Category: Old Memories

7th Grade Memories

Back when I first entered kindergarten, my mom did mild bit of forgery on my hospital birth certificate to get me into school a year early. So, I was 4 when I started kindergarten, 5 starting 1st grade, 6 at the beginning of 2nd, etc. I was a smarty-pants, so I did pretty well, spending all 7 years of K-6 in the same school.

If you’ve done the math with me, you’ll know I started 7th grade as an 11-year-old. Which wouldn’t be so bad if I’d gone on to the local junior high with my friends. But the summer between 6th and 7th, we moved from Los Angeles County to the San Bernardino Mountains. I would have to start those most agonizing school years, junior high, in a new school where I knew no one. Even worse, the school I would be attending was a diabolical experiment called a “junior-senior” high school (7th through 12th grade). Okay, it wasn’t diabolical. There weren’t enough students for two schools. But still, that was a lot for a nerdette like me to face.

I was positively geekish as an 11-year-old. I wasn’t too great at personal hygiene, knew zilch about makeup, was awkward and a little pudgy. I remember taking a stab at shaving my legs one morning before school, except I only had time to shave one. So I went to school with one hairy and one not.

So, not any kind of popular. Rubbing elbows with a bunch of cruel, haughty 13- and 14-year-old 8th graders was enough of a challenge, let alone those lofty high schoolers.

Luckily, the older ones ignored me as being beyond notice. The teachers adored me, since I was a Good Student. And there were a few students in my age group, the ones who walk with the angels, who were kind to me, even if they weren’t actually friends. A couple of the nicest were cheerleaders, so you can dump that stereotype.

But there were the mean girls, as there always are. They took such delight in embarrassing and belittling me. They were definitely not cheerleaders. There was nothing cheerful about them.

I sometimes wonder what happened to my tormentors. Maybe they married ugly guys and got fat. Maybe they had an epiphany and realized the error of their ways and were nice forevermore. Ah, I can dream.

So, worst high school memory–looking forward for weeks to the field trip to Disneyland, then getting hit with a horrible flu the day we were supposed to go. I went anyway and was miserable the whole time.

Best high school memory–dissecting a mink (long dead and preserved in formaldehyde–and no, today I would never buy/wear an animal fur of any kind). My lab partner and I decided to focus on the skeleton. When it took too long to cut the meat off the bones, I took the leg home to work on it there. Mom got the great idea to boil it on the stove in water. We boiled and boiled without effect until Mom got the idea to add bleach to the water. Extremely dangerous, but boy, did it work. Nothing but bones left after just a minute or so. Don’t try this at home!

Long story short, I was able to reconstruct a beautiful mink leg skeleton model (okay, there were some teeny tiny bones I threw away cuz I didn’t know where they went). My biology teacher was so enamored with the skeletal leg, he confiscated it. 😠 Sigh, all these years later, I still regret that he never gave it back.

December 8, 2022
Memories of Halloweens Past

I loved Halloween as a kid. Spooky decorations. Carving jack-o-lanterns. Dressing up in a costume and going out door to door in the neighborhood.

And candy, candy, candy! After I got home from trick-or-treating, I immediately dumped out my candy on the living room floor and took stock of what I got.

My mom could be pretty creative with the costumes. One year she made my two older sisters matching pumpkin costumes. I don’t know why, but Mom tied them together by the wrist. Maybe she didn’t want them to get lost? One of my sisters told me she was in tears the whole night.

The next Halloween it was my turn to wear the pumpkin costume. Mom stuffed a bunch of newspaper into the big orange bag to make it round like a pumpkin. I remember how scratchy it was to wear. To give you an idea of what it looked like, here’s Gnorm the garden gnome wearing a pumpkin costume.

Pinocchio was one of my favorite books, so another year, Mom made me a Pinocchio costume. It had shorts with suspenders and a white shirt. To make me look like a wooden marionette, Mom wrapped brown Kraft paper around and around my arms and legs. I couldn’t bend my elbows or knees. Not sure how I made it around the neighborhood to trick-or-treat.

As a grownup, I’ve dressed up for the occasional Halloween party. A couple years ago, I attended a horsey Halloween. Those horses were saints considering what they put up with. Hershey, a quarter horse mare, was especially sweet to the kids despite being decorated with fake spider webs.

What are your memories of Halloween? What candy did you always want to see in your trick-or-treat bag? What was the coolest pumpkin you ever carved? I’d love to hear from you how you celebrated (or didn’t celebrate) the holiday. Let me know in the comments.

October 15, 2021
When Life Turns on a Dime

Sometimes life imitates fiction. For instance, you’re tooling along, everything as usual, expecting to grill a couple burgers for dinner, then kick back and watch the ball game And out of the blue, something happens that throws you a curve, all your mundane expectations scattered like pick-up sticks (click here if you’re too young to remember pick-up sticks)

I’ve had that life-off-the-tracks experience a number of times, most recently a week or so ago when a family member was unexpectedly hospitalized (he’s fine).

The ill-fated horse I never bought.

There was another shake up a couple years ago. I broke my ankle moments before I’d planned to leave to check out a horse I was thinking of buying. That break not only stopped me from buying that horse, it kept me from riding for several weeks.

Thirty-five years ago while driving to work, someone turned left directly in front of me. The collision totaled my car and when I slammed on the brake pedal, I fractured my foot (same one I later broke the ankle of). That particular accident led indirectly to me meeting my husband of three-plus decades, so it wasn’t all bad. 😉 But I ended up in the hospital rather than work that day.

