FRIENDS FOREVER

    

Friends Forever

THEN:


    My very first friend was a cousin named Becky. She was a year or so older than me, and was very sweet and pretty, perhaps too sweet and pretty, because I could not talk her into playing in the sand under my porch or riding her tricycle like a wild thing. She was much more interested in boring ol' baby dolls. I carried a couple of dolls around sometimes, but my dollies rode horses, or went to sea, or went on adventures with fairies. Her dollies laid there until she declared they were crying for a bottle. Becky would then "feed" them delightedly while I sat there wanting to chuck her dollies out the window. I was more into dirt and speed. She had a little sister named Ramona, but Ramona was like Becky's dolls; She laid there until she wanted a bottle and then she cried. I did not want to chuck Ramona out the window. She was fascinatingly alive and I had an intrinsic and deep respect for Life. Sometimes they let me hold my baby cousin on my lap while I sat very still. Ramona felt nice. She was warm, she smelled like milk, and was much too heavy to throw out a window anyway.

    Years later, my family moved to a mobile home. Our next door neighbors, Ruth and Dennis, had a son named Randal that was two years younger than me. Ran loved animals, dirt, and speed. It was a match made in Heaven and soon we were like the proverbial peas and carrots. He was the same age as Becky's little sister Ramona, whom I had not seen in a few years. When they came back to visit, I was delighted to find out that Ramona was a precocious kid now instead of a crying, heavy baby. When her family visited, we left Becky with the grown ups and her dolls while we climbed tress and waded in the creek. Becky left when their parents did, but Ramona often stayed and played with me. She liked to run and jump and was no stranger to dirt. My sister Lila was pregnant and was suffering from pica, though we did not know the name of her condition at the time. What we knew was that Lila craved ice and gave into those cravings. She ate it all day long. Lila and I were largely anemic and craving ice is a symptom of an iron deficiency. I did not crave it like she did, but I wanted to be like Lila so much that I insisted on eating it with her whenever she was around. While Ramona was there, she ate the ice too. Once, she was holding a cube of ice tight in her chubby little hand and water was dripping furiously from her fist.

    "Ramona?" I asked, "Why aren't you eating your ice? Don't you like it?"

    "I like it just fine," She told me in her little kid voice, "But it's too cold. I'm waiting for it to warm up."

    Ramona taught me to sing a jaunty little song that said, "Here comes (insert any name) floating down the Delaware, chewing on her underwear. Must have been a dirty pair. Ten days later, bitten by a polar bear, and that was the end of it!" We tormented everyone we could with that song and with "He's got the whole world in His hands," because we would sing that one using ever item we could see or think of, "He's got all the hound dogs/old trucks/rainbows/merry go 'rounds/etc in His hands." He really did have the whole world in His hands when we were through singing that song!

    Lila gave birth to my niece Tanya when I was seven and Ramona was five. Now a trio was born. It seemed like I turned around a few times and Tanya was up from infancy and following Ramona and me everywhere. Tanya and Ramona were my best and most constant childhood friends. Their faces were woven into so many of my favorite memories. Their best interest so quickly become more important to me than my own, along with Tanya's brother and two other sisters that were all younger than her. I adored them all, but only Tanya tagged after me, insisting that she be a deep part of the fabric in my quilt of my friendships. My sisters were ten and twelve years older than me, more like extra mothers in many ways. Becky preferred to play with other little girls that loved crying dollies and ruffled dresses. I moved away from Ran and hardly saw him afterwards. But Ramona and Tanya became my pseudo siblings. They filled so many of my days with joy and drove away the lonesome feelings I sometimes dealt with.

    In first grade, I became friends with Camillia Michelle Rose. She was a quite little dark haired child, as sweet as sugar. I loved her pretty name and her calm ways. At different times in our kidhood, she went by Michelle and by Camillia. I thought she could not lose as both the names were as sweet and pretty as she was.

    In second grade, Camillia was in another room, but we still played together at recess. I also played with Annette and Tauna (pronounced Tonya, just like my niece's name was pronounced.) And I played a lot with a distant cousin named Earl. Annette loved that she had the same name as my mother. She found a way to talk to my mom almost every time my parents came to pick me up. Tauna was quiet and willowy. Both girls were blond and very pretty. I remember running across the playground holding each of their hands and wondering why boys did not like each other well enough to hold hands. In second grade it was already frowned upon for males to show physical affection. Earl was not affectionate and he was far from quiet. He was obnoxious and loud, but I loved him very much.

