Back to my future

 

We made the traditional Christmas break move so that I could start eighth grade in my new school at the beginning of a semester. I was so hopeful about re-establishing old friendships, but two years is a long time for  thirteen year olds.

My grandfather had remodeled the Douglas Street house after we moved. The kitchen was completely different! There was a modern corner sink shaped like two triangles and a dishwasher! The back yard had been sold off and someone had built a whole house there! 

I got the front bedroom this time and my dad said I could paint it to match my grandmother's kitchen, bright reddish orange!  My mother dyed a pair of old polyester curtains brown and somehow they came out a gorgeous brown with gold lines running through them because the dye didn't really take. My grandfather gave me his clock with a blue luminescent face and a space capsule orbiting around as the second hand. My mother let each one of us have a book of green stamps and I used mine to get a black metal bookshelf with brass legs. It felt very modern and gave me room for all my books. Add my desk and a dresser repainted from Kelly green to white and I loved this room

My sister got my old room and mom painted what had once been mustard yellow to purple, but since she didn't have purple, she added red and blue food coloring to white paint. The walls were definitely purple, but they also had tiny little red and blue dots all over them. My brothers shared a room and nobody cared what color it was. I don't even remember it now.

I walked to school with my old friend Kathy. She had learned to sew and now made all her own dresses. They were beautiful shirtwaists which were all the style right then and because they saved her parents money she was allowed to buy Capezio pumps to match the color of each one. I pretended I didn't care, but I wore black cheap pumps that had a hole in the bottom from all that walking. I just learned to keep my feet flat on the floor and no one noticed.

However I also wore many of my grandmother's hand me down clothes. I didn't mind. Grandma was a petite classy woman and I loved most of her clothes, but my mother used to try and get fancy once in a while. Sometimes that was cool, like a collar that could button down over any sweater to dress it up. It was the time she tried to make me a matching skirt and blouse set that really backfired. You could see where she had taken the stitching out of the blouse. There were miniscule holes that left no doubt something else had been there and when I walked into art class, a girl named Lana looked at me and said, "Your mother made that outfit! I can tell. It shows. Then she sneered. "You gotta wear hand me downs!" Even though she was a girl no one cared much for, it was the first time I felt ashamed of my clothes. Top that off with the brown hounds tooth winter coat that my mom's friend had given her and I started to become more and more self conscious.

But mostly I loved eighth grade. I was now learning to play the oboe, another instrument chosen by my mother because she had played it in high school. I made a clay head in art class that was supposed to be emerald green and look like the boy I had a crush on. The general consensus was that it looked like a moldy neanderthal, but to me it was art. I ate a ham salad sandwich and drank chocolate milk every day for lunch because I loved it and it saved enough money for me to buy a much coveted 45 rpm record at the record store where you could go into little booths and listen to records if you thought you might buy them.  We listened more than we bought. The Beatles were in and I loved George.

That year my mother bought me my first pair of high heeled shoes. They were spiked and very fashionable  even if they were only an inch and a half high. I slept on huge brush rollers at night so my hair would be as close to a bouffant as I could get it and I had tiny little velvet bows that clipped right into the middle of the top. My mother used  some of her green stamps to get a hair dryer! What a novelty that was with its plastic cap and hose. Now we could wash our hair and dry it right away, or in about an hour. I used Ten O Six to keep my face from breaking out when we could afford it and I was right on the cusp between playgrounds and parties.

November 22, 1963. I was home sick from school when Kennedy was shot. I remember my mom and aunt crying, but it just felt unreal to me. Then, on my fourteenth birthday he was buried. It was all that was on television and no one was really interested in my birthday at all. I was a little hurt by that, but I understood.

My grandfather was a big Republican and he had a warehouse full of Goldwater in 1964. My mother glued big  sparkly eyed elephants on either side of Uncle Ralph's wheel barrel and filled it with cans of Goldwater. We had to go door to door trying to sell it. I cannot tell you all the ear-fulls I got doing this.

In ninth grade I went to my first dance. It was the school's end of year dance and the twist was all the rage back then. I felt very beautiful when I looked in the big mirror over our buffet and commented, "I look pretty!" to my mother. She promptly replied, "You aren't pretty if you think so." That made me feel terrible.

In ninth grade I was also invited to plan an Invite. An invite was like a coming out party given by a group of girls who spent a year raising money with bake sales, auditioning live bands and checking out hotel ball rooms. We sent out very formal invitations to our friends and our parent's friends that said Mr. and Mrs. So and So announced the presentation of  their daughter, (name), escorted by (name), son of . . .  I wore an emerald green velvet gown that my mother and Aunt Lou made, with matching green satin shoes, long formal white gloves, a pearl evening bag and had my hair done at the salon. Our theme was In the still of the night and we had tiny dance cards with tassels that said this as well as beautiful bouquets to match our dresses. An emcee announced each one of us with great pomp, one at a time, while we walked down the aisle and up to the stage. These things were all the rage in Springfield and it signaled that I was old enough to date, which actually I wasn't, but since Shawn and I were both fifteen and neither of us could drive we were allowed to "date" because his father would have to drive us. It turns out that our parents actually knew each other when we were infants. They would put us in a playpen together and the story was that Shawn was nine months older than me, but I always took his bottle and made him cry.