When you’re writing a story, you’ll want send your characters into a similar life-off-the-tracks situations right from the beginning. They can start out in an everyday, humdrum experience, but within pages, everything has to change for them. Whether they’re fired from their job or barely escape being flattened by a piano, an inciting incident had better yank them free of their moorings. And their travails have to continue, building in magnitude to keep your reader reading.

I wouldn’t wish a car accident or a broken ankle on anyone. But when it comes to my fictional characters, sometimes a trip to the hospital is just what the doctor ordered. 🙂

August 2, 2015
Near Death, Divine Providence, and Mining the Past

photo credit: DSC03226 via photopin (license)

When I was 12 years old, I nearly died.

At the time, my two older sisters and I lived with our mom in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 2 hours east of Los Angeles. It was Easter Sunday, and we’d gone to visit my grandmother in L.A. for Spring Break. Grandma and Papa had dropped us off at the bus station in downtown L.A., and Mom came to pick us up at the bus depot in San Bernardino.

My mom, God love her, was a terrible driver. She was a lead-foot, not only on the gas, but on the brake as well. She drove “down the hill” (from nearly mile-high Blue Jay to San Berdoo’s thousand foot elevation) screaming around those mountain curves, most likely with her foot on the brake most of the way.

She picked us up at the bus depot, me and my sisters still wearing our Easter dresses. We tucked our luggage and our basket of Easter eggs in the trunk, then Mom headed back up the hill. My older sister Debbie sat in the middle of the car’s bench front seat next to Mom, and I sat next to Debbie by the door. Our oldest sister, Linda, sat behind me in the back seat.

Mom might have used less brake going up, but the brake drum nevertheless got hotter and hotter until about halfway up the hill, the heat actually blew a tire. We pulled into a nice, level turnout and a kind passerby changed the tire for us. The gentleman told my mom she better let the brakes cool before continuing on home. We sat around for what Mom thought was long enough, then pulled out again.

Me, Debbie, & Linda celebrating Linda’s birthday with a Barbie doll cake.

I don’t remember if there was a smell, or Mom could feel the heat through the brake pedal. In any case, she decided to pull over into another turnout and let the brakes cool again.

Except this turnout was sloped. The car started rolling backwards. The brakes were well and truly fried and no amount of stomping on Mom’s part would get that car to stop. The car just kept rolling toward the edge where the mountainside plunged down a couple hundred feet of steep embankment.

For some reason, Mom didn’t think to try the emergency brake. I suppose it might not have worked anyway. She was struggling to put the car into park. When that didn’t work, she jumped out and tried to stop the car with her body. The car knocked her down and partially rolled over her. Not with its full weight because at that point, the rear of the car was already over the edge, so the front end was partially off the ground.

While Mom was fighting to stop the car, Debbie had gotten the passenger side door open and was yelling at me to get out. I remember sitting sideways, my feet hanging out of the car, watching the pavement roll by under my feet. But I was frozen. Debbie couldn’t get me to budge. All the while, Linda kept yelling from the back seat, “I can’t open the door! I can’t open the door!”

We were all about to die. And then a miracle happened.

The car stopped. Linda got her door open, I finally scrambled out of the car with Debbie close on my heels. When we turned back to the car, we realized it had stopped with one front tire hooked to the berm that edged the turnout. That berm wasn’t even a foot high.

Mom was banged up but nothing was broken or needed stitches. We three girls were perfectly fine. The car was towed out of its predicament, and it went on to suffer through more of my mom’s abuse. The Easter eggs ended up rotting in the trunk because we all forgot they were in there, a fact that we girls chortled over for years to come.

Yeah. A miracle. That my mom wasn’t hurt more badly. That we girls didn’t flip right over the edge, none of us seat-belted into that pre-airbag car. That Debbie and I didn’t bail, and the car didn’t flip with Linda trapped inside. All those possibilities make me shudder now.

Oddly enough, as dramatic as this experience was, I’ve never used it in a book. I’ve probably used the fear, the panic, the horror of it without consciously realizing where I might be pulling it from. It became a story that we all found hysterically funny because it did have a happy ending.

In this case, reality was much better than the what-ifs. Thanks to God and miracles.

March 19, 2015
Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide

L-R, my mom, Barbara, and my grandma, Pauline.

January 16th would have been my mom’s 83rd birthday, so my sisters and I were sharing memories of her that day. My mom was a hoot–wacky, creative, and with a great sense of humor. She’s the one who invented our imaginary family friend, Henry, and she introduced all of us to the Tilly Williams Club.

But a common thread in my and my sisters’ reminiscences was Mom’s oft-repeated advice: Let your conscience be your guide.

We all admitted that when Mom said that, we’d always feel a tug of guilt inside. Probably because she knew that we knew what the right decision was to make, even though we really wanted to choose the wrong (easier) path. Mom didn’t judge us for that desire to make things soft for ourselves. “Let your conscience be your guide” was just her way of reminding us to make the moral choice rather than the convenient or self-indulgent choice.

While I was mulling over my memories of Mom, I happened to pick up my old high school yearbook. To my surprise, I found an inscription from my grandmother. I had no memory of her writing in my yearbook. It’s great advice, and such a precious gift to have it written in her own hand.

So many people are generous with advice whether we want it or not. But when counsel comes from someone who we know loves us and wants the best for us, it’s good to pay attention and give it more weight.

What good advice have you gotten over the years, either from your parents/grandparents or friends? Feel free to share in the comments.

January 26, 2015