304.366 - 2016 project and the 1950s part 2

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

the 1950s part 2

what a terrible time!  when I entered them I was 8, when they left I was 18.  when they arrived I was able to walk home from school in Recife, Pernambuco, Brasil; when they left, I was about to graduate from high school and start college.  neither of those were bad things, but the passage from one to the other was long and dreary.  we moved from the strange little house (it looked like a caricature of a kid's drawing of a house) to the blue-grey house (which looked like a real house, at least a real Brasilian house) and that should have been a good thing.  it should have meant we, the family, were moving up in the world.  isn't that supposed to mean happier times?  yeah, well.  then one day we packed up and flew to Miami and my mother and father and two brothers disappeared.  my sister and I traveled all day and all night to a place called St. Louis.  after about three months there we traveled to Perryton, Texas, where in fact we were happier, my sister and I.  we began to learn English as spoken by American kids our ages (12 and 10).  and our parents showed up, all smiles, except she wasn't the mother who had gone away, she was some other mother, slightly different.  we drove to Sherman, Texas, and picked up my brothers, who had no warning, and who'd thought we were all dead.  we drove to Clovis, New Mexico, and moved into a house we were told was our new home.  by that time none of us kids had any good associations with the word home. we lived there two years and moved to another home, then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico.  President Eisenhower got us through the McCarthy years, and then, thankfully, the 1950s were over.  to travel through them another way, I entered them playing circus performer and carpenter, then moved and played explorer and pirate and spaceman, then moved and played cowboys and baseball-sorta, then moved and played cowboys and knights, then moved and played cowboys and boyfriend, then moved and played boyfriend and student, than moved and played paperboy and student.  there were flourishes and nuances on that trajectory, but it tells the main story.  we survived the 1950s.  it wasn't pretty but we did, then I left home and we were probably both the better for it.  my family moved to Richmond, Virginia, and they were finished moving, but that was already the 1960s.  I started college and finished being a kid, but again, that was the 1960s and a different story.  the 1950s were a dark and miasmic time, and I never missed them.  I can't imagine why anyone but white men would feel nostalgic for them.