In the rearview mirror

I was thinking earlier today about the earliest thing I remember and there are two things that stand out. First it is helping my Mom hang silver stars that she had cut out of silver tin pie pans in the window of our apartment for Christmas. I remember thinking she was so big and wonderful that she could hang a star and make it look beautiful. I must have been about 3 or 4. The other is the strawberry man. He would go down the alley behind our building yelling STRAWBERRIES...STRAWBERRIES .... He had this deep voice and it sounded like a song. He was pushing a 2-wheel wooden cart with 2 long handles. The bed of the cart was flat and full of strawberries. It almost seems impossible. Where in the world did he come from? I am the oldest of 4 children.I was born 2 weeks before my Mom turned 19. She dated my Dad most of her high school and became engaged the week after her graduation. I think her parents forbid her to be engaged in high school so they waited. She worked for the phone company while preparing for her wedding and until I was born. I was born approximately 9 months and 2 weeks from the date of the wedding. It was 1959, and I am the last gasp of the baby boom. My Mom did what any normal American young mother of that time would do, or was expected to do. She stayed home and was my Mom. I don't know a lot about that time, except that I think she was friends with another young mother in the building with a baby. I know that we moved every few years as another baby came along, until I was 4 and they bought a house. This was a neighborhood that was filled with small houses with small yards and small children. All of the adults were in their 20's, mostly early 20's, and all of the children were young and numerous. It seems all very cliche, but it was what I knew. We had one car and my dad took it to work and since he drank after work, we didn't really go anywhere. I don't remember thinking that was a problem, it was just a fact. Everything there seemed clean and new. Everyone was young, and my Mom was just like all the other mom's. She had a baby on her hip, she smoked, she scolded, she laughed, and she made the days better.