My Extraordinary Ordinary Life Read Online Free

electricity. He did his best to train us to cut off the lights every time we left a room. Years later, the habit landed me in trouble with the director Robert Altman on the set of 3 Women. We were doing a very long scene and I had to walk from room to room while the camera followed me. I was still relatively new to the acting business, and I kept ruining the shot by hitting the light switch every time I walked through a door. After the third or fourth take, Bob was exasperated and wanted to know why I kept doing that.
    “I’m sorry!” I told him. “I do it automatically. My father wanted to save money on the electric bill.”
    “Well, the next time you see your father, please tell him that he cost me more money in one day of filming than you saved him in a lifetime!”
    Daddy earned a modest salary but invested wisely, and we lived a comfortable middle-class life. My brothers and I always got nice presents for our birthdays and Christmas, but never anything extravagant. That made each item more precious.
    One present Daddy always bought Mother at Christmastime was beautiful silk underwear from McDade’s. She would pick out exactly what she wanted, then he’d stop by after work to pay for it and have them wrap it up. My brothers and I preferred to do our Christmas shopping at White’s Automotive. Along with the car accessories, White’s had a whole window filled with games, toy trucks, and gift items. One year, Ed and Robbie and I pooled our allowance money to buy one big present for Mother from all three of us. We spent days and weeks staring in that window, trying to decide on the perfect purchase. Finally we settled on a pair of decorative ceramic pheasants. We thought she would just love them. Looking back, they verged on being tacky. But we were so excited to have bought such a big-ticket item that Mother’s present seemed even more important than our own gifts that year. When she opened the package, a look of delight lit up her face. She hugged us all and put those Christmas pheasants in a place of honor on the mantel, where they stayed for the rest of her life.

… 2 …
     
    Every December we would drive down from Quitman to spend the holidays with Mother’s family in the Rio Grande Valley, stopping along the way to visit my dad’s parents in Granger. It was a twelve-hundred-mile round-trip in a 1949 Pontiac with no air-conditioning loaded to bursting with luggage and wrapped presents. It was quite a production with three boisterous kids. I was always carsick, so I was usually allowed to sit up front between my parents and fiddle with the radio dial while the boys rode in the backseat. Whenever my brothers complained about the arrangement, and I sat with them in the back, they quickly regretted it.
    There were no interstates then, and we couldn’t make the whole drive without stopping at motels along the way. In the beginning, our parents allowed us to take turns picking out the motels. But one time it was getting late, and Robbie, Ed, and I saw the most incredible place beside the highway. It was the biggest, brightest motel we had ever seen, lit up like a Christmas tree with flashing neon lights. It was so wonderful it might as well have been in Paris, France.
    “That one! That one!” we cried.
    “I don’t know,” said Daddy. “This doesn’t look like such a good place.”
    “No! No! We want that one!”
    So in the spirit of fairness and democracy, we checked in. The room was horrible, with threadbare sheets and a dirty bathroom. How could this be? It was so beautiful from the outside. We wanted to move out, but it was too late to find another place to stay. The next morning we walked out into the daylight and saw that the huge motel was just a tiny row of cinder-block rooms; the lights were all fixed to a tall skeleton of scaffolding. From then on, the family rules changed, and our parents got veto power over any motel choice we made.

     
    Our first destination was Granger, a small farming town