    In the third grade, I met Jutannia and Angie and we became a common trio around the school. I played mostly with them but sometimes also with Rosalee and Betty. That year I learned the trick of keeping out of a fight that I should not be part of. Jutannia and Angie would get angry with each other and, for a while, they would both come to me and ask me to take their side. I don't know where I got the idea to refuse. Maybe I simply and honestly could not tell who was in the right, but I quickly made a habit of refusing to take sides. If they got obsessed with the argument, I would withdraw from both of them and hang out with Rosalee and Betty, or Camillia Michelle. If they were not being too crazy with their feud and they were nice to me I would play with whichever one asked me first, usually this was Jutannia as she seemed to value a friendship with me more than Angie did. But I loved it best when all three of us were friendly. Many times my insistence that I would not take a side and my encouragement that they get along brought about their happy reconciliation. And so it was that, quickly and at a very young age, I became a peacemaker.

    In fourth grade, I was all about Paul S. He was a farm boy and I was a farm girl. We lived too far apart to play together, but I watched him get off and on the bus every day and we often sat together. Our teacher seemed to hate both of us, but made the mistake of assigning our seats alphabetically. This put us together and near the back of the room. Paul and I huddled over comics and magazines and whispered about things we found more fascinating than our spelling words.

    In fifth grade I was back with Jutannia and Angie. We spent a lot of time trading white elephants, though we did not know then to call our trinkets that. To us, it was a game where we took anything we did not want anymore, or our family did not want anymore, and traded those items at school for something we wanted or imagined someone else might want. Or game became pretty serious to us. The trinkets were used as serious currency that might buy you extra french fries at lunch or an awesome new pencil. A few kids brought things their family most assuredly was not willing to trade away, and that became the end of the game. I would never have stolen anything from my family. If they wanted something, did not give me permission to trade it, I would not have dreamed of carting that something off. I was largely about gifts. Much of what I traded for was to make my family happy. I would not steal from them and make them unhappy. That was the opposite of what I hoped to do. Most notably I "bought" my mother a Christmas tree broach for Christmas. It was simple costume jewelry, silver, and had different colored faux jewels in it. One of them was missing, and I had this big idea that I could find another jewel to fit in the slot and glue it in there. That never happened, but my mother wore that costume jewelry with much pride and delight through several Christmas seasons anyway.

    In the second year of fifth grade (I failed that grade twice) I hung out with Jill, who was a very pretty curly haired girl with a lot of attitude. I loved how spunky she was. I also hung out just a little with Rose, a very poor girl that spoke with a deep country accent, and I made friends with a girl named Andrea. Andrea was also spunky and she had a great sense of humor. This is probably when I began to value friends that could make me laugh. My family finally had a telephone and Andrea was the first friend I spent time talking with on the phone. I knew where she lived. She and another nice girl named Debbie got off the bus near the second sharp bend coming up the Camp Creek road, about four or five miles from our home. I had watched her get on and off the bus many times. The fact that I could sit in my home and she could sit in her home and we could talk to each other and hear each other instantly fascinated me. I tried many times to get my sister Sandi, who I thought knew everything, to explain this magic to me, but either she did not understand it well herself or I could not follow her explanation. My home had no running water, but we had electricity and a telephone. We were almost normal in my book. We had a party line and Andrea and I used to drop silent whenever anyone picked up the phone and, without listening for a dial tone, began to dial. When they stopped dialing, Andrea would say, "Hello?" and try to pretend to be "Aunt Alice" or whomever the caller was asking for. She didn't get by with it for very long but it did not take much to greatly amuse us.

    The electric range in our kitchen, like most everything else, had been purchased second hand. It had a timer that no one could figure out how to turn off or reset. At random times during the day that timer would go off. It was much louder than you would ever expect an oven timer to be and, the only way to get it to stop buzzing, that we had chanced upon, was to jar it -- hard. This meant a lot of vibration. So, the timer would go off and everyone in the house would stand up, race to the kitchen, and begin jumping up and down. Being on the phone did not render you exempt from your stove jarring duties, so Andrea became accustomed to these interruptions. I don't know if it was due to frustration or simply because it was fun, but most of us would begin not only to jump but to yell. We turned into the Looney Tunes characters every time that timer buzzed.

