It was the greatest day of my life. But even at 5, I saw the cracks.

Adapted and excerpted from “Year of the Water Horse” © 2025 by Janice Page. Reprinted with permission from Pegasus Books.

The greatest day of my life happened when I was five.

I mean no disrespect to all the other great days of my life, including those that involve a child or a spouse, but my greatest day is my greatest day because of four things: surprise, unconditional love, durable life lessons, and ice cream.

It happened in a suburb of Boston on a perfect July day, which in New England means the sun was out, the humidity was tolerable, and the Red Sox were probably playing a weekend double-header at home. I woke up, as I always did, to the sound of my dad raking his metal teaspoon across the surface of his ceramic cereal bowl.

Every morning of his life, my father ate Kellogg’s Raisin Bran (never Post) drowned in whole milk, a ritual that required scraping the bottom and sides of his shallow bowl no fewer than fifty times. I know this because I counted the scrapes from my bed, which was only a few feet away on the other side of a wall no thicker than a communion wafer, with a painted plywood door that hung several inches short of the floor.

We lived in Braintree, a proudly average South Shore town most infamously known for the fatal armed robbery that sent Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti to the electric chair in 1927, fueling many decades of ethnic profiling and name-calling (a regional specialty). In a neighborhood labeled the Highlands despite having almost no perceptible elevation, we occupied a tan, one-story ranch with a single tiny bathroom, two official bedrooms, and a small dining room that had been converted into a third bedroom to accommodate our family of eight. I was the youngest, so I squeezed into that makeshift sleeping space with my sister closest in age (Patty), the headboard of our double bed resting against that same thin wall, which backed up to a small, hardworking electric stove on the other side. There was only enough room in the kitchen for a two-person, Formica-topped café table where my father slurped his breakfast while my mother drank black coffee and chain-smoked Kents. The dining room table was in the living room.

Clink, clink, clink. Clink, clink. Crunch, crunch. Clink. That was my daily alarm clock.

But on this particular summer day in 1966, there was an added element to the crack-of-dawn soundtrack. It stood out because it didn’t happen often. Ma and Dad were arguing (not so odd) and she was holding her ground (odd).

“Well, I’m not doing it,” she said.

“We have to,” he countered. “Already told them to come.”

“You told them,” she corrected. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“I’m not staying here to cook for them,” she told my father.

“Have to. Already invited them,” he said again, dismissively. “It’ll be easy. I’ll throw some hot dogs and hamburgs on the grill.”

“You stay and entertain them, John,” she shot back. “I’m leaving.”

There are no days off when you’re a woman with six kids and an Archie Bunker husband. My mom’s idea of a break was when she’d escape to the grocery store and return hours later, it felt like, with little more than ground beef and a carton of Kents. None of us was allowed to accompany her on those trips; undivided attention wasn’t a thing in our otherwise happy house. We generally just went along, and got along, without much drama.

Not today, though.

My dad dropped his bowl in the sink and headed out back to prep the grill, mow the lawn, clip the hedges, and enlist my two brothers — eleven and thirteen at the time — to help with the rest. He was whistling as he went about his chores, which, in hindsight, seems like a gross miscalculation. Inside the house, my mother was seething.

She fed me breakfast. Dressed me. Packed a bag. Where were we headed? I’m sure I asked, repeatedly and without really expecting an answer. “Just get in,” she would have said as she hustled me into the back seat of our seaweed-green Chevy Nova. If there was a seat belt, I doubt this was the one time we made use of it. All I remember is my dad’s quizzical look from a far corner of the yard as we backed out of the carport, lurched forward over the sidewalk curb, and sped off.

When my mother was a little girl, her mother would grab her by the hand and say, “Come on, YoYo, we’re getting out of here.”

It was the 1920s, but my grandparents were recent immigrants from the Abruzzo region of Italy by way of Ellis Island, so there was nothing roaring about their finances. They’d board the cheapest bus (or maybe several) from Boston to Hoboken, New Jersey, where my great-uncle lived. From there, they’d often venture to Coney Island, spending all day taking in things my grandfather dismissed as frivolous and my grandmother preached as vital. My mother told me how the air smelled of sugar and grease, how the sand burned her toes, how the saltwater still crusted her skin the next day.

This is exactly why, after about thirty minutes of deliberate driving, Yolanda DiMartinis Page pulled the Nova into the parking lot at Nantasket Beach, our first stop on the Screw You and Your Barbecue with the Pattersons Tour.

We never went to the beach this early in the morning.

