Growing Up Alien: Page 2

Our new house was at the top of a hill on Arapahoe Road, with the Rocky Mountain National Forest for a back yard. Our nearest neighbors on one side of the hill were a friendly young couple with a toddler and a pair of attack-trained Doberman Pinschers. The dogs gained some local notoriety when, it was rumored, they tried to devour someone's newborn baby. After this incident they were banished from the house to a small cyclone-fenced pen, but periodically their owners would let them run loose in the woods behind our house. Unfortunately, my father often tried to work off some of his own pent-up energy by tramping in the same patch of forest. Our relations with the neighbors took a rapid turn for the worse after a few close encounters between my dad and the Dobermans.

On the other side of the hill from us was a large Catholic family, 9 or 10 children total, all of them with birth defects affecting their legs and feet. The summer we came to Nederland I befriended one of this clan, a girl close to my age (the only one in the "neighborhood") with a relatively inconspicuous club foot. We went to the local rodeo together and I was allowed to eat lunch at her house. I remember watching her father, dressed in slacks, undershirt and crucifix, say grace over the baloney sandwiches. Later we played pool in their basement, one corner of which was filled with outgrown and abandoned prosthetic devices.