The only other interesting creation in the area was the Wet ’n Wild water park, which opened up by the Columbia Center Mall when I was a teenager. It also had some important-sounding rank among national attractions. It supposedly had the third longest water slides in the country. Going down those slippery tubes rubbed the hair off my calves and made my body feel like it was full of static electricity. Then I had to wait in line for a long time, shivering and dripping, until I was back at the top. The lifeguards there were always too cool to look at anyone. They kept their eyes set on a particular curve of the slide and then waved their hand lazily, signaling the sliders to go. For some reason, it was closed down a few years later and then eventually demolished to make room for a car dealership.
Elinda
Elinda is my mother’s first child, born in 1946.
Elinda’s father was with my mother for only a brief time, physically abusing her and then disappearing for a long time after he was sent away for an armed robbery in Great Falls, Montana.
Shortly after that, Mom met a man named Jimmy and they got married. Elinda was afraid of Jimmy and would have nightmares about him, even after Mom had two children with him—Gary and Russell.
Mom and Jimmy got divorced when Elinda was five.
My dad came into the picture in 1956. He wanted to help Mom with the children, but he was often overwhelmed trying to provide for them. Despite their struggles, he wanted to have his own children. My brother Mark was born in 1960.
When Elinda was a little girl, she would often daydream in school and her teacher thought she was mentally retarded, or, as they called it back then, “feebleminded.”
Mom was wrestling with her own health concerns. She was epileptic and would have seizures quite often, shaking the whole house, scaring the kids, and waking up unsure of what was happening to her. It took several years and several treatments to get the right medicine to stop the attacks.