Coop’s Childhood Part I – As I Was Told | Lefty Parent

Coop’s Childhood Part I – As I Was Told | Lefty Parent:

Coop’s Childhood Part I – As I Was Told

January 4th, 2014 at 13:32

Eric & Jane

I was born on April 2, 1955 in the maternity ward of the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor Michigan. My mother, Jane Roberts Zale, was 32 years old, older than many first time mothers in those days. My father, Eric Michael Zale, was six years older than Jane. Theirs, I would later learn, would be a very unorthodox style of parenting, much more egalitarian than conventional practice, giving me a greater amount of freedom than most kids were blessed with. But given particularly my mom’s childhood story (I know little about my dad’s) that gift of an independent childhood had been passed through the generations.

As I get older, I am more and more amazed about the story of how my mom decided to go to Ann Arbor. An unlikely odyssey in 1947 for a single young woman of 23, but one consistent with her independent spirit, well nourished in her own childhood, that started a chain of events that led to my birth. Another thirty-two years later in 1978, I would embark on my own comparable odyssey to Los Angeles, coincidentally at age 23 as well.

Based on her telling, my mom had had a childhood mixing idyllic joys and adventures with some difficult family relationships, particularly with her mother Caroline. Jane was the first of three children, her brother John just two years younger and her sister Pat born to an entirely different generation 14 years later. Born in Dedham Massachusetts outside Boston, my mom would later recall to me only good memories of adventures playing outdoors as a kid. Her family moved to Watkins Glen New York during the depression, after the jewelry business her dad worked for as a salesperson failed. From that period more stories from my mom of playing in the namesake glen across the street