When I lived in Mesick the first time, I had a long and spectacular summer off from school between Kindergarten and first grade. During that summer I met Matt and Kellie Amidon. The Amidons had a cement business and they lived on the other side of a small woods from us. Matt was going into 6th grade and Kellie was a year ahead of me, going into second grade. We spent our summer days tearing through those woods, riding our bikes, digging holes, and reading comic books. We had a great time. When I came back to Mesick in the summer of 1977, so did they. Apparently they had moved to Oklahoma, but now they were back, and they built a brand-new house at the end of a road that ran alongside the field adjacent to my grandparents’ house. They were selling lots along the road, and my dad surprised me by getting us a mobile home to live in on one of those lots. I don’t know if he bought or rented it; I never asked. But it was our home, his and mine.
The two-bedroom trailer was humble. Dad had the room at the end of the hallway. He had a queen-size bed and a dresser. My bedroom was tiny, six feet long and about five feet wide. There was just enough room to drop a twin bed in it, with enough room for me to stand next to it. My room had a recessed closet with four drawers underneath it. I had literally no clothes to hang in it except my shirt and pants that I wore to church when we lived in Tustin. We had abandoned the practice when we moved to Mesick. Everything I owned fit into the four drawers. And naturally, I nailed the 1977 Marvel Memory Album to the wall.
We started with nothing. I mean, we even took the swivel chair out of my dad’s van to put in the living room and supplemented that with Grandma and Grandpa’s lawn chairs to start. A few trips to the Copemish Flea Market got us some plates and silverware, and my Star Wars and King Kong glasses were our drinkware. I had a set of sheets and a bedspread for my bed, but I preferred to use my sleeping bag. That way I didn’t have to make my bed in the morning. I didn’t mind any of this. I had my dad all to myself with no step-family to make things weird.
Looking back now, I can’t imagine how my dad must have felt to have to move in with his parents at age 33, divorcing for the third time, with a 12-year-old son. He seemed to take it in stride, though, and that made me happy. He was genuinely determined to make the best life for me that he could.
I spent the last week of my summer vacation helping the Amidons finish work on their new house. I learned a bit about construction (enough to know that I didn’t want to do it for a living), and I also discovered something incredible: Mountain Dew.
When we were hot and thirsty after installing insulation, Matt and Kellie gave me a can of this magical elixir that I had never tried before. It was sweet, refreshing, and addictive. Each day that I came back to work with them, I got another can. We generally didn’t have this sort of fancy stuff at home, instead settling for Meijer-brand foods, so this was a rare treat.
This was one of the great lessons of my life. I had to learn how to economize when margins were razor-thin. Meijer brand mac and cheese was 19 cents. Kraft was 23 cents. We always went with the Meijer brand, at least until the generic unbranded brand came out:
Does this packaging look familiar? When I saw the Dharma Initiative labels on LOST, I almost busted a gut laughing at the memory. Some producer had to have grown up poor like I did!
Generic brands were even cheaper than the store brands and you could try any number of products. My favorite: Chicken hot dogs. I don’t even want to think about what parts of the chicken went into their processing but I’m sure my DNA has been altered to adapt to digesting just about anything because of it.
My dad said that we would plant a garden in the spring to supplement our stingy choices of food, but we just had to make it through the winter with what we could afford. The bottom line is, I didn’t care. As long as we were living in the same house and I was treated well, it was like a dream come true for me.
