Glenna Stearman Park, Life in a Menagerie

Glenna Stearman Park

When I married Joel, he told me about his plan to go to graduate school for a PhD in Engineering.  He wanted to do that in California.  Besides my art, I was interested in having children.  Joel was in the Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs.  Our first two children were born at the Air Force Academy.  Then we moved to Vandenberg AFB in central California where Joel was the Missile Launch Officer, lobbing rockets into the Pacific.  I took 30 hours above my undergraduate degree so I could teach in the California public schools.  I started as a substitute teacher. 

On my first job, the kids saw me walking down the hall and immediately went wild, opening the windows and crawling out on the sunny lawn.  The principal was right behind me as he knew the reputation of these students.  I made it through the day and said “No way!” when they asked me to come back “tomorrow.”   When Joel got home from work, I told him that ‘NO WAY IN HELL’ was I ever going back into public school. 

Joel chose the University of California San Diego for graduate school.  He had the GI Bill and a research fellowship.  We had another son.  Three boys, and yet, I grew up with mostly girls.  We were in student housing on the Mesa situated between two canyon areas complete with wild life, and a five-minute drive to the La Jolla shores beach.  It was close to heaven most of the time. 

Our oldest son JT, when he was five, had become the resident bug catcher.  Armed with a shoe box, he went to the hippie garden near the playground and busied himself for hours.  He returned to the apartment and proudly told me what he had captured as he lifted the lid to the horror of a wiggly knot of biting, chomping bugs.  It was a savage baseball-sized clump of broken wings, severed legs, and plainly desperate creatures.  He was shocked and sad as he realized these could not live in the same space.

Christopher, who was 17 months younger, admired JT’s attention to bugs and decided (on his own) to collect bees.  He captured the angry creatures in an empty mayonnaise jar and came screaming back to the apartment in student housing.  I heard him before I saw him.  He hung onto the jar, lid on tightly, and hands red from bee stings.  Ice and Benadryl barely comforted him as we all told him what he already learned:  Bees sting!

News of JT’s and Chris’ bug collecting ventures got around UCSD student housing pretty fast as other children were warned away from that adventure.  Soon after, I received a frantic phone call that Chris was collecting black widow spiders, after lifting the lids off underground sprinkler system.  We had a more serious conversation while Chris sat on his chair in the corner.  He needed his own hobby.

At Christmas, Santa Claus brought Chris a tool box with a saw and a hammer in it. The old man forgot to bring wood and nails. I promised to take him to get the supplies the next day, but he was not distracted for long. While working in the kitchen, I heard the soft sound of sawing and checked it out. Chris was cutting through the wooden staircase to the upstairs apartment.  We put the saw away with the repeated promise to “buy wood tomorrow.” A couple of hours later, the same sound rushed me outside where Chris was sawing through the corner of our apartment.  Trying not to upset him on Christmas, I reminded him that we would shop first thing in the morning.  Holiday spirit prevailed as Chris and his brothers turned to other gifts. 

Danny, who was born while we lived in student housing, was fascinated by the stop sign in our parking lot.  He took his favorite blue blanket and used to wrap himself around the pole and stand for long periods of time.  Neighbors noticed and would stop and visit with him as I watched him from our patio.  One resident let it be known that she was going to report me for child abuse.  Other neighbors stopped her and explained that we were well aware of his odd love, but I decided to buy him a stop sign and put it on his bedroom door.  Dan’s favorite behavior was watching his brothers and then posing in karate moves against his shadow on the beach.  He also had an almost daily habit of dumping and unwinding my yarn, but he was an easy kid.

Soon, I looked around and saw most of the fathers and mothers were going to school, and I felt like I needed to have a reason for making so many paintings.  I hired models and painted in our living room.  I taught life drawing for the San Diego night school but got fired from that the first night when my supervisor discovered that “nude” meant no clothes at all and that males could also be nudes.  A physics department PhD student agreed to pose.  The supervisor arrived with two other men expecting to see a female. I had hired a female model for the artists in student housing.  She was an undergraduate who later went to medical school.  The drawing class was satisfying for a couple of years.  Eventually, I talked to one of the  UCSD art department professors, and he supported my admission to the graduate school. The next two years is a story of its own. 

Before I started classes, we had a chance to move to the west side UCSD campus housing that overlooked the ocean.  It had beautiful grounds and was easy walking to class for both Joel and me.  The walk to the beach was downhill, but returning uphill with tired kids was breathtaking, so we drove most of the time and carried sleeping boys from the car to the apartment.  By then the two older boys were going to Torrey Pines Elementary school and Danny was in the pre-school I had helped organize on campus.  Also, by then, the nature of the pets changed.

First of all, dogs and cats were not allowed in student housing.  JT was the most eager to get a pet.  I went through the terrariums of field mice (very stinky); a range of captured frogs, toads, (very noisy at night) and lizards; a mean mole in a shoe box (who was returned to the mesa immediately); the second grade chinchilla (over Christmas vacation); baby chickens; guinea pigs; and three female hamsters, two who gave birth and we very quickly had over 20 babies playing in an elaborate system of habit trails.  We discovered “Dirty Harry” who we donated to the university Bio Department because he produced more offspring than the male in the animal lab.  Ultimately, we had two desert iguanas who lived at the top of our drapes and came down for food and water occasionally.  Of course, my kids were known for the snakes. Twice JT came home with live rattlesnakes and totally freaked us out.  Joel dumped them out in a canyon since they were good at keeping the rodent population down.  Then, there was the special California King snake lived with us for several years, the last six months loose in the apartment because we could not catch him. 

We moved to Texas and grew up to dogs.  The boys left home and I added two cockatiels and a sun conure to our family.  We are down to one dog and one bird.  

Life is easier now, and the memories are fun.