    My mother would raise her voice to a higher pitch and start screaming something akin to, "Come on, you dad blamed stove! Shut the heck up! I'm trying to cook around here!" She often resorted to baby talk and that, coupled with the high pitch and her penchant for yellow, left me seeing her favorite Looney Tunes character, Tweety Bird hopping lightfootedly around the kitchen.

    Sandi would hop too, chiming in simultaneously with, "Pipe down you crazy hunk of metal before we take you to the junk yard and sell you for scrap iron!" She seemed more genuinely angry than Mother did and my mind's eye likened her to a frustrated Sylvester or sometimes Daffy Duck.

    Daddy would sometimes jump quietly and sometimes shout out a random song that had been hanging around in his head. He'd sing loudly, "Hey, good lookin'! Whatcha' got cookin' How's about cookin' something up with me?!"  His jumping was always joyful! 'Foghorn Leghorn, at your service' it seemed to say.

    My adopted uncle, Crit and my Uncle Junior would use mild swear words in their declarations of stove timer resistance. My mother would usually let the mild curse words slide without a dressing down. They would yell, "You *+^%#@ stove! Shut the *&&^$# up," while jumping mightily all over the kitchen. Crit with his shaggy hair and fierce but lovable scowl might as well be yelling, "Bracken Fracken!" He was Yosemite Sam in my eyes. Uncle Junior, thin, and lanky, and full of hard luck tales, could be Wile E. Coyote on a good day.

    I usually helped my daddy sing while I bounced, imagining myself as Witch Hazel or the Tazmanian Devil. Sometimes I was Speedy Gonzales yelling to the top of my lungs, "Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!" Sometimes I was laughing too hard to shout anything at all.

    Usually the stove stopped buzzing and no one noticed because of the immense racket we were making. After the commotion calmed down, I would breathlessly pick the phone back up and Andrea would say, "Can I please trade families with you?"

    The other common interruption to our phone calls was when someone sneezed. My mother and both my sisters have always sneezed very loudly, unbelievably loudly. I grew up around them and was soon immune, but those sneezes startled other people a lot! Andrea made a game out of trying to guess who she heard sneezing in the background at my home. She was rarely ever correct, but she was dogged in her determination to identify my mother and sisters by their sneezes. I thought it was funny when she guessed wrong, and extra funny when she got the dogs and the humans mixed up. We had two Chihuahuas, Feisty and Pumpkin, that had barks much bigger than their bites. Sometimes one of them would yip a single sound or perhaps two in succession and Andrea would say, "Was that your mom sneezing that time?"

    On the road that traveled directly above our road we had some very good friends and fellow church members. Brother Manny Wayne and Sister Bea had two kids named David and Robin. I did not get to see them often, but I loved playing with them when I could. Robin was a pretty big tomboy, like me, and David loved motorcycles. I loved watching David love his motorcycles, but I never admitted that I had a crush on him. I was still very shy about boys at that time. On my twelfth birthday, Robin told me that my parents were buying me a rabbit from her mother. We were on the bus and the noise was drowning out part of what she was saying. "Don't tell them I told you though," She yelled my way, "It's supposed to be a secret." I got my hopes up for a beautiful rabbit for my birthday when in reality it was a rabbit cake. I had missed a crucial word in the secret. I had a large and beautiful Bugs Bunny cake that Sister Bea baked and decorated. I loved Bugs Bunny and that remains the prettiest cake I have ever had for any birthday.

    Once I switched schools Nancy and Michelle became my best school friends and I had found a new trio. One or the other of them was in my homeroom every year while I was at that school and we all three hung out together before and after classes, on the playground, at lunch, music, library, and gym. We were together at sock hops and any school functions that allowed just a little mingling. We mingled toward one another like magnets. Once high school reared its head, Nancy and I struggled to arrange our schedules to be together as much as possible. Pitifully, it turned out that Home Economics would be our only class together and I had no classes with Michelle. It helped that Nancy and I shared lockers, but I still missed her most of the rest of the day and this added to my high school blues. There were other friends that moved into and out of our happenings. I thought of them as our bigger group or "gang". They were Tammy, Rhonda, Shan, Stephanie, Jill, Brenda, Rita, Sherry, and April. All of us were friends but Nancy and Michelle were the ones I hung out with most often. As far as the guys went, Jimmy was my most constant guy friend, but I also loved to hang out with Buddy, with my cousin DeanO. In class, I spent a lot of time fighting the urge to whisper with the wonderfully sweet Stuart. Shane H. was the only guy I knew that I thought was as good, as kind, as loyal as Stuart. And there were two tough little guys named Joey B. and Clint R. that never failed to defend me if a bully was around. Possibly that was because I would tolerate no lip about either of them, but who knows which is the chicken and which is the egg? Though we did not hang out much, Joey, Clint and I shared a mutual respect that ran very deep.

