Thursday 13

My Thirteen Best and Worst Memories of Childhood* * That I'm willing to share The worst 13: 1. Death of my aunt and two cousins in the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980. 2. Saying good-bye to my dad every summer. 3. Learning my young niece had been raped. I guess I was 19 when this happened, but it feels like a childhood trauma just the same. 4. Flying down to San Francisco one Christmas when I was, oh, 10 or so. I got queasy and, even after a couple of increasingly frantic trips up and down the length of the plane, all of the toilets were occupied. I tossed my cookies right there in the aisle. I was mortified and still feel huge sympathy for the flight attendants and all the poor people who were sitting near there. Maybe someday I'll work up some sympathy for that poor 10yo. 5. When my best friend pulled away from me in high school because her boyfriend was jealous of the time she spent with me. 6. Coming home to find my (first) stepfather had taken my Irish Setter—a stray I'd adopted and really connected with—to the pound. 7. The drunken melodrama that occurred between some of the adults at my graduation party. 8. Getting in trouble for staying with the neighbor boy I was babysitting even after his dad came home. He had begged me to stay until his mom returned so he wouldn't have to be alone with his dad. Being forced to leave him... Phew! Still hurts. 9. Getting kicked out of choir for chewing gum in the fourth grade. I'd never been in trouble at school before and found it utterly devastating. 10. Getting sent to detention in middle school for letting a cat into the cafeteria. I wasn't any better at handling being in trouble by then. 11. When someone left a note in my locker in middle school that accused me of thinking I was "King Shit." Even at the time I was as puzzled by that as I was hurt by it. How could a girl be a king? And how could someone so self-conscious and desperate to belong think she was king of anything? 12. The trauma (no joke) of getting a B in Physics, second semester of my senior year. This was compounded by my counselor pulling me out of PE class when he learned about it. Instead of expressing concern and asking what was going on with me (because something had to be going on with me for me to get a B), all he could talk about was how I'd made his life difficult because he'd already told the principal there would be three 4.0 students at graduation and couldn't I please do better? 13. Getting spanked. I don't know if I remember every time it happened, but I remember a few times vividly. The best 13: 1. My mother scratching my back at bedtime. 2. Crashing our car into my stepfather's cop car. I didn't do it on purpose and I felt bad at the time, but the memory has sweetened with time. 3. Receiving a HUGE box full of dozens of Christmas gifts from our new grandparents in Nebraska. 4. Christmases in general. My mom really made them shine. Stockings. 12 days of Christmas gifts. Lights and angel hair on the mantel. 5. Halloweens and scavenger hunts. Anything that got us out running the streets in the dark. 6. Traveling with my dad. 7. Weekends with Cherie/going to the ballet. 8. Sitting next to my cousin Dave at graduation. He made it really fun (B or no B). 9. Crawlstrokes! (This was the code word for guys' buns. It's a long story.) 10. Dancing at Studio 59, a teen club in Everett where we had many adventures. 11. My friendship with my sister/running loose in San Diego. 12. Learning to SCUBA dive. 13. Playing in the woods near our house/making Matchbox highway systems in the gravel out front/playing Barbies. I need more than 13 for this one. :-)

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