In the bathhouse, I pulled on my favorite cerulean swimsuit with the neon-lime piping. My mother slipped into a cocoa-colored one-piece and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Yolanda was a babe, even at forty-four. I took after her in the expected ways of a dark, hairy, petite Italian girl, but I also had pronounced red highlights in my curls, and freckles bestowed by my father’s Scottish heritage. We unfurled our blanket on packed sand close to the seawall. The next several hours were a blur of sun and surf that only ended when the last bit of beach gave way to the tide.

If this had been any other day, that would have been our cue to head home. Instead, we changed out of our damp suits and headed across the street to the frozen custard stand, where my favorite thing was watermelon sherbet with the chocolate sprinkles known in these parts as jimmies. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and she let me order a large cone. What the F Troop was happening?

On the other side of the frozen custard stand at Nantasket Beach, rising out of the ground for blocks and blocks and blocks, was a white wooden monster known as the Giant Coaster. It stood nearly a hundred feet tall. Surrounding it was a legendary utopia called Paragon Park. If you lived anywhere near Hull, Massachusetts, in the mid-1960s, this was your Disneyland.

We got to go to Paragon Park exactly once every summer. My father, who worked as a boilermaker at the Fore River Shipyard in nearby Quincy, would bring home his modest paycheck and my mother would divide up the cash, slotting it into budget envelopes marked “electric,” “food,” “oil,” “water,” etc. There was no envelope marked “entertainments.” So, starting about two months before the week that we all went to Paragon Park, she’d skim a little off the top of each fund until we had enough to pile into the car and set out on a mission to have a year’s worth of fun in a day. Never would I have expected to enter the park for an unplanned, unsanctioned, Mommy-and-me-only visit. But here it was, happening.

First, we played Skee-Ball in the arcade outside the park gates. I figured I’d go home with a Chinese finger trap or some other trinket I’d earned with my vast Skee-Ball winnings. When we actually moved toward the park entrance, I thought my mother had made a mistake.

“We’re going in?” I questioned.

“We’re going in,” she confirmed.

The stern man taking tickets motioned me through the gate. The full expanse of the park came into view.

There was the Rocket Swing, and the Beep Beep Cars. There was the Whip, the Kooky Kastle, the Tilt-A-Whirl, and dozens of other attractions. The Giant Coaster loomed above it all, with people squealing from inside cars that appeared to teeter on the edge of the sky. But nothing seduced me like the Congo Cruise.

To begin with, you were loaded into a precarious little boat that quickly entered a pitch-black tunnel, bumping into the concrete sides as it floated down the track. Whenever you’d glimpse light, it was because the tunnel opened up to a jungle-themed vignette, the most consistent theme being White People in Peril. There were dioramas with scale figures of humans and animals on the prowl. A man in a pith helmet faced down dangers like quicksand and fire ants. And then, suddenly, cannibals! The pith-helmeted white man was shown in a kettle perched over a fire, with straw-skirted, black-skinned pygmies dancing around him, wielding spears. Oogabooga music played in the background.

In 1966, we were on the cusp of race riots that would consume news headlines and define the era in which I grew up. My five-year-old brain didn’t have a clue about that, and it wouldn’t have known to reject this scene as wrong, on so many levels. I was raised in a monochromatic world where casual racism happened regularly. It wasn’t until much later that any of this incensed me. At the time of my greatest day, all I knew was that something about this place, this ride, was off. And I found that fascinating. Maybe because my mother was also a little … off.

The finishing descent of the Congo Cruise, down a long ramp, through a spray of water that ended in a soaking splash, was the reason most people boarded the ride in the first place. Well, that and the darkness of the tunnels, which provided cover for couples making out. My mom held my hand as we felt our boat cranking up the rickety ramp, and she squealed as we plummeted in a great whoosh.

We spent about three hours in the park, including a break for hot dogs, fries and a creamy soft-serve twist. It was midafternoon when we finally exited. I think I started napping on my feet, before we even hit the parking lot.

But my mother wasn’t done.

When I woke up, we were at the East Braintree home of my eldest sister, Nancy, about a twenty-five-minute drive from the beach. Nancy was nineteen years older than me. She was married already, with a one-year-old son.

Ma and Nancy spent a lot of that afternoon deep in conversation, much of which involved the phrase “your father” in a way that did not seem very flattering. I was offered more ice cream — spumoni this time — and since no one on this planet seemed to be counting, I accepted. When dinnertime rolled around, we moved on down the road to the nearest Howard Johnson’s, where I ordered fried clam strips and Ma ordered a cheeseburger. She wanted hot fudge sundaes for dessert; who was I to argue? It was dusk when we left HoJo’s. The local drive-in was practically across the street, and it was our next stop.