    When I was in the sixth grade, I found Cindy D. and we spent many a fun hour together rocking the 80s. We had a lot in common and had similar tough spirits, though I did not know any of that when I first saw her on the bus, wearing a fancy rabbit coat and sporting perfect blond hair, her eyes sparkling like blue diamonds. It would have been easy to simply be envious. I am very glad I took the time to get to know the sweet, tough girl beneath the facade I saw as weak and spoiled.

    In eight grade, which was held in the high school, since I was not in as many classes with Nancy as I would have liked, I fell into a friendship with a girl named Dreama. I loved her name and she seemed so much older than most of the girls in my classes. She had a serious boyfriend that worked in the local garage, and she was about as disillusioned with school as I was. Dreama taught me the best and easiest ways to skip classes and how to shoplift much more, and much bigger items, than I had ever imagined. Once I realized I had to stop shoplifting, I found a way to hang out more with Nancy and less with people that encouraged the wild child under my skin. I had discovered that maybe you aren't what you eat, but if you aren't vigilant, you sure lean toward being a lot like whomever you hang out with. To this day though, I wish Dreama, and all my wonderful friends many blessings and fine things. I am grateful for all they taught me and all the fond memories they helped me make.

ON QUITTING SCHOOL

"A Tree Grows in Moonlight"
By: Skitch

THEN:

WHY I QUIT SCHOOL:
SCHOOL WAS PAINFUL:

Though I have long considered myself an autodidact, the foundation for my education came from public school. It was there that I learned to read and there that I discovered my fierce love for literature, my penchant for science, and my weakness toward mathematics. Letters have always been my friends. Numbers were, until fourth grade and then they seemed suddenly to desert me. Whatever the reason, numbers scare me. Perhaps, as a psychiatrist once told me, this was due to some malformation in my decidedly odd little brain. Perhaps it was more akin to what my husband Olin claims. He says I have a deficiency in the foundation of my mathematics learning, and that the blame for this lies solely on the shoulders of one or more of my earliest math teachers.

I was disliked by several teachers, though I wanted to be loved by them, and I did as I was told. I was unpopular in the first elementary school that I attended, and I was disallowed any extra curricular activities by my parents. Thus, the only sport I participated in was bully dodging. I gave my formal education very little effort for several years in order to be more like my parents and less like a person that might abandon them by "getting above my raising." This was an idea so deeply planted in my head that I could not have put it into words for you then or even years later. It was almost thirty years after it began to rear it's ugly head that I finally saw it for what it was.

