KBTV

KBTV::Kate's Early Years in an Hour

It’s Friday, “Cleanup Day.” This is the day I do all the crap that slips through the cracks amid the insanity of the Sunday-through-Thursday, rapid-fire schedule of reporting, writing, producing, hair and makeup, memorizing scripts, shooting, editing, e-mails, responses to viewer comments, boxing, food and sleep – in that order.

It’s raining today, on this humid, hot, dark, dank “Cleanup Day.” So, you see, the tendency is to laze and loll about in bed enveloped by the chilly air-conditioning. Hmmm. I have a nice little bag of chocolate truffles in the fridge, a six-pack of Peach Fresca and the four-DVD set of Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke,” still nicely, nestled in the Amazon.com corrugated, brown cardboard packaging – waiting to be viewed.

No, no, no! I slip on my magenta fuzzy, terry-clothe robe, Ugg navy suede clogs and clump downstairs. Earl gray tea with lemon and sugar. OK. Clump, clump – back up the stairs to check my e-mails. (I’ve already looked at most of them from my Blackberry while still lying in bed – a brand new favorite pastime.)

Ping! Here’s comes another one (I love e-mail). It’s from a journalism student at Columbia University (my alma mater). Are we still on for our 1 o’clock interview today? She assures me, “we’ll stick to several seminal experiences in your childhood and how they impact the type, style and subject matter of your writing today.” Also, she adds, if I would “please focus on your education in the early years” and it won’t take more than an hour. My education and the early years…an hour? Try 25-to-life.

* * * * *

I've never known quite how to answer that ubiquitous question: Where are you from? I guess I could say I'm from Delaware – that's where I was born – but I didn't spend much time there as a kid because we traveled so much. Our first odyssey around Europe began when I was six. Dad moved the family to the continent for a few years while he finished a novel that was never published. Twenty-six rejections.

He had a passion for travel, fueled, in some part, by his contempt for American culture. Both he and my mother were English literature professors. My parents had developed a weird but admirable arrogance for the way Americans educate children. I remember the glee they shared when yanking us out of school – and lying to the government – to cart us off for years at a time. I guess you could say we were educated at home, well before it was cool to be home-educated.

My father took slides. He loved that ancient Nikon camera, invariably heckling us into posing for carousal upon carousal of slides. The documentary of sorts began when I was six, southern Spain, the Costa Del Sol. Our family moved to a little fishing village called La Herradura (the horseshoe).

I remember we arrived at our new home – a villa about to slide off a cliff – to find the cook, Encarna, had prepared American hamburgers. My older sister Christine, my brother Russ, and I were thrilled, my mother defeated. (She’s a foodie; she takes these things personally.) My father was – the usual – oblivious.

We were told that we wouldn't be attending the local school because Dad had seen the girls in the village. They didn't wear shoes. "The kids will turn into peasants," he told my mother.

I didn't even know what a peasant was. So as kids, we'd sit on the floor of the villa diagramming sentences and solving equations in yellowing workbooks. Until that day we realized our parents didn't check up on us anymore. The following morning, Russ and I packed our knapsacks – stuffed full of workbooks – snagged a pack of Mom's cigarettes, a couple of Cokes and sped up the cliff to an abandoned lighthouse. There we had the ceremonial burning. The workbooks went unmissed.

To be continued…

posted by rjoyner @ 6:18 PM