When it began to rain, I wandered into the living room. Unable to work in her flowerbeds, Mom was already there, comfortably cuddled in her rocking chair with a lap robe over her knees, reading a woman’s magazine. Stretching out on the linoleum floor next to Mom, I listened to the rain softly pattering on the cedar tree and lilies growing alongside our house. After a muggy morning, the gentle breeze coming through the window screen, scented so beautifully by green plants and the earth, felt like a bit of heaven.

I spotted the shoe box Mom used to store family pictures on the floor next to Daddy’s favorite chair. Remembering his smiles and head shakes as he went through them last evening, I decided to spend my rainy-day afternoon looking at pictures. There were many of them but not in order. Old pictures and new ones were all jumbled together, so I began to sort them. Being twelve years old and having looked at the pictures often through the years, I knew almost everybody in the pictures, even those taken of my older siblings, before I was born, when they were very young.

Mom had somehow pulled together enough money during the war years to buy a black square, box-camera called a Kodak Brownie. She’d made good use of it. Everyone in the family recognized that having a camera was a luxury. Although the pictures were never put in a photo album, they were often looked at and enjoyed.

Being the baby of my family, an inordinate number of pictures were taken of me. I made a pile of my favorite ones: the one with me on my belly to watch close-up how our cat ate; three-year-old me wearing a polk-a-dot dress and chasing a small flock of guinea hens past the old house; me being held up by my brother Casper, high among the branches of a heavily blooming apple tree. Some pictures showed me looking like a cute toddler, but pictures of me as a tiny baby were much different. One of my infant pictures had caught me on the back lawn, crying with my mouth wide open and my eyes closed. As a baby I was fat and very bald. I stared at my image in disbelief. It was like I saw this picture for the first time. My preteen sensibilities were jarred. What a very ugly baby I had been!  

Needing to begin preparing supper, Mom got up from her chair and looked over my shoulder at the picture I was holding. She chuckled, “You looked like a baby Khruschev.”  I continued to stare at the picture after she walked away. She was right!

Nikita Khruschev was the boogeyman of my childhood, and I looked like him! During the height of the cold war years when I was a small child, I somehow knew Mom feared that Russia would invade the United States. Once, when the electricity went out during good weather, she paced nervously about until she learned a car accident caused the power outage. She worried because Nikita Khruschev once threatened, “We will take America without firing a shot.” Mom figured that without power, much of the nation would be paralyzed.

Nikita Khruschev and the threat of the Russian Soviet Union may have scared my family, but we laughed when we heard that their ill-behaved, large, bald leader took off his shoe and pounded his desk with it at a United Nation meeting in 1960. He was angry and protesting a speech given by a Filipino delegate who criticized communism.

In 1960 I became aware of the greater world outside my family when I watched the campaign and election of an American president, John F. Kennedy! He was good looking, suave, and debonair, completely different than Khruschev, leader of the USSR.

A year into his presidency, JFK was faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Wall Crisis, which resulted in my brother-in-law reenlisting and going to Germany, taking my sister and nephew with him. The Russian boogeyman was behind all of these troubles.

Rain drops pattered gently on the living room windowpanes as I struggled to reconcile myself with what an ugly baby I had been. Then I remembered something I’d heard Daddy say from time to time. “People are either pretty in the cradle, but ugly at the table, or ugly in the cradle, but pretty at the table.” That meant pretty babies could become ugly adults and ugly babies can grow up beautiful. What a comforting thought!

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On September 29, 1959, Nitika Khruschev said, “Your children’s children will live under communism. You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright; but we will keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We will not have to fight you; We will weaken your economy, until you will fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”