I did enjoy three years at a different, far better elementary school. I'm not sure how the school got that way, but I can tell you what made it so superior: simply put, it was a sense of togetherness. Yes, this school had it's cliques. The jocks hung out largely with other jocks. The nerds hung out mostly with other nerds. But the groups did not prey on each other and they looked at each other as simply different branches of the same tree. They shared a loyalty to their school and to their classmates that I'd never seen before or after. I remember sitting between a "nerd" and a "jock" in one particular classroom. I proudly called both of them my friends. They were nice to me and to each other. The three of us talked quietly when given permission and passed notes when silence was called for. When the recess bell rang Stuart went to play football with his friends and Scott sat on the sidelines with his, going over plans for the upcoming science fair or talking about some other cerebral pursuit. Most of us had a good idea which kids came from privilege and which ones did not, but no one ever made a big deal about money. It was an afterthought. In fact, when I once mentioned food stamps to Stuart he was surprised. "I thought you were one of the rich kids," He told me. This prompted me to wonder about my new found contentment. Were the kids in this school being kind to me because they thought I was rich? Did all rich kids enjoy this sort of sweet acceptance from other students? The questions pouring through my head encouraged me to pay more attention, and I soon realized that I need not be concerned. Not only did Stuart's kindness never waiver, even now that he knew I certainly was not a rich kid, but it seemed to work across the board. The jocks and the kids who came from money were largely nice to the kids that, without one doubt, did not come from privilege. I don't mean to make this school sound like a utopia. It was not. We had kids that leaned toward being bullies, just not entire groups of bullies as I'd confronted before. The incidents with bullying were rare and most often the other kids would defend whomever the bully was set against. This was usually one of more of the guys in my grade. Stuart helped me put a few bullies in their place over the years. So did Clint, and Joey. This warmed my heart because none of these guys were big or tall and the bullies often were. It was like being threatened by a wolf and watching while a fox ran it off. Of course my friends Nancy and Michelle stuck by me when bullies tried to establish dominance, and my classmate, April spoke up and took my part many times when a high school girl on our bus tried to push me around. I returned the favor and suddenly neither of us had to worry about any of the bullies on the bus, though the high school was much more peppered with them than our elementary school was. I was not as close to April as I was to Nancy or Michelle. April and I were something between acquaintances and friends. We rarely sat together on the bus, often we were yards apart, but as soon as one of us heard the other begin to raise her voice in agitation, we were on the move. Suddenly, the bully that thought they could push our friend around found that he or she would have to push much harder than they had anticipated. They were staring at two little spitfires instead of one. Always, it became more trouble than it was worth for the bully. There really was safety in numbers. 

When I entered the eighth grade, I was shuffled out of my pleasant elementary school to the high school. Neither of the elementary schools were big enough to house the eighth graders but the high school, with it's significant drop out rate, had plenty of room. So, though we weren't formally high school students, the eighth grade kids were sent to the high school. There they would merge my friends and the kids from the elementary school that I had gone to previously, the one that was rank with cliques that did prey on each other and bullies that went largely unchallenged. My group still stuck together as much as possible, but we were outnumbered. Not only were we only half of the eighth graders, but we were in an high school that was populated with many, many kids that had come from my first elementary school, and we were suddenly on the bottom of the rank, guppies and goldfish in an ocean rank with sharks and barracudas. Eighth graders were the runts and the butt of most of the jokes, often cruel ones. I was pushed into lockers, threatened, and sexually assaulted. With the advent of sexuality in the mix (the previous bullying had be rather asexual) I soon found myself more frustrated with school than I had ever been. I was miserable.


WHY I QUIT SCHOOL:
WESLEY:

My cousin, Wesley had moved in with my family, telling me he would be the brother I'd never had! This was exciting and wonderful for me because I had always wanted a brother. He was nine years older than me and had been honorable discharged after a full term in the U.S. Army. I admired him very much. Wes had a job as an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant and he told me, "If you'll quit school, I can get you a job with me!" He wrote out on paper approximately what I would make each paycheck and budgeted it out for me. He showed me that I could give a certain amount to my parents (to improve the lives of everyone in the family) put some back for my own future, and still have a considerable amount of money to spend on whatever I wanted right now! I'd never imagined I might someday have a steady stream of money for whatever struck my fancy and suddenly an entire world of dreams was opened up in my head. What if I could afford to get my learners permit? Maybe even a used car in a few years? Might I be able to take home a piece of "real" jewelry now and then, something silver or even gold? And get my hair cut often enough that it did not look like a crazy cat lady's head? And buy Nike shoes? I'd had one pair that my family caught on clearance and I loved Nike shoes! My feet had never felt more comfortable in any pair of shoes and my soul had felt so normal looking down at them. I was maybe as good as anyone else, right? Wesley seemed to have thought of everything as he figured in lunches and gas money and said I could car pool with him, that his boss would match our schedules. I was thoroughly beguiled by the idea.

"You can get your GED in a few years and go on to college. No sense wasting the next four years in high school when you could be making money! Sure, a high school degree is better than a GED but if you go on to college no one will ever care that you have a GED instead." He was very convincing and I was so unhappy with high school.


WHY I QUIT SCHOOL:
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN:

A dear friend of the family, Liz Rose, told me that I very much reminded her of "Francie", a character from "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," which was one of her favorite novels.

"Have you ever read that book?" She asked.

