October 20, 2003

• Chapter Four – Coming of Age (cont.) (story begins 9/8)

  
  

  At 14, in the summer of my sophomore year, I began to date a boy a year older than I, who would become my first – and only – husband four years later. Our first date was a double date out of town to a swimming pool that had a giant slide. Making a great first impression, I climbed the ladder to the top of the slide where I cowered for half an hour before climbing back down the ladder. From a solid town family, his father being a very successful attorney, he had aspirations to go on to college and the intelligence to succeed when he got there. Tall, gangly, awkward, good, he fell in love with me with no idea how far we would be from our home town when I abandoned him after ten years of journeying together. He wasn’t the football captain or the softball hero, but he was on the basketball team and he was well liked. I wore his class ring, as well as saddle oxfords, pleated plaid skirts, blouses with dickie collars, and a short bob.

  
  

  It was the ’50′s, and I went to school in a different part of town from junior high, in an even bigger newer building. We girls all resembled Olivia Newton-John in Grease. We sat on hard bleachers wearing royal blue uniforms with a big gold bulldog dead center and waved pompoms, having no idea what the plans were out there on the field of dreams. We danced in formal gowns at proms and bent backwards over young men’s arms until our permed hair almost touched the floor. (to be continued)
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  Deep Thought: Many people think that history is a dull subject. Dull? Is it “dull” that Jesse James once got bitten on the forehead by an ant, and at first it didn’t seem like anything, but then the bite got worse and worse, so he went to a doctor in town, and the secretary told him to wait, so he sat down and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, and then finally he got to see the doctor, and the doctor put some salve on it? You call that dull?

  • 10:01 am
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