefferson, Iowa.
I learned in high school that California was the place where everyone, at least of my age in the Midwest, wanted to go. That’s where all of life was happening, whether it was California Rock ‘n Roll music, lipstick, automobile (Mustang), bathing suit, tennis shoes; Jefferson was a joke in comparison, and “getting out” was the goal. All the hype for the California Life impressed me, and I bought the hoor-rah about it, even moved there to live with the boy I loved. He was from the Center of the Universe, too, and one of our goals was to attend the Iowa get-together in Long Beach: It was a picnic divided into the 99 counties of Iowa, started by sailors after WW2 who came back to the States and decided California was better than Iowa.
Now, the far Right considers California the worst state, for any reason they can come up with. I bet that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, they thought it was as cool as it still is. They are just jealous of its success: it is the fifth largest economy in the world.
And despite the draw of the “woo-woo state,” as my sister called my new place of residence, Jefferson remained that center in my heart, and it remains so to this day, in my memory if not in reality.
It is where I learned to be: for one thing, polite to everyone. This was partly family lore, but most of my friends were the same, and the few who weren’t seemed slightly askew to me. Most of us said hello to our neighbors; the lady walking down the street in front of our house, whether we knew her or not; the old guy uptown who wore his winter coat in the summer and sat on a bench in the heat speaking to no one. My boyfriend told his dad he was scared of the old bearded guy. His dad said, “His name is Quinas Mugen, and he went to Iowa for law and then to Harvard and returned home. He’s kind and generous, always been a leader. And scholarly. And from now on, you make a point of walking past him no more hiding behind his back, and you say hello. Period.”
If the Baby Boomers growing up in the 1950s were taught to be civil, what happened to them that they and their children can be so awful now?
The Center of the Universe was a place to climb trees. Not one person ever told me and Margo to get out of his or her tree. Front yard or backyard. Jefferson was a tree haven, the best being the maples, then old cherry trees (we were told we couldn’t eat the cherries; we figured we could eat one or two, not enough that anyone could tell). We climbed boxelders, a few oaks, catalpas, elms were impossible (they had no low branches), walnuts, sycamores and one hackberry. Miss Price, a high school teacher, told us the name of the tree, the only one in town, she thought. She said nothing about our trespassing in her backyard.
What an interesting branch of my life. When I wasn’t climbing, I was looking out of my second story bedroom window straight into them. I was capable of feeling that I was a tree. They were my friends. Have been ever since. I do not understand developers who cut down all trees to build houses and then plant one tree in front of each house. Thick-skulled modernity, also known as greed, comes to mind.
Our neighbor Anna Lawson grew grapes on a long wooden fence in her alley. As they ripened, she put white sacks over each bunch so the birds couldn’t get to them before she did. Mom told me I could not take Anna’s grapes. I said she covered them so we could take them. Mom won. They were such a temptation, but not one I could indulge.
Not all my friends were cool; some of them, I learned to my dumbfoundedness, were prejudiced! One non-Catholic girlfriend told me that her family called the Thanksgiving turkey’s tail the “Pope’s Nose.”
I did not get it. “Whaddya mean?” I asked stunned and confused. Her mother chuckled in the background.
“Well, you know, a cooked turkey ‘s tail looks like the Pope’s nose!”
“How do you know?” I asked, tweaked off. Had she ever met him? I soon left. That evening at supper, I asked Dad what she was talking about. He sighed.
“It’s a prejudicial slur,” he said. “Against Catholics.”
“Huh?”
“Some people who aren’t Catholics don’t like Catholics, so they make jokes about them or say bad things about us. It is a form of prejudice.”
“She doesn’t like me because I’m a Catholic?” Dad nodded and went on eating. “So, am I supposed to not like Lutherans?”
Dad started to say something, possibly “Exactly!” but Mom cut in. “You’re supposed to like everyone and not be mean just because they are.”
“Well, that’s not fair,” I said reasonably.
“It is right, however,” Mom said. “And don’t forget it.”
End of that conversation.
I grew up a little that day. Whenever I heard a bad word out of somebody’s mouth or when another must-have-been-Catholic-hater called me a “Mackerel snapper,” I pretended I was deaf, which was easy: I didn’t know what he was saying, and I wasn’t going to ask. I was never mean to these people, but once I learned what they meant, I never forgot their little slights. I was never mean to anyone, except my sister, that time I hit her in the jaw with my croquet mallet and knocked out a tooth.
The Center of the Universe was just like the rest of the world, something I didn’t fully learn until quite late in the game – mid-twenties – and now I live in a world where most of it is prejudiced and mean. How did this happen? Oh, that’s right: the Orange One. Most of my friends grew up having been taught to be lenient with others, routinely kind, thoughtful to the needy, friends with the poor kids as well as the rich kid (I knew only one of those), and carry on with whatever we were doing.
Now, even broadcasters use words like “ass,” and they’re not speaking of the donkey. Advertisements say “poop.” A politician calls women reporters “nasty” to their faces; and we inadvertently think of something nasty. This particular politician even pushes world leaders out of the way to get in the front row for a photo; and he yells at a democratic nation’s president IN THE OVAL OFFICE!
What a scatological time the world has come to. The Center of the Universe probably has citizens who use the “F” bomb. But then, on occasion, so do I. Mom would be horrified. Dad might smile. I did hear him yell, “Son of a bitch!” one time to a baseball umpire. Little League, too. I’d never heard a bad word out of his mouth, but sitting next to him keeping the scorebook, hearing him cuss, I was as stunned as I had been by the “Pope’s Nose.”