She knew I was an avid reader and when she found out I had not read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", she somehow found me a copy. This was before the internet and before the large chain book stores. In fact, I'd never been in a book store of any sort in my entire life, so I have no idea where or how Liz found that book. Likely, she gave me a copy she'd had on her bookshelf for decades. I gratefully accepted it. Books were my favorite gifts. I was intrigued by almost every novel and more so by this one, since I had been compared to the main character. I loved the girl's name. It reminded me of my grandmother's: Frankie. I had never met my dad's mother and had long felt that loss. Maybe this girl would be spunky like everyone told me my grandmother had been.

I sucked the contents of the book down in hours and it became my favorite novel, my favorite book (other than the Bible) and it still is. 

Francie was spunky, and she was a lot like me. She had a love of books and learning that ran deep to her soul. She adored her daddy and struggled to understand her mother. She suffered from poverty and dreamed of overcoming it. She wanted to help her family improve their lot. At her mother's insistence, Francie quit school to get a job. I could see me being the salvation of my family, so "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" was the final straw in the high school camel's back. I wanted to drop out. This would essentially mean skipping high school, as eight graders were not even freshmen yet.


THE ACTUAL FACTS OF THE MATTER:

I told my parents I was quitting school, and I braced myself to drown out my oldest sister's plaintive objections. I talked my dad into taking me to see the superintendent and telling him that I was not coming back after Christmas break. Talking him into this course of action was not only disappointingly easy (though I'm not sure why I expected more resistance from my parents who had quit school in the fifth grade (Dad) and the sixth (Mom) but it turned out to also be quite a blow to my ego. My pop told the superintendent, "She's never really done well in school anyway. She's slow." I had been told by so many teachers that I was plenty smart enough, even as cleaver as any kid they had ever taught, so this was a shocking revelation! Were they all lying to me? Did they say that to all the kids? Surely my pop would know if I was below average intellect! I never knew if my dad truly believed I was mentally deficient or if he said it to get the paper signed. I know he would not tell an outright lie, but he has always had this way of beating around a bush and of finishing sentences under his breath. He might have said, "She's a bit slow," and then breathed, "Getting out of bed in the morning." I will simply say, I would not put either idea past him!

I quit school that day and I wondered about my mental ability for many years.

Wesley moved out of our house soon afterward, and no job was handed to me. I turned out to have a big case of "Teenager" and was too lazy to pursue one very well on my own. I found a babysitting job for a few months, I worked in a gift shop for a short time, and I wrote an advice column for the local paper. I made one dollar an hour in the gift shop and she paid me in merchandise, going by the full marked up price. I came home with some nick knack every two or three days. I made no cash there and so little money at the other two jobs, that my dad refused to take a penny of it to help with the family expenses. Jobs were extremely hard to find in my little town unless you "knew someone who knew someone" and we did not know anyone with the power or authority to find me a job. I know now that I should have tried harder, should have found something more substantial or, better yet, endured the misery and the bullies and kept my butt in school while finding an after school job.

What I largely did was read fiction and watch MTV. In my defense, I must point out that this was back in the day when MTV was truly music videos and was worth watching, unlike the sludge they show today. I also learned more from the fiction than one might imagine. Without planning to, I put my life on a nocturnal shift. Most of the time I was "between jobs" and I stayed up all night reading Kathleene E. Woodiwiss, and Johanna Lindsey, and Lavyrle Spencer. I found the silence and the night beguiling and fell under it's dark spell. I had never been allowed to stay all night away from home, to participate in after school activities, to be left alone without either my parents or my sister to "watch me". Other than going on walks, I had never been entirely alone and yet I knew this truth: My soul loves solitude and craves silence. My mother listened to the Christian radio station every hour she was awake, which was usually five to eight hours a day. My dad watched one television and my sister (if I wasn't watching MTV) watched the other one. When Wesley was living there, he was often listening to music in the kitchen or the living room on his portable boom box. We lived in a shotgun house with only one interior door, which was on the bathroom, a bathroom that did not have a commode. We used an outhouse for those functions. The bathroom was simply for bathing. When my mother was sleeping the house was forcefully, oppressively silent. Even whispering was often frowned upon. It was a study in extremes, but I preferred the silence. The cacophony felt like torture. The silence was merely strained. For a while I kept my cot in the walk in closet. After the bed was moved back into the bedroom I shared with Sandi, I put an old couch in the closet and turned it's back away from the wall. This was even better than the cot because it created a box for me to hide in to try to escape some of the noise. I slept there sometimes. Once I had reversed my days and nights, I imagined it was a coffin and that I was a vampire.

