The Gospel According to Judy Lou
By Julia Van Develder
Nov02
I was born in Pasadena, California, the second child of Mary and Frank Van Develder. It was 1952. The world was slower then, so this was still considered the aftermath of World War Two. And people were poorer then, much more accustomed to hardship. There were such things in our country as charity hospitals. I was born in one.
Some people claim to remember being born. I am not one of them. I don’t remember anything about California or about the move to Wyoming or the little church where my father was the pastor. I don’t remember the move to Mexico City where he and my mother studied Spanish before entering the mission field. I don’t remember arriving in Bolivia. But my mother does. She says it was just like that scene at the end of the movie in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You remember? Trying to escape the man in the white hat (“Who is that guy?”), they go to Bolivia, of all places. They get off the train—dust, and chickens running around. Sort of primitive. Then they get nailed.
My earliest memories are of Bolivia. When I examine these memories to try to set them down here as truthfully as possible, I notice that they have components. There is what I believe to be the actual memory, which in some cases is nothing more than a single image, or even a sound. And there is my understanding of the memory, which has evolved over the course of my life. As you go through your life, things begin to stick to your memories and eventually become part of them—a photograph, for example, or an explanation offered by a parent of something you wouldn’t have been able to understand at the time.
For example, I have a memory of sitting in front of a fire with my mother and my brother, watching his cowboy hat burn up. The meaning of the memory didn’t come until much later. It was a punishment, because he’d been caught playing with matches; there were gasoline tanks on the farm, and a match in the wrong place could have killed him and us and all of the farm workers. But I couldn’t have understood that then. The memory is the visual image—his face in the firelight—and the feeling I had that he’d been bad, and that I didn’t want to be bad, ever.
I remember a man’s bloody hand. I can see it in my mind’s eye even now, more than 50 years later. It was probably the first time I’d seen a violent injury. I think I remember that it was at night, and there was a knock on the door, and urgent talk, but do I actually remember that, or is it a narrative that attached itself to the memory afterwards? He was one of our farmers. He’d been attacked by one of the wild dogs that roamed the farm. My father drove him to the hospital in LaPaz.
I think I remember the sound of a gunshot. I was in the house with my mother. I think she was holding me. After the gunshot, my father came inside. He didn’t look at us. His eyes were open, but he was seeing something else. Do I actually remember this, or have I imagined it from what I know now about my father and how he must have felt about having to shoot our dog, Triste. The dog was chasing the pickup truck and got caught under the wheels. My father had to put him out of his misery.
Interestingly, I don’t remember much about the house. I have actual pictures of it—a substantial house, made of stone, with a long porch with stone arches. It had belonged to a rich landowner but had been confiscated by the revolutionary government. Which revolutionary government, I’m not sure. Bolivia had many. How did we get to live there? I don’t know.
According to my mother, at some point during our time there, the house caught on fire. One of her most terrifying memories is seeing my brother standing frozen at the top of the stairs, framed in flames. This must have been traumatic, but I don’t remember it at all.
I do, however, remember my little kitchen—a little kitchen cupboard, made of wood, just my size. A very satisfactory kitchen. Outstanding, in fact, in my four-year-old opinion. How on earth did my mother manage to procure such an item in the Bolivian hinterlands?
I remember the man who was in charge of the mission—Earl Hunter. Actually, I know the name because I’ve heard it since. What I remember about him was the time I wandered into a prayer meeting where the grownups were all on their knees in a small circle, and he was praying out loud. I think I was looking for my mother. He grabbed me and forced me to kneel down in front of him, sort of imprisoned by his body. I had to stay like that until he finished praying, which was a long, long time. Was this the beginning of my dislike of organized religion?
I remember distinctly seeing a chicken with its head cut off running around in circles near a swimming pool. This, I’ve been told, was during a vacation in Cochabamba.
