The True Story of My Life #4 (When I Was A Girl)

My father called me "ornry". Or is it "onry"? He said it with a smile. I asked question after question and wore my parents out. I actually remember a time when I was asking my Dad about the grass. I must have been about 3 years old. I remember asking why it was green. He would give an explanation and my response was "why"? I really wanted to know.

When I was about 4 years old, I was the flower girl at my aunt's wedding. A gentleman to the wedding party bent over to smile at me and say, "What a sweet little girl!" and I responded with, "Mr., did you know there is a pimple on your nose?...righhht there." to which, my father says, the man turned red and stood upright.

I was the same age when I ran to my parents, in the coffeehall after church service, "Lisa hit me!" My parents asked what I did to her first. I said, ferociously, "I BITE her!"

Of course, these are the stories my father likes to remember and tells me about. I must have been sweet sometimes too.

My old friend Shirina's favorite childhood picture of me is the one where I'm at my 6th birthday party and my mother made me a paper crown for my head with the number 6 all the way around it; the camera only captures an angle with three of those sixes: 666. "The Beast!" Shirina shrieked, doubling over in hysterics.

My favorite photo when I was young, is of me in my Bluebird uniform, a little plaid jumper with a button up shirt. I have my nose in the air, and a look of utter self-satisfaction with my lips firmly pressed together. I look like the perfect snob, and far too young to be so self-assured--I'm 7 years old.

When I was a girl, I liked to draw, sing, dress my brother up in girl clothes and paint his nails, play with the puppies, make mud pies and bridges and elaborate tunnels and roads, swim, ride my bike over dirt hills, and explore abandoned houses. I once swindled an elderly neighbor out of his money, but I felt guilty and told him I wasn't really doing a fundraiser, and gave him his money back with an apology. I never told my parents and he kept it a secret. He had been the first person to live on the road out there, a pioneer, and told me some stories.

When I was a little older, I did some serious fundraising for the "jump-rope-a-thon" and got so many sponsors I won the ultimate award: a nylon bell-bottomed sweatsuit I never wore.

I earned some legitimate money by creating a "book order form" modeled after Scholastic Books' book order forms, and sold ideas for original stories on the bus when I was in the 3rd grade. I passed it around and kids could check a box for a book of fiction with a theme already, or a book about them, which I would write, complete with drawings. A lot of kids wanted the book about themselves. They paid me in quarters and dollar bills until my mother asked me where I was getting the money and put a stop to it. Moooom! OTHER kids sell suckers! I tried to argue.

I held a lemonade stand outside our house but writing and selling my original stories was far more profitable.

My first crush was B.J. Moos. I thought he was cool because he was in 1st grade and I was in kindergarten and he had a BeeGee's lunchpail. I gave him some candy hearts for Valentine's Day and he threw me a chocolate egg around Easter. He broke up with me after I defended myself from the boys playing tag-and-capture with a mighty wand of lipgloss. It was bubblegum flavor and John got a taste of it.

I played soccer every recess, on an all-boys team, in the first grade. I loved soccer, until someone convinced me I should hang out with girls instead, and I traded soccer for parading around the playground chanting: "We want GIRLS--NO BOYS ALLOWED! We want GIRLS--NO BOYS ALLOWED!" I remember I heard lots of dirty jokes in the first grade. How did these kids know them? I tried to justify my position and knowledge of sexual matters by arguing "babies come from the BELLY-button." I remember wondering, to myself, how they came out and thought maybe the mouth??? It seemed to be the largest outlet. A rational thought, I knew.

In the second grade, I was fond of twirling on bars and doing backflips off of them. I got a taste of being a leader when other girls asked me to teach them what I knew. I would teach them some tricks and then they'd turn on me, mad because I knew more, or because I was bossy. I decided I didn't like being a leader. I also got some practice in the imaginative arts by pretending to be a nurse at the jungle gym. Kids came to me with their "owies" and I would "heal" them or "fix" them by applying pressure on a different limb until their focus was on something besides the part that had hurt. They'd jump up exclaiming, "It works! It works!" That was my little nurse station. I also ran away from school in the 2nd grade. I didn't want to be there so I took off and when a school teacher spotted me on the sidewalk, walking home, she asked me where I was going. I lied, saying my mom sent a note to have me home, and she let me go. Then I hightailed it across the street, down into the neighborhood and brush, where I thought no one would find me as I made my way home. The police found me I think, and boy was I in trouble. It was a scene out of "Malcolm in the Middle".