I wish I could remember the first movie we saw that night. It was probably something like “The Singing Nun” or “That Darn Cat!” Maybe it seems odd that I don’t remember the exact title when I’m able to recall ordering clam strips for dinner; I think that’s because the second half of our double feature blew my mind so completely that it obliterated whatever had come before it.

In fairness, my mother probably thought I was asleep when she hopped screens between movies. She obviously didn’t know that the five-year-old curled up in the back seat would be taking in every word and frame of “A Patch of Blue,” an intense drama in which Sidney Poitier befriends a white woman (Elizabeth Hartman) who was blinded at age five (!) when her mother (Shelley Winters) hurled a bottle of acid at an abusive lover and missed. The black-and-white film, for which Winters won an Oscar, features rape, persistent abuse, rough language, and numerous anxiety-provoking scenes of accidental jaywalking by the blind girl. I’d never seen people be so mean to each other, or so vulnerable. And though I was too young to appreciate the irony of watching a movie about racial tolerance just hours after enjoying a stupendously racist amusement park ride, somewhere in my nascent conscience it registered and lodged.

Around midnight, the Nova finally rolled up our driveway and settled back into its carport cradle. My father came to the back door as my mother carried me inside. He looked stricken. However angry he may have been, it was clear even to a child that he was far more rattled, and now relieved. A new world order had been established, or at the very least threatened. I wasn’t too sleepy to remember finding that pretty interesting.

I revisit my greatest day often. It taught me how to listen and observe. It taught me how to construct a priceless day of memories for someone you love, even as a collateral objective. And, maybe most useful, it taught me how to really stick it to a boyfriend or a spouse when he seems to be taking you for granted.

But there was something else I learned that day in 1966 — something more disturbing and less in line with my naïve first assessment of our carefree existence. I saw cracks, deeply rooted and widening. I was pretty sure my father saw them, too.

Trained to be a dutiful wife — the kind who always had a cold Schlitz waiting when her man got home from his shipyard job — my mother knew that a comfortable life isn’t always a fulfilling life. From her I learned the power of picking your spots, and that feminism can be just as loud when it’s whispered.

My father may have thought he was in charge, but she decided how much or little she wanted to be heard, and when she talked or acted, people listened. Even he listened because, let’s be honest, she scared the crap out of him.

Mental illness wasn’t something I understood in the 1960s. I simply thought my mother had light and dark days, same as everyone. Her way of dealing with them was maybe just a little more extreme. The story my siblings liked to tell was about a standard 1950s afternoon before I was born, when one child after another clumsily knocked over their milk glass during an at-home lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. At first it seemed comical but when the fourth drink spilled, my mom lost it.

“Alright then, let’s have a party!” she shouted, and with the dramatic flourish of a Vegas magician, she yanked one end of the tablecloth with both hands, sending the soup, the glasses, the plates and bowls and every piece of S&H Green Stamps-financed flatware crashing to the floor.

It wasn’t long after that lunch that my mother was checked into a hospital for another evaluation of her “nervous breakdowns.” They pronounced her chronically depressed and in need of a course correction, the inevitable prescription for unruly women of a certain age and circumstance, whether they were truly manic-depressive, as it was known then; or postpartum/perinatal, as wouldn’t be widely understood for many more years; or just not “acting normal.” She received the standard electroshock therapy and was sent home a few days later.

Home. Where, on one tiny wall to the left of our tiny kitchen sink, my mother had hung a tiny ceramic plaque emblazoned with cartoon flowers and the Serenity Prayer that was her daily affirmation.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

Courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

The thing is, she did know the difference, mostly. You can be bipolar and still be a strong woman. You can have a mind of your own, even when you’ve lost it over spilled milk. In time, my siblings and I would come to see the lie of the dependable, black-and-white life, which lacks credibility even in white suburbia. We’d learn to cope with patches of all colors and tones, including — not least where my mother was concerned — every imaginable interpretation of blue.

I know now that my greatest day is my greatest day mainly because innocence appreciates with time. Two decades after her death, whenever something stirs the sediment of my complicated childhood and the epic highs and lows that followed, I try to put everything else aside and just revel in the memory of our impromptu adventure as it was — as it felt then.

What I see is a luminous summer day that stretches on forever. The sand is hot under my feet. The salt crusts my freckled skin. The air smells of sugar, and grease. And watermelon sherbet.

Janice Page will be in conversation with Wesley Morris at McNally Jackson Seaport in New York on Dec. 2, with Julia Sweeney at Book Soup in West Hollywood on Dec. 11 and with A.M. Homes at Politics and Prose (5015 Connecticut Ave. NW) on Feb. 23.

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