When I was a kid my toys were portable...

Paper dolls, comic books, the latest Jack & Jill magazine, my beloved Raggedy Ann doll, crayons, pencils and always, always a Big Chief tablet.

Two books I'd gotten for Christmas were bulky, but very important to me: Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse, and a Big Book of Stories. Funny but I don't remember now if the stories were classic or fairytales, but I've never been into much fairy lore, but I managed to keep them for a number of years while we chased Mother's dreams around the country.

My major gift that year was the compact silver metal case that carried a gleaming pair of white figure skates. I managed to stuff my growing feet into those beautiful skates for several years, they were so important to me. I had no grace on ice, or speed, but I cherished the freedom of gliding.

I walked the nineteen blocks to Gibson Park to skate on Christmas Day after Mother left the house with her boyfriend Tim. There were more people skating than I'd imagined, but hardly anyone noticed me...many children got skates for Christmas, but I shyly wobbled away to learn on my own shaky ankles. Before the afternoon faded I was able to join a long line of skaters playing Crack the Whip, without falling, although I gathered that pile-ups of people helpless with laughter was about half the goal of that exercise.

It seemed important so I counted 108 falls before it started getting dark. I took the bus home, and got spanked for not telling anyone where I'd gone. I would have thought she'd guess...since I took the shiny case along. She raised me to be independent, yet couldn't bear the idea of letting go, or being left alone, maybe. She never told me what it was we were looking for (or running from) either, but we always traveled light. Everything we needed to start over packed neatly into the back of the 1937 Pontiac coupe Grampie bought for us after Grannie died in 1949. It was a sedate dark green, but eventually Mom painted it a sort of flat primer gray, which was as close as she ever come to her desired gun metal gray sheen. We lived in that car far more than we should have in the ensuing years, but really it was a fine old buggy until 1952 when the Nevada desert proved too much for the old car, and the axles gave out with a clank, a rattle and probably a rusty death moan.

Mother was alone by then; I was living in Idaho with my dad and his wife and son. She didn't get any further than Elko, for nearly a year, and didn't get another car of her own. She and I didn't get back together until 1955. By then the only thing I had left from those Gypsy years was Raggedy Ann.