When I got into books there was no turning back. My Dad would come home to find me reading, and reading in my room all summer, and say, "Why don't you play outside?" I started carrying a book around on the playground, wandering around with my nose in a book, or sitting under a tree, and I found other bookworm friends, who would hide their novels behind the math books we held upright to conceal our treasure, thinking the teacher had no clue. But it wasn't until 5th grade that my math began to slide.

I could do figures quickly. I was the math champ of sorts for times tables in 3rd grade and then placed at top of my class in the highest math classes and of course, always reading classes. My 3rd grade teacher really pushed and advocated for me to be tested for intelligence, by someone independent, and told my parents she believed I was gifted, but because I never completed homework, I was not admitted to the TAG program. I was never tested. She said she thought so from many things including drawing details, but especially from a play I wrote, complete with sound effects and music. She asked, "What does "dum-dum-dum-dum-dum mean Cameo?" I think she thought I was writing a weird "dumb dumb dumb..." line but it was for the little jingle we use for mysterious anticipation (DUM-da-DUM-DUM-Duuuuuuum!) Anyway. I loved that teacher. Mrs. Rosenow. She was the first teacher I had who said on the first day that she wanted her students to be "creative" or use their "creativity". I remember perking up at that.

Unfortunately, she may have been the last to see any promise in me for awhile, academically. My next teacher was terrible. I wrote a bunch of original patriotic poems, inspired by statements he had on his classroom walls, by our forefathers, and when I let him read them he said I couldn't have written them, that they were too good, and that I plaigerized and it was a crime. I tried to convince him they were really mine, and then he made a concession after he said, "Well, I guess you mispelled this word, so maybe they're yours." At that time, my best friend and saving grace from the class was Katie Fallon. Katie Fallon was interesting. She was in TAG. No one would ever argue she wasn't smart. She liked to talk about God and philosophy under the trees on recess, and we discussed books. She was reading those mature woolly mammoth and cavepeople books though. Her Dad was a doctor-surgeon and her mother was a nurse. She loved the movie "Airplane", which I thought was stupid. She told me how her mom threatened to divorce her Dad if he didn't agree to remodel the house and get rid of the shag carpeting on the walls. Katie worked very hard. She had lots of chores and did ballet. I was jealous of the ballet. I wanted so badly to be in dance! Katie said I would be good at modern or jazz but my parents envisioned a future in nightclubs with a dancing background so I never had lessons but tried to content myself with piano instead.

Then there was 5th grade, when I officially heard girls didn't need to know math. So I figured the geometry I was learning was a bunch of B.S. and I'd never need to use it. I was actually the fastest one at figures up until then, making it a game to finish my homework in record time, accurately. I stopped doing any math and they moved me into the next lower class, where I lost all interest, finding learning to tell time too big of a step down from geometry. The math was lost forever. One problem I always encountered with math was boredom. If the teacher didn't move really fast, I would tune out or zone out, learning the equation quickly and then losing interest while questions were asked and then missing the next piece because I was day-dreaming. Sometimes I just stared at the board and tried to find alternate methods of doing the math, and sometimes did. This whole attitude is what led to my, years later, being in a college pre-algebra math class (after I'd had 2 years in high school), asking the teacher why zero didn't follow the pattern for fractions and couldn't be divided. I was told I was getting into "black holes" and should talk to someone in Calculus. The Calculus I never made it to because I was missing the fundamentals. I still like mathematic theory though, or stories about math people.

After 5th grade, my mother decided to try her hand at homeschooling. It was nice to be so near the fridge, but I hated it because I missed talking in class, and passing notes in class, and being social. So, for 7th grade, we were placed in a private Christian school, Moses Lake Christian School.

In my free time, in addition to other activities listed, I played often with our neighbors, The Springers. They had a house behind my house with a large field and I helped them change sprinklers. We used to snake through the tall grass on our bellies, playing a form of tag; run through the cornfields; slide around and swim in the ditches; make forts and spy on eachother; design barbie clothes; slide on the slip-n-slide; and I remember inventing a lot of games where I was the Queen of Egypt and everyone else was my slave, feeding me grapes and fanning me with grass plumes, as I lounged on a soft mattress of chickweed and dried wheatgrass.

The horses (ours and theirs) put me in my place, bucking me off, running me through the apple tree, and stepping on my toes. I always rode bareback, and hoisted myself on without supervision. Yeehaw!

The other thing I loved, was a treehouse my father built for me and my brother. I loved that treehouse and this is where I sang my songs and did a lot of daydreaming and watched the sunset. I had my alone time in the treehouse. Once, I had a slumber party there, singing my friends to sleep. My parents allowed us to sleep out there once, until someone pooped outside and they knew it wasn't the dogs.