What Was I Thinking: A Life Story

By Celestine Favrot Arndt

What Was I Thinking? is both a witty memoir and a thoughtful meditation on life--an attempt to distill insight from a lifetime of experience. Touching on both singular events and the dramas common to all human beings, Ms. Arndt writes honestly on childhood, adolescence, college, marriage, motherhood, living overseas, challenges, failures, loss, grief, family, friendship, gratitude, and joy. A luminous and illuminating life story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662921186

Book preview

Mexico

(1942-1945)

My first memory of my father is of a deep voice on a crackling phone line speaking a language I couldn’t understand. That’s your father, I was told. He could only speak English, and I could only speak Spanish, so I listened but I could only understand my name. He called me Titine, a name my sister, Jeanette, had coined when she couldn’t pronounce Celestine. I was so filled with excitement and fear of that unknown voice, I couldn’t say a word to him.

This was during World War II, while my father was in Burma. My mother had decided to return to her parents’ home in Mexico City with her three small children: Jeanette, Larry, and me.

My grandfather’s study in Mexico was filled with books, and an enormous desk. His pipe was propped on an ashtray, his bag of tobacco tucked into the top left-hand drawer, right next to his little tin of eucalyptus-flavored, sugar-coated cough drops. He would occasionally give us one.

My grandmother’s lap and bosom were both soft and comforting (as long as I could avoid the stiff stays in her girdle).

Living in a Dutch household in Mexico, our life was a mix of many cultures. We could have Dutch cheese and dark bread for breakfast, or huevos rancheros. We bought pan dulce for our Dutch tea in the late afternoon. I learned native Mexican folk dances, and wore the traditional costumes associated with each dance and native subculture. (We were taught by a lady who was heavily perfumed and beautifully coiffed.) I could be attired in a lacy Indian headdress, with huaraches on my feet and a rebosso swung over my shoulders, and watch my mother waltz to Strauss in the living room with my grandfather or one of her brothers.

We would hear the Mexican mariachis on the street corner and in the market. Or I would sit quietly with my grandparents listening to symphonies. We sang rowdy Dutch songs to celebrate a birthday, the birthday celebrant sitting in a flower-bedecked chair, a Mexican custom. Spanish, English, and Dutch floated through every room. For the big meal in middle of the day, a steady stream of strangers—Dutch sailors, expat Americans, Russian relatives, or friends of friends visiting Mexico—came to be seated around our multi-leafed dining table, which grew and grew to accommodate any number of guests.

It was always an adventure to accompany my grandmother to the big market where she would bargain for fruits and vegetables in her heavily Dutch-accented Spanish. She would drop off her and mother’s nylons at a little kiosk at the end of our street where a lady with tiny crochet needles would mend the nylon stocking runs. Shopping and errands completed with dispatch, she would ask my sister and me to carry one of her fully-laden string bags, making it difficult to climb up on either a streetcar or bus to go home. I would lie in my grandmother’s lap when I was too tired to look out the window of a taxi at the never-ending, cacophonous, busy streets on our way home. We would often be stuck in traffic, horns honking and vendors squawking their wares, and home seemed too far away. The buzzer next to the gate would alert the gardener that we were home—hot, tired, thirsty, and hungry. I would wait impatiently for our cook, Lupe, to ring the bell for lunch.

Sometimes we took trips outside of Mexico City. I would take deep breaths of the moist pine air as we drove up the Toluca highway, away from the fumes of buses and taxis on the crowded streets of Mexico City, climbing up to a monastery inhabited by an order of monks who had taken a vow of silence. We would visit their little chapel where I would stand facing one corner and whisper something to my sister or brother across the way in another corner and then listen carefully as their whispered response magically wafted over the vaulted ceiling and arrived clear as a bell in my ear. Afterwards, we would look for pinecones among the pine needles and pick out the small sweet pine nuts that tasted so delicious.

Once Jeanette and I chose to sleep in a guest room at my grandfather’s house—a room that had a window level with the street. We woke up in the middle of the night to a scraping sound. A man on the street outside had passed a metal rod through the bars of the window and was trying to hook objects on a table beside our bed in order to steal them. I couldn’t breathe or move I was so terrorized. Fortunately, after a while he gave up, and Jeanette and I scampered upstairs to our normal beds, cured for the present of our desire for adventure.

Dad came back from the War in the summer of 1945. Mother was so happy. But to us, the kids, he was a stranger. I couldn’t communicate with him.

So we left Mexico to go to a new home in a new country, the United States.

Houston

(1945-1958)

There is a moment I remember so clearly from when I was five or six years old. I was playing on the steps in front of our house, and decided to jump from the top step onto the grass. And as I jumped I realized that I was myself, and that I could do things on my own. I remember in mid air thinking, I am Titine! It was such a feeling of freedom. That was the first time I really had the sense that I was my own person.

We lived in a big house on 3617 Inverness Drive in River Oaks, but I always thought we were somewhat poor because Dad was so frugal. I had a friend whose family owned horses. We didn’t own any horses, so I thought we were not very well-off.

I always had the sense that we weren’t really American. We had people living with us. Grandmother had an accent. We had tea in the afternoon. We were different.

My father made sure we were exposed to a cross section of society at a young age. I remember going to Mimi Smith’s house, and meeting her father, this great big burly Texan. He turned to me at one point and said, "Sweetie, I can tell you how I found oil. I just picked up a little dirt, and I put it in my mouth, and I could just taste the oil."

I was also invited by Mother to go with her to visit the Browns. And dear Mrs. Brown—Margaret Brown—was sitting in her beautiful home, in this lovely room with antiques, and her African-American butler standing behind her chair, ready to assist her in any way with her oxygen. And we would talk about all kinds of things—music, and theater, and the travels she had taken when she was younger.

Contrast that with the weekend I spent away, when I was about eight or nine, at the country place of another family we knew—they had only one daughter, and I went with the mother and the daughter. It was in East Texas somewhere, in the midst of these woods, and we were invited to go see the town next door. It was an African-American town, with houses with dirt floors, and very rudimentary construction, and lots of children. My friend and I had a wonderful time playing with these kids, and then we were invited that evening to a barbecue. And the barbecue turned out to be barbecued squirrels, that had been shot that day. (It was a Saturday evening, I think.) And I remember really enjoying the barbecue.

(I also remember the mother taking a nude shower outside, with a spotlight on her. And I thought, That’s…. Let’s just say it seemed strange to me at the time. I was in the upper berth, and I could look out the window and there she was, a very hefty woman.)

So I was exposed to a broad cross section of society at a very young age, and I don’t know how that affected me, but I’ve always had a deep affection for the South.

I admired my father. The only moments I had alone with him were when he reviewed my report cards in his office at home. We would go in one by one, and he would look at our grades. He was always stern, always looking for improvements, measuring this report card against the last one, anticipating what he hoped the next one would be.

Once, when I received an award for excellence in Latin, he and Mom took me to Neiman Marcus to buy me an outfit for the award ceremony in Dallas. I bought a hat with fruit around the brim, and a red coat that I