Often my home felt like a prison that trapped me with sound and nervousness. The doctor had put me on several nerve pills due to mouth ulcers, sever stomach aches that woke me in the middle of the night, and a bad case of Shingles at the age of fourteen. I found peace in my sleeping home. I absorbed my sister's even breaths, the sound of the crickets outside, and the lulling of the box fan. I sighed deep, happy sighs, and I swore there was more oxygen in the night air. I rarely fell asleep before the sun rose, and before I went to sleep I would often position the box fan near my head. That way I could sleep through all the household goings on during the day. I would wake up around 3pm and soon after that eat supper, instead of breakfast, with my family. They had fallen into the habit of eating at 3:30 because I had always arrived home from school saying I was starving. Suppertime had been moved up for my convenience. My family loved me very much and I loved them just as heartily. We simply had trouble understanding each other sometimes.

These days I spend a lot of time listening to the gentle hum of my computer or the rain outside my window, while contemplating nearly everything, including my past, future, and present. I truly bless the broken road that got me right where I am today. I need and love my sons. I adore my husband. I'm happy with my own quirky blend of knowledge and the hard earned wisdom I've managed to acquire. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have done my best to plow through with high school and so much more. I would have given a formal education my all from day one to, at least, a master's degree, and I would not have continued to do what I've always done, never stopped teaching myself. I did learn a lot about myself and life from those years of bad jobs and late nights. It is possible that knowing yourself is even more important than having a good formal education, but I have confidence that I could have handled both. In fact, fighting for a formal education while being a troubled teen, while married to my first husband, while raising my boys might have taught me even more about myself and life, might have given me a higher degree from the school of hard knocks. I am not at all discontent with where I am today, but wouldn't I love to have a rewarding career to go along with my awesome husband and cool progeny!

My advice to all: Stay in school! Learn to teach yourself as well, and never stop learning. You will be amazed to find that you can be your favorite teacher if you only give yourself a chance.

THE ONLY VACATION

Party Goers and Me
Summer 1976

THEN:



    The only vacation our family took while I was living at home was to White Pine Tennessee. What was in White Pine? Aunt Nancy and Uncle Leslie. They were so often part of our lives that my cousins are more like siblings. I was nine years old and I knew it would be great to go to the Smoky Mountains or to the beach like most families did, but this was still a vacation! I adored my aunt, uncle, and cousins, and I was very excited about White Pine.

    On the morning we were supposed to leave, my internal alarm kicked in for the first time in my life. I had struggled even more than usual with sleep the night before, such was my excitement, but I woke up at four am and Dad was still sleeping. Usually he was "up with the chickens". When I woke him and told him it was time for our vacation, he said we might not go because, "Your mommy ain't feeling too good." My mother suffered so much from nervous conditions that she hated leaving the bed, let alone home, but I begged to go and fought back tears of disappointment. Mom looked at me, sighed, pulled herself from the bed, and we piled in the truck. She was weak and weary. Yes, she smothered me, but I knew she loved me. Only for her husband or daughters would she drag herself up and out like this.

    In White Pine we mostly sat around talking to relatives, but I really enjoyed playing with my cousin Wanda's children Wendy, Wade, and P.T. as well as my niece Tanya and nephew Little Johnny. My cousin Marcia's kids, Kristina and Kristal, were too little to play with but were fun and cute babies. I enjoyed helping with them whenever I was allowed. Still more cousins came in and out visiting, but the aforementioned were there most of the time. 

    One of my older cousins, Buzz, decided to throw a party to celebrate our visit. He bought several watermelon and lots of picnic food. He had an above ground pool and I'd never even seen a pool before. I had only been in the river a handful of times and then never anything deeper than what my family called "the shallows" of the Pound River. My mother was petrified of water, but hand in hand, she and I would wade across the rocks, and find a spot that was not likely to have a crawdaddy guarding it, due to the quickly moving water, and we would sit down. In that position the water would be about waist high on me, never high enough to drown in, never high enough to learn to swim. Still, it was refreshing on a hot summer day, and I cherish the memories of those trips to sit in the shallows. The water was white with movement and often the rocks were moss covered. Sometimes I would lie back and let the icy water rush over my shoulders to cool me off completely. I loved and love that river to this day.

