Prologue

 

 

Honey privileges is a metaphor for the generosity and abundance someone experiences from the people around them. When someone says, "I've got more honey than I can use, feel free to come by anytime," it signifies that they have plenty to share and are offering it freely. This kind of privilege refers to being in a position where you benefit from the kindness and resources of others without needing to ask, almost as if you have unlimited access to something sweet or desirable—like honey—from others' generosity. It reflects a sense of community, trust, and goodwill.​​

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Recently, I began revisiting all the family letters and documents we’ve exchanged over the decades, going back to the 1950s. I've insisted on keeping them with me since 1999, carrying them from California to Tokyo, then to Shanghai, and on to Kunming, China. After a year in Bogotá, Colombia, they traveled with me to my current home in Da Nang, Vietnam. Among these letters, I discovered my mother's unpublished "autobiography," which she aptly titled Honey Privileges.

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​It didn’t take me long to realize that other kids didn’t have a mother like mine—unique not just in the way we’re all unique, but in a way that, had she become famous, she would have stood out among the greatest women in history.

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Sometimes, as an adult, I would talk about how special my mother was to my friends. I think they humored me a bit until they finally met my mother. They would exclaim, "Oh my God, your right! I want your mother to be my mother."

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I believe my mother wrote Honey Privileges with the intention of publishing it, though she may not have known how to go about it. Without making any apologies for its informal format or knowing how many people will eventually read and appreciate it, I’m sharing it posthumously. She passed away at the age of 90 in 2012. I’ve pieced together what I could find of her writing so far, though I’m uncertain I'll find all of what she wrote.

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My mother had an extraordinary eye for detail, despite her tendency to be judgmental when she deemed it warranted. With her remarkable memory for dates, names, and connections, her love for literature, her gift for language, and her deep passion for life, I believe she wrote a captivating autobiography—perhaps more akin to memoirs. But I'll let you be the judge.

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I have used ChatGPT to read the images of her letters and provide the transcription, amazed at how flawlessly it has been able to do that.

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This will be published page by page, as I found it numbered by her. On occasion, I will provide my own perspective in footnote form, page by page.

 

For more about my mother, see Will it die with you?
 

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Honey Privileges

 

(page 1)

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Just now it dawned on me how little I know about the year I was born, 1922. How much a loaf of bread cost; what one paid for a car, the population of the United States, what particular problems our country faced, what percentage of the populace was homeowners.

 

Always I have thought March 20 as being the perfect birthday, the ultimate in being a Spring Baby. My parents’ first child, I came into the world healthy, energetic, and eager to live. My mother told me when I was born I announced, “la la la la.” The attending doctor clipped the frenulum, freeing my tongue, whereupon I hollered, “LA LA” with gusto. A home delivery with my Aunt Ruth, my mother’s sister, an RN, in attendance.

 

My father was teaching high school algebra in a little border town in Arizona barely north of Mexico. Hot. Arid. Pretty much treeless. I don’t think my mother ever really liked Arizona. She told me of walking from one blistering side of the sidewalk to the other to be able to walk under the shade of a lamppost. It seemed to me that was slim pickin’s for a slice of shade.

 

My parents did not have a name picked out for me as my mother told me later, “Dorothy, I had no idea I could have a girl. It just never occurred to me and so we didn’t have a girl’s name chosen.” I always felt slightly superior when she told me this as if I had fooled my mother, put one over on her. My father said he went out on the sidewalk after my birth to see three youngsters skating up the concrete. “What is your name, little girl?” “I’m Dorothy Dalton, and these are Ruthie and Jimmy Crockett.” My father returned to the house and suggested Dorothy as my name; they added Alice which was my maternal grandmother’s name. Some sixty years later I read that Dorothy was the second most common name for little girls born in that year. Four decades later I was living in western North Carolina and received a newspaper clipping from my mother. It told of Dorothy Dalton and her husband, a major, living at a military base close to Cherry Point, North Carolina.

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The story was told to me as a child. My folks took me to Aqua Prieta on May 5, the Mexican national holiday. My mother had dressed me up in the finery I had received from my parents’ friends on the occasion of my birth. As hot as one can imagine in a little Mexican town in mid-spring. I screamed and turned red and wiggled and fussed and cried. My mother removed my bonnet. My jacket. My dress, booties, socks. Finally my undershirt. I began to coo and returned to my normal shade of pink. My mother never attempted to dress me up again.^1

 

My mother contended that if she put a tiny pair of glasses on me I would have looked exactly like my father. Of this I felt inordinately proud as I adored my father and wanted to emulate him in any possible way. It had to be the following winter, early January, when my parents took off for the Grand Canyon for six weeks, leaving me with Auntie Foster, a friend of the family’s. My mother said when they returned from their trip and took me back to our own house I could walk and kept going around and around a low, coffee table-like table in the living room, patting it and cooing — glad to be home and saying so.

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My mother declared I did not say words, that the first time I really talked it was a full-blown sentence. We three were out hiking somewhere in the desert. I stepped on a worm, squashing it. I commiserated with it, exclaiming “Poor worm. Dosie step-a-a mur. Hurt ed da murm. Poor murm.”

 

Whenever possible, my folks went up into the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona, taking me with them. They told me if I ever got lost to stay in the road, they would find me. I got lost, at least, they thought so. They found me. In relief, my mother rushed to me and I indignantly pointed to the road with the affirmation, “Dere’s de woad.”

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The only “big” picture of me, that is say 6x8, shows me sitting barefoot on a tiny footstool, my ankles crossed in front of me. I look bright, inquisitive, alive; the kind of little girl anyone would be proud and happy to have. My parents were. Several small black-and-white pictures: in a white dress atop a burro with my father holding onto me; my father lying on the ground with one ankle atop the opposite knee and I propped up on his knee; a picture of me in my “kiddie koop” in what looks to be a long, white nightgown; a snapshot of me as a toddler in below-the-knees plaid pants and matching shirt complete with bobbed hair.

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^1 My mother was a tomboy, often playing baseball with the boys in grammar school and even getting into fights, sometimes beating them up. As an adult, I’ve realized that I’m frequently drawn to women who were tomboys themselves.​​

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