Dad drove through the dark slowly so as not to alert anyone that we were, as he liked to put it, doing the skedaddle....Once on the road, to distract us kids, Mom got us singing songs like 'Don't fence me in' and 'This land is your land'.
'Where are we going, Dad?' I asked.
'Whereever we end up,' he said.
Later that night, Dad stopped the car out in the middle of the desert, and we slept out in the middle of the desert, and we slept under the stars. We had no pillows, but Dad said that was part of his plan. He was teaching us to have good posture. The Indians didn't use pillows either, he explained, and look how straight they stood. We did have our scratchy army surplus blankets, so we spread them out and lay there, looking up at the field of stars. I told Lori, my sister, how lucky we were to be sleeping out under the sky like Indians.
'We could live like this forever,' I said.
'I think we're going to,' she said.
While Jeannette Walls was living on Park Avenue, covering the Academy Awards and attending black-tie parties at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her parents were living in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side.
Rex Walls, her father, was an ingenious adventurer and a hopeless alcoholic. Her mother was an artist who abhorred domestic routime and the chores of motherhood: "Why should I cook a meal that will be gone in an hour when I can do a painting that will last forever?"
When I finish a book I always come in and at least start the post by putting a title in. I had no idea that I finished this one so long ago!
Click here to read the joint review that Kailana and I have done....
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