I was eight years old in 1972, and I hated it. I was permanently creeped out.
The Watergate hearings interrupted my lunchtime Flintstones, and all those somber men mumbling about “bugs” had me convince that giant spiders were about to invade.
When I managed to make out that “bugs” were listening devices, I took a notion that everyone everywhere was being recorded; in particular, that there was a camera hidden in the macrame orange sunflower artwork over the TV.
Also, it seemed to me, thanks to Patty Hearst and Chowchilla, that everybody was being kidnapped.
My mother explained that we were too poor for anyone to want to kidnap me.
However, she also used to try to make me feel better about a rather embarrassing birthmark by chirping that, after all, it would make it so much easier for her to identify my body, should such a circumstance arrive.
And that she dearly hoped that if I ever was abducted, they’d at least find my body pretty quickly so she’d at least know I wasn’t being tortured with power tools in a basement someplace.
Fortunately, she’d bought a life insurance policy and a burial plot for me — for $50 — when I was born, so none of this would cost too much money.
(I don’t mean to make my mother sound so awful, although like all mothers, she could be, doing brilliant stuff like picking an alcoholic, rage-aholic pervert for Husband #3. Frankly, these morbid, pragmatic speculations were actually the things I liked about her. They showed some evidence of thought…)
I still own that damn plot; when she died I tried to unload it on the cemetery but they didn’t seem too interested. In fact, they seemed to suggest I couldn’t sell it, which sounds fishy to me.
I really need to get rid of this thing, by the way. I love that I have the world’s cheapest burial plot but I do NOT want to be buried in Hamilton.
If you do, maybe we can work something out.
