Simple Dreams ~ A Musical Memoir Read online

  Everything in the desert seems to either want to inject one with venom or give a vicious stab with a thorn, but we were rarely injured in this manner. I prefer to think that we were lovingly protected by the great good sense and vigilant valor of Murphy and Little Paint. I remember Paint skidding to a halt one afternoon at the sight of a huge rattlesnake stretched across the trail in front of us.

  Our parents expected us to be home by dark, and we had no reason to dawdle, as a place with so many spines and fangs was no place we wanted to be after sundown. The trip home always seemed to take half the time, because Murphy and Little Paint were eager for their dinner. We clung like burrs on their backs and rode like the wind. We were eager for our dinner too.

  The year before Murphy came into our lives, my mother had brought home a brown and white springer spaniel puppy. She called him “His Honor the Judge” because his curly ears reminded her of the wigs worn in the British court. One late afternoon, we were cruising down the road in Frank & Earnest, Mother driving and the puppy with me in the backseat. Some exuberant canine impulse caused His Honor to jump from the backseat into her lap. This had the unhappy effect of landing us in the ditch that ran by the side of the road. My mother was very calm. I remember her saying “Well! Here we are!” in a chipper voice and then climbing out of the car so she could pull me out of the back. My knees were skinned, but neither of us seemed to be seriously hurt, so we hiked to the nearest gas station, and someone came and took us home.

  The following morning, my mother leaned over the sink to brush her teeth. Next, she was lying on the floor and couldn’t move her legs. Again, she stayed calm, so I wasn’t aware that anything was particularly wrong. My father was helping her, and he was pretty calm too.

  Eventually some men arrived with a tidy little bed on wheels, loaded my mother on it, and wheeled her out the door and into an ambulance. I was fascinated by the little bed with its crisp sheets and neatly tucked-in blanket, and hoped I’d get a turn on it next. I fully expected her to be right back after a short ride around the neighborhood. I thought I would spend the morning helping her to make beds and hang wet clothes on the line, rake leaves, feed the chickens, and gather the eggs. My mother still wasn’t around at bedtime, and she didn’t read to me from her own childhood collection of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, which were my favorites. She didn’t turn up the next morning at breakfast, either, and by now I’d gathered that she wasn’t feeling well and had ridden in that little bed to St. Mary’s Hospital. I knew about this place because my older brother had been hit by a car and taken to the hospital with a broken leg. They put a cast on the leg, and we went there and brought him home. My sister had been treated for polio at the hospital, but she came home too, and she was fine. I didn’t know what was wrong with my mother or when we would bring her home. I didn’t know that she was completely paralyzed from the waist down and not expected to walk ever again.

  A thin-lipped, rather severe woman of Scottish extraction who wore a green-striped uniform was moved into our guesthouse. She had been hired to care for me; my sister, Suzy; and my brother, Peter; keep the house clean; and do the cooking. No wonder she was grouchy. We thought her cooking tasted funny. She fried steaks in a pan until they were gray and rubbery. She introduced us to Jell-O. I wasn’t in school yet, so I was home with her by myself all day. With all that she had to do, she understandably paid me very little attention. I learned to entertain myself. I spent hours pretending that I was galloping with Hopalong Cassidy and his big white stallion, Topper, chasing cattle rustlers. Hoppy and I were tight. We did everything together.

  I figured out how to work the big combination radio–record player and would twist the dial through the Arizona call letters beginning with K. Also, I could get the Mexican stations, beginning with X. They played blaring mariachi rancheras: accordion-driven polkas, waltzes, and corridos from the mighty state of Sonora. ¡Sí, señor!

  This was before rock and roll, and I listened to the sonic fantasies of a country still reeling from the war, with men finally home from the nightmares they had endured and survived, and wouldn’t talk about. The songs were all about pleasant, positive things: love and marriage, doggies in the window, counting blessings.