    A pool was such a foreign and fascinating idea. The families were bustling with excitement over this party! My parents opted out, as I anticipated, and so did my aunt and uncle. But Lila and Sandi (both past the age of 18) went without a word of objection from my mother. Lila pleaded to be allowed to take me but Mother refused. She said she was afraid I would drown. When Lila promised to stay right by my side, mother said someone might get drunk. She did not want me around drunks, I might hear foul language. I now know that her most present fear was always that some man would hurt me sexually, as she had been hurt, but I did not know that then. Looking back, I truly believe that my mother trusted my male cousins not to do such a thing, but some of the female cousins were married to men my mother barely knew, and the hosts of the party had invited some of their friends. These also included men my mother did not know, and she was not taking any chances with her frail blond daughter. She did not want me going through any of the horrors she had survived. She did not insist that Sandi and Lila stay there, though I think she could have gotten by with even that. Lila was married and had two kids of her own and Sandi was even older than Lila was. Mother cautioned them both repeatedly but seemed to reckon that her older daughters were big enough and savvy enough to defend themselves. She did not trust that I was.

    I think if my niece and nephew had not gone I would not have taken the loss so hard. I was used to disappointment and used to not attending most events, but with my nieces and nephews going and all my cousin's little children going, I felt a bit like the pariah of the family. I did not want the little kids to miss out on the pool, and the watermelon, and the cold Coca Colas, and all the fun. But somehow the fact that they were allowed those pleasures and I was denied them cut me to the core. I shrugged off my sisters getting to do things that I could not. They were adults after all, and I was only nine years old. But this time the people older than me were going and the people younger than me were going. It seemed so unfair that I should be the only person that wanted to go to the party but was not allowed. I sat out under a shrub and cried almost the entire time they were gone. I had never felt more alone.

    A night or two later, Auntie and Uncle took my parents out for a steak dinner. I had never had steak and had never been to a "sit down" restaurant. At first, I was very excited, thinking that I might be allowed to go along on that outing since I had missed the other one. After all, I had stayed home with those four people when everyone else went to the pool party. Shouldn't this be "our" turn? Shouldn't this be "our" outing? But Auntie told me it was a grown-up date, and that I must stay home. I swallowed my disappointment. I would never argue with her or hurt my dear aunt's feelings if I could help it. I went to the bedroom I'd been sharing with my parents so that Auntie might not notice my disappointment. Mother knew me better than most. She found me and told me if she had the money to feed me herself at that restaurant she would insist on taking me, but the only reason she and dad were able to go was because my aunt and uncle were paying for the food. I told her it was "okay." I told her to go and have a good time. I could see she was on the brink of putting her foot down and nixing the outing entirely and, though I did not say so, I did not want her and dad to miss out on the experience just because I could not go. I tried to appear nonchalant about the whole thing and must have been somewhat successful because the four of them went out for steak. I stayed with my cousins and sisters and watched television. I ate seven hot dogs for supper that night along with nearly a bag of potato chips. But I was sure the hot dogs did not taste like steak, and all the excess did not fill the emptiness inside me. It just made my tummy ache, and I sat up with heart burn late into that night.    

    On the way home to Virginia, Momma rode in the back of the truck with me. I couldn't stop being amazed that she was back there. It was the highlight of the vacation and the only time I remember her ever riding in the back of the truck with me. She pointed out some dark clouds and told me it was going to rain. She also told me how miserable the vacation had been for her and how she didn't want to ever go on another. I felt my heart fall because I had really hoped this was the first of many and that next time I might be allowed the party or the dinner out. After a moment of utter disappointment, my mind consoled me, "It wasn't much fun anyway. It's more fun when Auntie and Uncle come to visit us." But I did not say a word. I looked at her face haloed by the stormy sky and thought, "She is so pretty, so sweet, and so smart. She is always going to be enough." It started to rain and my mother smiled at the biting raindrops before huddling with me under a piece of clear plastic. I was impressed that she had so assuredly seen the rain coming. The memory of being in the back of the truck with her on that sunny, rainy summer day is one of my favorites. I loved and love my mother so much! She was extra beautiful that day with the wind in her hair and the sky in her eyes. I knew then and I know now: My heart was tied to this woman as surely as the Earth is tied to the sun. I'd do without a thousand vacations and after school activities for her, to make her content, to be her daughter... And I guess I did.