One day when we were all in the elementary schoolyard playing baseball, a sharp little Triumph TR4 pulled up to the fence. It was bright shiny red and had a black convertible top. When the door opened, Shawn got out! He said my mother told him it was okay if I went for a ride in his new car. I felt like Hollywood royalty that day!

I dated Shawn off and on up through my freshman year in college. I guess he assumed we would get married. I never even considered it. To me he was just a friend who liked to make out, which I didn't. It didn't help that my new best friend, Barb McClelland hated him. She referred to him as that red headed leprechaun. He was terribly smart, the youngest computer programmer in Springfield when he was a junior in high school and his hair was more strawberry blonde than red. He had an in-ground pool with a dome that inflated over it so we could swim all year long and he taught me how to scuba dive in that pool. I liked him. I dated him. I just didn't love him.

High school started when I was a sophomore. I switched from French to German and band to orchestra. I was in what they called tracked classes which is where I met Barb, my new best friend, and a lot of our work was independent research culminating in term papers and long speeches in front of the class. I was busy. Physical education classes were every other day at seven in the morning. I had no study halls and after school I took Driver's Ed my sophomore year, so I got home around 7:30 P.M.  Kathy, my best friend since fourth grade, and I rode to school in her Dad's station wagon, but we often walked the two miles home after school when I didn't have to do something else. 

On Tuesday I had candy striping and there were various other things on other days. Candy striping was something I did, not because I wanted to be a nurse, but because I thought I wanted to be a nun. I fell in love with Sister Eunice at the convent during candy striper parties and picnics.. She played guitar and led us in singing folk songs. The candy striping itself was sometimes tense. One day I was given a woman in a wheel chair by Sister Gerard and told to take her from Emergency to the surgery floor. Alone. Half her face was gone and there was a beaker taped there to catch the blood oozing down. Another time I had to go through the hospital basement and up a dark hallway to an elevator that opened to a back door. There I let in the ambulance people and unlocked the door to the morgue for them. There were stainless steel coolers on stretcher wheels in there and I had to open each one and read the tag tied to the waxy looking toe of the dead person until we found the right one. Then I rode back up with them and let them out. Riding nose to toe with a corpse in a tight elevator was unsettling. I spent hours studying the Catholic saints during this period of my life, dreaming of living with the sisters in a castle like convent and spending my life singing folk songs. Then Sister Eunice died of TB because she worked in the sanatorium and my enthusiasm gradually faded away. 

After Driver's Ed my mother let me drive our family's Vista Cruiser station wagon with her for practice. I loved to drive by the house of a boy I had a crush on, just in case he might be visible. He never was, but on Christmas Eve she let me drive with her to go buy a carton of Cokes and as I passed his house I clipped the bumper of his family's classic car! It completely crumpled the right front of our car and ruined the only snow tire my dad had managed to get on it so far. It put an almost invisible tiny scratch on the bumper of their car, but his dad, who was a lawyer (and had been drinking) came rushing out screaming and yelling at me. I was in shock. I don't remember how we went home. I went straight to my room. I was so scared and upset, but no one ever said one word to me about that accident! I guess they knew they didn't have to. I wouldn't drive at all for nearly a year.

I had Miss Fogarty for English in my junior year. She made us memorize big pieces of Hamlet and Macbeth and after she graded our themes we had to rewrite them in ink with no mistakes. Nothing says mistake more than me trying not to make one. I can't tell you how many times I rewrote some of those papers. Miss Fogarty was old. I studied my dad's old Crib Notes for one of her tests, the ones he had from the 1940's and her questions came right out of them! Sometimes she would get confused and say, "When I had your brother Harold in my class," and I would remind her he was my father not my brother.

One time a girl dating one of the Hell's Angels got in trouble and in retaliation they rode through our school on their motorcycles! Then there were the bomb scares when we had to evacuate the building. Times were changing. I remember two girls whose parents were in the military got into a fight in our cafeteria and one of them ripped the other's earring right out of her ear. There was so much blood! 

But most of my life was peaceful. I took my ACT test and all the other tests, usually with Shawn and I went to the show with my girl friends, things like Spartacus or West Side Story. Sometimes I rode the bus downtown to have lunch and shop with Kathy, or stayed overnight with Barb to study for tests. I played records and sang a long with them, read Teen magazines and on Sundays usually went with my siblings to have lunch with our grandfather at his restaurant. 

My sister and I worked for him for two weeks right after my sophomore year. He was in Washington D.C. with his friend, Everett Dirksen, so we held down the office. All we really did was answer the phone, go eat lunch at the restaurant and type up one contract. I guess he wasn't satisfied with something we did because when I asked if I could do it again the next summer so I could earn money to go on the senior trip to Washington, he said no. I never understood exactly why and I didn't get to go on the trip.

At the end of every year from eighth grade through my junior year in high school I played in the band for the Springfield High School Graduation ceremony in the Armory. That was where we had all our basketball games too, because the school auditorium was just not big enough. My junior year the school bought the old Orpheum theater organ and installed it in the auditorium. I was asked to take lessons on it my senior year. 

But it was not to be. The summer before my senior year my parents rented a house in Taylorville, Illinois. It was where I was born and it was my mother's hometown. She was going to go to work for her mother since Dad's job as a Title 3 Science person was a political appointment and Ray Page lost the election. Dad was going to try and get back into teaching.