  My father had some 78 rpm recordings, and I liked those better. Bizet’s Carmen, Grieg’s Peer Gynt, and the flamenco singer Pastora Pavón, known as La Niña de los Peines, who sang in a slangy Spanish that I couldn’t understand. She killed me. I could somehow sense that she was not singing about something pleasant, she was singing about something essential. Something she yearned for so much it burned her, like I felt when I missed my mother, which was all the time.

  The Scottish woman had not been raised in the desert, so she wasn’t going for the mud huaraches. She insisted that I wear my little black patent leather party shoes, which I wore only to birthday parties and had already outgrown. They pinched my toes and rubbed my heels to blisters, which I popped with a pin. They hurt like hell. I couldn’t stand shoes for years after that and still always buy them a size too big. The Scottish woman, who apparently wasn’t aware that I had powerful friends like Hoppy and Topper, whacked me with a pink hairbrush if I squirmed when she was trying to braid my hair. I was pretty squirmy. I wanted my mother to come back.

  In those days, children, being considered noisy little germ factories, were not allowed in hospitals to visit. After several months, my father smuggled me in through the window in my mother’s room. She was lying in bed in traction, with a body cast. The room smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol. She was smiling at me. I got a little fit of shyness. I wasn’t quite sure what to say after all that time. There was a novelty song we knew from the radio. It went “Ah, get out of here with a [drum sound effect] boom, boom, boom, and don’t come back no more!” Peter, Suzy, and I would sing it all over the house, banging the drum part on any resonant surface handy. I stepped up to the bed, belted the song out at the top of my lungs, and pounded the boom, boom, boom on her cast.

  My mother exploded in laughter. The ice was broken. She showed me the picture of a Mexican guy in a big hat with a big-toothed grin that my father had drawn for her on her cast. She showed me the circle they had cut out of the front of her cast with a little electric saw, so she might be a bit cooler in that hot room in the middle of the desert before air-conditioning was in general use. The traction rig looked kind of fun, like a jungle gym for people who had to stay in bed. I didn’t know she had been paralyzed. I didn’t know that she had gone through a horrific surgery to try to make her walk again, incorporating a brand-new technique that might not even work. This involved taking a piece of her shin bone and grinding it up to make new pieces for her poor broken back, which was reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle and fused in place. During the six months my mother was in the hospital, that was the only time I got to see her.

  When she finally came home, she was in bed for another six months, except she could take little steps with a walker. I played on the floor of her room all day, and we would listen to Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby sing live on the radio. I was ecstatic. I had my mother back.

  In the second six months of her recovery, my mother began to make steady progress. She still had to wear a cast on her torso but gradually was able to do without the walker. She began to spend long hours with her sewing machine, making dresses that would fit over her cast and also pretty little cotton dresses for me and my sister to wear to school.

  During the time that my mother was absent, I was used to a lot of freedom, roaming the desert with Dana on our ponies. So the idea of spending the day squirming in my desk in a stuffy classroom was not too popular with me. Peter and Suzy and all the O’Sullivan kids attended Saints Peter and Paul, the local Catholic school, and that was where I would be going in the fall. I had heard a lot of their stories and complaints. I was pretty excited about the brand-new pair of saddle shoes Mother bought for me, with plenty of room for my toes, but I would have traded them in a minute for the mud huaraches and more days to spe
nd with Murphy.

  I had always been extremely shy around other children. Before Dana, the only times I encountered other children were at my cousin Nina’s birthday parties. I would be dressed up in pastel organdy and driven to my uncle’s beautiful cattle ranch, the Agua Linda, which sprawled in the valley between Tucson and the Mexican border. Nina’s mother would set a pretty table and have a wonderful lunch for us, including a cake that revolved on a music box stand. Then, after a hayride around my uncle’s cotton fields, we would play pin the tail on the donkey and break a piñata. The other children would be scrambling for the candy, and I would peek out at them from behind my mother’s leg, much too shy to participate.

  At school, I knew I was going to have to contend with miserable shyness and no hayride.

