5 Memories

These memories are supposed to be from before I got married, right? That was a long time ago, but OK.

One: My father was stationed at Kindley AFB in Bermuda, and I went to school there from 1st grade to 3rd grade. Before I started school, I chatted with my friends about who our teachers would be and we were all excited to go to school like our older siblings. My Mom walked me down to the bus stop, but the bus took a long time to get there, so she went back to check on my little brother and sister. In the meantime, the bus came and I got on, hoping it was the right bus. My mother came back to make sure I got on the bus and when she saw I was gone, she called my Dad and asked him to check and make sure I got to school ok. When I got to school, a lady read my name tag and told me to get in line "over there". So I got in the line she indicated. My friend was in the line next to me and we knew we were supposed to be in the same class. I thought she was in the wrong line and she thought I was in the wrong line. We got to class and did some preliminaries and then the teacher took roll. She asked if there was anyone who's name she didn't call and I raised my hand. As she was trying to figure out where I was supposed to be, my Dad and the base commander (I think) walked in the classroom door. When they hadn't been able to find me in my class they were afraid something awful had happened. I was happy to see my Dad and didn't realize that they had panicked somewhat until Mom told me "the rest of the story" Anyway, that was my first day of school.

Two: This one also has to do with school in Bermuda. My older sister, Faye, was learning how to use quotation marks in school. She was a fourth grader and I was in first grade. I thought quotation marks were really cool, so the next day as we were doing adding and subtracting, I put quotation marks around all of my numbers. I was so happy to be able to use quotation marks! When I got my paper back, graded, there was a big, red F on the paper and all of those quotation marks were circled. The teacher, (whose name was Mrs. Sherman and she must have been old and ready to retire, with no sense of humor left) was disgusted that I had put those on my paper. Well, it was the first F I ever received and I just knew I was going to fail first grade because of that, so I cried for the rest of the day. When I got home and showed the paper to my Mom, she laughed and told me not to use quotation marks anymore and Faye told me I was stupid.

Three: I have a lot of memories from Bermuda. We lived at one time, in a two story yellow house. We occupied only the top story. The bottom story was some kind of storage place. There was a balcony that we could play on. It was a cool house. There was a banana grove across the street, which I was deathly afraid of because my brother told me there were spiders as big as your hand in there. Anyway, when our parents would go out of an evening and leave us kids at home, my older brother and sisters came up with cool games, which I only got to be involved in because I threatened to "tell" if they didn't let me play. We played "Murder in the Dark" and other scary games. Then my brother devised a really fun game. We took a white sock and fashioned it into a kind of ghost effigy thing. We put some twine around its neck. Our house was close to the street and we had a window overlooking the street. My job was to watch for cars that turned down our street and say "Victim!" Then my brother and sister would fling this ghost thing out of the window at hopefully the right time to land in front of the windshield of the driver and scare the pants off of them. Did we think we might be doing something dangerous? NO. We just thought it was fun to scare people. We made a couple of cars swerve and had great fun. We play the game a few times until we threw the ghost out in front of my Dad. He was really mad, we all got spanked and that was the end of the ghost game.

Four: The summer after 7th grade in Houston, Texas was probably one of the funnest. I had a new best friend, Frances Campbell. I still keep in touch with her. One time, we went bike riding round to see who we could see. Frances wanted to take a shortcut, so she took me over to a catwalk that spanned a canal. Well, I am afraid of heights, always have been. The catwalk was only about three feet wide. Frances just rode her bike right across it, turned around and said "Well, come on." I told her no way. She called me a scaredy cat and I agreed. There were other kids there too that we didn't know and they were running back and forth on that catwalk, not at all concerned that if they fell, they would fall about 30 feet.. There was no water in the canal. So, Frances left her bike on the other side, walked back across the catwalk and rode my bike across and I crawled on my hands and knees across. That was really scary. The summer after 7th grade was when we saw the Osmonds in concert there in Houston. Frances and I would talk for hours and hours about all sorts of things.

Five: The summer after 10th grade, I went to Houston to visit Frances. We had moved to Mississippi. Frances and her Mom were going to Mexico to visit relatives and they invited me to come along. My first trip that I can remember to a foreign country. We drove to Monterrey, where her relatives live. They were all so very nice and she had a cute cousin. Frances' Mom decided she wanted to go to Guadalajara. The three of us, plus two of her cousins made the trip. To get from Monterrey to Gudalajara, you have to drive over the mountains. We were beginning to come down the other side of the mountains when the car broke down. This was a road less traveled and there was not much traffic. And this was way before the days of cell phones. A truck came by and he gave us a lift back to the nearest town and we were going to stay the night there, but there were only two motels and they were both full. Frances's Mom had us get on a bus that was heading back toward the car and the bus dropped us back at the car and we stayed the night in the car. It was raining and we could hear rocks falling. When lightening would flash, we could see this huge boulder and we just knew it was going to come tumbling down that mountain and smash us. Well, we made it through the night and when dawn broke, we saw that the huge boulder was actually a big bush, so we felt a bit foolish. A truck came by and I think Frances's Mom rode with him to get a tow truck. We stayed with the car and amused ourselves by clearing the road of all of the rocks that had fallen down during the night. We finally got the car fixed and the mechanic's wife made us something to eat. That was one of the best meals I ever ate.