THE GOOD OLD DAYS
My Mother Ran Into an Old Classmate After He Obliterated His Family
He thought he’d gotten away with it
Content Warning: Violence and domestic abuse
My mother used to say that life was much simpler when she was growing up in the 1930s and 40s. They didn’t have the same kind of violence and anger that we do now.
I disagree.
Life is never void of danger, but memory can blur its brutal edges. In time, a traumatic incident becomes a riveting story or gets buried deep within one’s psyche.
My mother lived a charmed life, and even in extreme danger, she wasn’t aware of it.
My mother, Barbara, never Babs, was born in 1925. As a child, she lived in the small town of Walnut Grove — a place she’d return to again and again, and a month shy of her 99th birthday, would die there.
Barbara’s parents moved around as her father, Joe, worked for the government. He either planned roads or planted trees; my mother’s memories of that time changed frequently.
After Walnut Grove, the family lived in Sacramento, Los Angeles, and then back to Sacramento. It was there, at Sutter Junior High, that my mother met Ray Latshaw. He was a farmer boy who lived in nearby Loomis…