  As a little girl, I was taught that cowgirls don’t cry. I didn’t feel like a cowgirl the first day of school. I managed a few brave smiles for my father’s camera but started to cry as soon as it was time to get in the car. My father took my hand and walked me, still crying, into my classroom. He thoughtfully introduced me to the sweet-faced little girl sitting across the aisle. Her name was Patsy, and she would become a lifelong and dearly loved friend, now godmother to my children and I to hers. I cried all day every day for three weeks. Then I finally gave up and just looked out the window.

  The classroom that Patsy and I occupied was brand-new cinder block construction with a bank of windows on the left side and a cloakroom stretching along the entire back of the room.

  We would file in there in the morning and stretch to put our lunch boxes on the shelf that ran above the row of hooks where we hung our coats. That was our one place to whisper and visit, because once we were seated in the classroom, we were expected to sit still with our hands folded on our desks and give our full attention to the front of the room. This was not always easy for such young children, especially some of the boys, and anyone who disobeyed was dealt with swiftly. I remember one unfortunate little boy who had wet his pants. The nun went after him, there was a struggle, and his desk tipped over onto the floor. She picked him up by his shirt collar, shook him loose from his desk, and then pulled him bawling back to the cloakroom and hung him on one of the available hooks by his belt. He was left there for a minute or two, utterly humiliated, flailing his little arms and legs furiously. This was shocking behavior to me. My parents never treated us like this—not even the thin-lipped Scottish woman did. If my mother had known that such things were going on in the classroom, she would have rammed Frank & Earnest through the convent wall. But we didn’t tell her. We just said that we didn’t like school. We thought this behavior was standard procedure at all schools, as we had never been to any other. I left for school each morning with a stomachache.

  The class size was big—there were forty-eight of us—so the young nun standing in the front of the room might have envisioned Lilliputian anarchy if her crowd control methods were ineffective. She was dressed, poor thing, in a habit that consisted of a long-sleeved, ankle-length black wool dress, with heavy black stockings and lace-up black leather shoes. An elbow-length cape made of the same wool went over the pleated bodice and was never removed, even on the most blisteringly hot days. On her head was a black wool bonnet with a stiffly starched lining of white linen. The bonnet fastened snugly beneath her chin with a black bow. The starchy bit looked like it must surely scratch, and the tender skin at the side of her face was often streaked with red. At her waist was a long rosary with a heavy crucifix, the rustling sound of her rosary beads being synonymous with her movement. We learned to fear that sound because it could mean that she was coming up from behind to whack an offender with a ruler or, worse yet, the pointer.

  To be made to dress in such a way in the desert heat was nothing short of sadistic. It made it very hard for the sisters to observe us properly on the playground, let alone play with us, as a minute spent in the full sun would turn the black habit into a solar collector that could incinerate its wearer. It’s a wonder that the playground didn’t turn into Lord of the Flies.

  In the front of every classroom, above the blackboards, was a fairly large crucifix, fully loaded with a suffering Jesus and complement of thorny crown, nails, and oozing side gash. Whoever had the idea to force six-year-olds to contemplate an image of a man being horribly tortured to death was a sick person indeed. I thought the whole thing was gross and tried not to look. We were instructed that our childish peccadilloes had been responsible for this guy Jesus being treated in such a cruel fashion. Furthermore, they told us, he had eventually died to atone for what we did. I knew this couldn’t possibly be true, because when all this stuff happened to him, I wasn’t even born. This made me question the veracity of everything they ever told us.

  An incident that stands out as a turning point in my ability to swallow any life-defining ideas not accompanied by data and published in a peer-reviewed journal occurred when I was in the second grade. Our teacher was Sister Francis Mary, a wizened old soul who had taught my father and Peter and Suzy before me. We actually liked her pretty well and tried hard to please her. She had established a point system to gauge our good behavior. This is how it worked: Sister Francis Mary hung a piece of paper on the wall. Sometimes she would leave the room for a short while, and if we were completely quiet and sitting with our hands folded when she returned, she would stick a gummed foil star on the paper. If we got ten stars, that meant we got to have a party.

