sonora2sonoma

A collection of short essays on my recollections of growing up in the Sierra foothills in the 1950s.

by Tim Konrad

Examining Internal Landscapes

Histories of places, as noted in Chapter Three, rarely extend their scope beyond descriptions of locations, events and timelines. As a result, the internal dialogues of the places’ inhabitants usually remain unexamined.

That focus changes when a place holds emotional significance for someone, as Sonora does for me.

When a person becomes attached to his or her surroundings, they have embarked, knowing or not, on a love affair as potent and primed with possibility and pitfall as any other romantic relationship.

Because of my attachment to Sonora, it isn’t possible  for me to explore its history without also considering the emotional underpinnings that determined the nature of the impressions I formed while negotiating the twists and turns separating then from now.

In that sense, this story is MY story because, in the telling of it, as in the living of it, the tale and its teller are inextricably linked, forever bound by bonds that are, by nature, non-linear, inscrutable yet omnipresent, bonds beyond sight, beyond notice, tucked discretely into the spaces between commas, between breaths, binding us to our fates as reliably as molecules hold tight their atomic confederacies.

On Nearly Growing Up in Sheepranch

Of the many insecurities I felt as a child, one, in particular, stands out for the sheer devilishness of its ability to “stir the pot,” so to speak. by fanning the spark of uncertainty I experienced concerning the true identity of my birth parents.

My mother informed me when I was quite young that another baby boy had been born at the same hospital around the same time I was born. The other boy’s parents resided in Sheep Ranch, in neighboring Calaveras County.

When these parents were preparing to take their baby home, the nursing staff mistakenly bundled me up instead, but my mother became aware of the mix-up and set everyone straight . . or so she’d always told me.

Despite my mother’s assurances that the babies went to their correct homes, an element of doubt remained, in quiet moments, that troubled me throughout much of my early childhood.

Pesky little thoughts would intrude from time to time questioning how the error had been revealed and upon what evidence attempts at reassurances had been based.

Doubts provide fertile ground for the imagination to bloom large, and mine took full advantage of the situation.

Occasionally I would find myself wondering how different my life might have been had I been raised in Sheep Ranch by people I knew nothing about.

This uncertainty continued until, at some point, it dawned on me that it didn’t really matter; regardless of whether the babies had gone to their correct homes, my parents were the ones who raised me, with love, and that was all that counted.

***

My parents had two children before I came along. The first, a boy, was stillborn. My father once told me that they hadn’t named that baby since he hadn’t made it to full term.

Having recently been made aware, from my genealogical research, that families would sometimes re-cycle the names they had chosen for their children in instances where their firstborn suffered an untimely death, I now wonder if the name they chose for me was influenced in any way by that phenomenon.

My parents’ second child was a girl. They named her Pearl—after my father’s mother. Pearl lived for 18 hours and is buried in the family plot at the Mountain Shadows Cemetery in Sonora, alongside their long-time friend, Jim Covington,.

I was born the following year—1943.

***

When I was a child, my mother told me that she’d been advised by her doctors after Pearl’s birth that she might not survive another pregnancy. The effect this news had on me was twofold: I felt fortunate, and grateful she’d taken the chance and become pregnant anyway, and I also felt something else—like a combination of obligation and guilt all at once—and that cocktail of emotions contributed to the evolution of deep-seated feelings of unworthiness over my perceived shortcomings.

A Total Surprise

My musings over what might-have-been regarding the hospital mix-up were revived anew years later when I discovered, while going through old boxes long stored in Sonora, a letter my Aunt Dorothy had penned to my mother the year before I was born.

My father’s older sister, Dorothy was a constant presence in my life, from my earliest memories until her passing in the late 1980’s.

In the letter, dated July 26, 1942, my aunt was telling my mother of an opportunity to adopt a newly-born girl, suggesting to her it might “keep you interested until such time that you can have one of your own.”

The child had been born to an unwed mother from a distant town who had become involved with a married man. Everyone in her community believed she was away somewhere receiving treatment for a tumor. Because of her tender age (20), her family had thought it best to place the child for adoption.

Echoing the tenor of the times, the letter described the hospital administrator as not wanting the affair to “leak out,” because if it did “the authorities will take it . . and place it in a home.” On the other hand, the letter continued, “after the papers are signed, they can do nothing.”

The hospital administrator had first approached my aunt and uncle with the proposition. While my aunt was charmed by the little girl, my uncle was resistant, so my aunt,  aware of my mother’s failed pregnancies, reached out to my parents.

Judging from the fact I never heard anything about this from anyone back then nor have I at any time since, until I discovered the letter in January of 2020, my parents must have declined the offer.

I can’t imagine how different my life might have been had I been raised with a sister with whom to share my childhood. I had long wished, growing up as a single child, that my parents had produced siblings, playmates living under the same roof as me, instead of across the street or across town.

The closest thing to a sibling I had growing up was my cousin Linda, 20 months my senior. She grew up in the Bay Area, so we only got to see each other when our parents (usually mine) would undertake the 3-hour drive that separated us.

Linda and I would make up for lost time each time we were together; the memories of that time still resound happily in my mind.

To be continued: