Prison Baby: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

within Seattle’s city limits we lived with a country feel.
    My perfect weekend day was one of silence and solitude. I loved to sprawl in bed and read or sit still and look out a window. Or out back in the garden, I’d poke and roll the thick green slugs before my mother dissolved them with salt. Other times I’d plant myself in front of the poplar tree in our front yard and pop its sticky sap blisters until the whole trunk wept with goop. If I wasn’t playing with my neighborhood friend Wendy or hanging around her mother, I’d wander alone from yard to yard up and down our street on the hunt for adventure. Sometimes I stopped to watch other kids play, but then I’d move on, restless.
    On some weekends I played around the pond by the house of our next-door neighbors, an elderly couple, Captain Mac and his wife. Captain Mac looked like Captain Kangaroo, white beard and round, rosy-cheeked face often full of smiles. Sometimes Captain Mac sat next to me, both of us silent for hours, while I squatted by their pond and stirred the water lilies with a stick in search of tadpoles and frogs. I’d even bring a sandwich so I could sit longer at the pond’s edge. Come pollywog season, I never poked into the water because I wanted to protect their slimy masses and examine the magic of baby frogs as they evolved from their goopy mucus. Science fascinated me then. I couldn’t wait for the tadpoles to approach the adult stage, when their legs sprouted and little tails disappeared.
    On cool, fall weekends Jonathan and I would rake our long front lawn while Mother weeded her garden.We’d drag our bamboo rakes over the geometry of orange, yellow, and red maple leaves. I’d stay quiet so I could listen to the scratch of the bamboo over the carpet of leaves. Pine needles and leaves blanketed our grassy slopes, and after we’d build high and round mounds of leaves and needles, my brother and I would jump into the piles and flap around in the crunchy leaves. Some would stick in my shoulder-length hair, but I never minded getting dusty and dirty. After enough fun in the leaves, my parents would toss a match onto the piles. The flames pulled me into their power with a dance of heat from leaves and twigs on fire.
    MY FATHER AND I shared another routine besides Friday-night fights: jaunts to the Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle on the edge of Puget Sound. We’d shop for our fish and vegetables every Saturday morning, one of the few times I relaxed around him. We’d wander the market stalls, but his pace drove me crazy compared to my quick and nimble ways. He moved with the grace of a ballroom dancer, slow, deliberate, calculated. People strained to hear his gentle public voice, not always his voice at home
    We’d watch fishers peddle their fresh catches and farmers and their families sell crisp, fresh vegetables, moist from the washing. The winds off Elliott Bay fused the aroma of fragrant fruit with the essence of fish, all mixed with the steam of French dip juice as its scent sailed from the cafeteria where we ate lunch. I’d never seen anyone with features resembling mine in my neighborhood or school, so I felt at home in the market surrounded by Asian and Mexican farmers and their families. I loved the market for its tough working-class realness. I wanted to live there, where all the get-up-and-go of city life merged, to live with the farm families who sold fruits and vegetables, even though farming didn’t fit my middle-class upbringing.
    On our way to the market every weekend, my father and I sometimes drove past the homeless men and women, slouched from either hunger or alcohol and scattered across the grass in Market Park along the waterfront. On one Saturday trek, we passed a swarm of men in a food line, who waited in stiff procession in the damp Seattle chill. My father’s eyes revealed grief as he handed a dollar bill to a man in the park. My father said he believed many of those men tried to rise above their