  In our class, we had a sweet girl, Bojanna, with thick, beautiful hair to her waist, whose family was Polish. Her mother made a traditional sweet called a Polish rosette, which was made out of fried dough and sprinkled with powdered sugar. When we had a party, Bojanna’s mother would fry up fifty of them and bring them to school for the party. They were the most delicious things we ever tasted, and we really wanted to earn those ten stars and have our party.

  One May afternoon, after we had earned almost enough stars and were in the home stretch for the party, Sister Francis Mary left the room. We had set up the traditional May altar in the corner, with a large plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and some flat pieces of scenery made to look like trees in a garden. Each morning, a different child would be responsible for bringing in a little wreath made of fresh flowers. We would all sing a song to the Virgin Mary, she would be crowned with the wreath, and it was a big deal. That particular afternoon after Sister left, we were being good, and we were being quiet. Patsy was walking up and down the aisles with her finger pressed to her lips as an extra reminder, and we were all thinking of the party and the Polish rosettes. The windows at the side of the classroom had been left open because it was a warm day, and a wind had kicked up. This can happen very suddenly in the desert, and the wind can be quite violent. The wind surged through the open windows and blew down a piece of scenery, which crashed into the Virgin Mary, knocking her to the floor and snapping her head off at the neck. The head rolled across the floor in front of our horrified gazes and came to a stop at about the third row. We couldn’t have been more shocked if Marie Antoinette herself had been executed before us with a guillotine.

  We were speechless and frozen in place when Sister Francis Mary returned. She was apoplectic. She demanded to know who had been roughhousing. Brave Patsy raised her hand and told Sister Francis Mary about the wind. Sister accepted her explanation. Then she wheeled on us and hissed that we in the class must have been having impure and sinful thoughts, that we were clearly wicked children, and that she was canceling all the stars we had earned. We were devastated. We hadn’t been thinking impure thoughts. We had been thinking about the Polish rosettes.

  I don’t remember when there wasn’t music going on in our house: my father whistling while he was figuring out how to fix something; my brother Pete practicing the “Ave Maria” for his performance with the Tucson Arizona Boys Chorus; my sister, Suzy, sobbing a Hank Williams song with her hands in the dishwater; my little brother, Mike, struggling to play the huge double bass.

  Sundays, my father wou
ld sit at the piano and play most anything in the key of C. He sang love songs in Spanish for my mother, and then a few Sinatra songs while he remembered single life before children, and responsibilities, and the awful war. My sister sang the role of Little Buttercup in a school production of H.M.S. Pinafore when she was in the eighth grade, so she and my mother would play from the big Gilbert and Sullivan book that sat on the piano. If they were in a frisky mood, they would sing “Strike Up the Band” or “The Oceana Roll.” We would all harmonize with our mother on “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”

  When we got tired of listening to our own house, we would tramp across the few hundred yards to the house of our Ronstadt grandparents, where we got a pretty regular diet of classical music. They had what they called a Victrola and would listen to their favorite opera excerpts played on 78 rpm recordings. La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madama Butterfly were the great favorites. On Saturdays they would tune in to the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast or sit at the piano trying to unravel a simple Beethoven, Brahms, or Liszt composition from a page of sheet music.

  Evenings, if the weather wasn’t too hot or freezing, or the mosquitoes weren’t threatening to carry us away to the Land of Oz, we would haul our guitars outside and sing until it was time to go in, which was when we had run out of songs.

  There was no TV, the radio couldn’t wander around with you because it was tethered to the wall, and we didn’t get enough allowance to buy concert tickets. In any case, there weren’t many big acts playing in Tucson, so if we wanted music, we had to make our own. The music I heard in those two houses before I was ten provided me with material to explore for my entire career.