I remember cars stretched as far as I could see in either direction on a high mountain road. There had been a rock slide, and we were waiting for them to clear the road. My father took me and Paul for a walk while we waited. We climbed down a hill; there was a huge house built on the hillside. It was empty. We looked in the windows. I remember the bathroom. I had never seen such a bathroom. I think the tile was pink, and the fixtures were pink.
My sister, Becky, was born during our time in Bolivia. I have no recollection of this.
Paul, however, looms large in these early memories—larger than my mother and father even. After all, they were the ground. They were me, weren’t they? There was no me without them. He, on the other hand, was an “other.”
The clearest memory of all is Paul and the cave. Now, this is very strange. I can close my eyes and see the cave—a long “room” with rough walls, and a number of cubicles. It seems to me that we were in there all by ourselves. Can this be? I have a photograph of the caves—they were high up on the side of a steep cliff. These were the caves where the rebels had hidden, apparently, during one of the revolutions. I wasn’t afraid of the caves or the dark corners or the possibility of wild animals or spiders. I remember being interested, looking in each of the cubicles.
What were a four and five year old doing there by themselves, and how did we get there? And yet, I know we were there because one of my most terrifying memories is how we got back to the farm. There were two ways. I knew this, so this can’t have been the first cave expedition. You could climb down the rocky slope, which was difficult and took a long time, or you could run down the road, which was easier and faster, but you had to go right by a shack where an old woman lived with two vicious dogs who were either chained up or behind a fence of some sort. I wanted to climb down, but Paul made the executive decision to take the road. I think he held my hand—I hope he did. I remember the dogs lunging at us and snapping their jaws and barking insanely.
Not all the Paul memories are scary. I remember riding in the back of the pickup truck with Paul and playing guess-where-we-are. It was night; I think we were on our way to some sort of church gathering in LaPaz. We were lying down in the bed of the truck with a blanket over us, looking up at a million stars. The idea was to pull the blanket over our heads, ride a little ways, and then try to guess where we were. Paul would shout something out and then pop up like a jack-in-the-box and peek over the siderail to see if he was right. I think I was mainly an audience in this game—I probably didn’t have a clue where we were--but I loved it. I loved him.
The last Bolivia memories are of leaving. I remember at the airport a monkey jumped on me and had to be pried off by the grownups. Can this be? Were there really monkeys roaming the airport?
When the plane landed, I remember men in green uniforms with thick black belts coming on the plane and spraying nasty-smelling stuff in the air. My mother covered my nose and mouth with a handkerchief. I think this was upon our return to the United States. But those uniforms in my mind’s eye look much more like the Hollywood version of South American military regimes than their American counterparts. If it was upon our entry into Bolivia, then I suppose it would have to qualify as my very first memory, for I certainly have no memory of anything pre-Bolivia.
What’s true? What’s not? It’s very hard to say for sure, isn’t it? How do we make sure of anything that’s happened in our lives? I’ve dreamed things that seemed so real, the next day I believed they happened. How do we make sense of it?
One way is to try to systematically verify everything—compare notes with the others who were there, try to pin down what’s knowable and what’s open to interpretation. I mean--why are there four gospels?
That does get you somewhere. Your mother, for example, might verify that yes, in fact, a monkey did jump on you in the airport. You’re not making that up. But even if you’ve verified that one fact, there are a hundred others that you’ll never pin down.
No matter. I love these memories, even the cave. Of all the people I’ve met in my life since, only one has ever even been to Bolivia—he was a Spanish professor at Vassar. So it’s safe to say that this was an unusual beginning for an American life. What it’s given me is a bigger framework for understanding the world. There has never been a time within my memory when I didn’t know that there was more than one way of life, more than one language, more than one set of cultural norms and practices. That may seem obvious in today’s global culture, but it’s really not. The war in Iraq is at least in part about our failure as a nation to recognize and respect the endless variations of the human experience. So I am enormously grateful for that more expansive view. Except for the gifts of life and love, there isn’t a more precious gift my parents could have given me.