1961: My Blanket

By Corinne H. Smith

1961:  I turned four years old.  Daddy was 32, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my fourth birthday was “Big Bad John” by Jimmy Dean.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     I was a security blanket kid.  When I was young, I carried a small white blanket around with me, everywhere I went.  Tottering around the house, exploring the backyard, wherever and whatever.  Eventually all of the nap wore off of it.  All of its edges got frayed.  Holes appeared.  After a whirl in the washer, it could still become soft and white again.  But I literally loved that blanket to death.

     After a while, I stopped carrying it around so much.  At night, I left the blanket on the chair beside my bed.  I looked at it as I fell asleep.  Some days, I forgot to grab it whenever I left the house to accompany my parents on errands around the neighborhood.  The blanket stayed behind, always resting on the chair.

     And then one day, it was gone.  I searched every inch of my bedroom.  I crawled under the bed.  I looked around the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, everywhere, several times.  I finally approached my mother, the ruler of the house.  I asked her if she had seen my blanket.

     “I threw it out!” she exclaimed.  What?!?  I did not understand her.  How could something of mine, suddenly be dispatched by someone else who had no right to do so?  “It was torn and tattered,” she quipped, supposedly as further explanation.  “Besides, you didn’t need it anymore.”   Well.  This news was indeed a shock to my young self.  It showed me who was in charge.  Certainly not me, the youngest member of the three-person household.  I quietly mourned the loss as best as I could.  And I went on with my merry little life.

     I thought of my blanket again several years later, when A Charlie Brown Christmas aired on TV for the first time in 1965.  I watched in fascination as Linus turned his security blanket into a snowball slingshot and a shepherd’s headpiece.  How had I missed creating such magic with my own blanket?  I longed to question why it was all right for this famous cartoon boy to carry one, when I wasn’t allowed to.  But I already knew what my mother’s answer would be.  “Linus doesn’t live in this house.”  So I kept my mouth shut. And year after year, I would watch that traditional Christmas special and be reminded of those blissful early days of my own, when I too had a security blanket, just like Linus van Pelt.

     Mom died in July 1993.  My father, my aunt, and I soon sorted through her clothing and other belongings.  The cedar chest became mine.  When I opened the lid, I found a number of embroidery pieces in various stages of work.  I eventually finished the unfinished ones; and we framed them all and gave them to friends.  Beneath the craft items were some woolen sweaters I hadn’t seen in a good long while.  A few of them fit me.  The others had to be donated away. 

     At the very bottom of the chest lay the little white dress that I had been baptized in.  I couldn’t believe that buttons could be made that tiny.  Right next to the dress was a ratty looking pile of threadbare material.  Only one person in the world could recognize this raggedy rag, and that person was me.  I pulled it out of the chest.  My blanket!  What a surprise!  Wow.  Well.  More than 30 years after it disappeared, I learned what really happened to it.

     Thanks, Mom.  I guess I can finally forgive you.  The blanket can go back on the chair beside my bed.

 

My blanket and the cedar chest, 2013