I was the “new” girl at Hutchison.  It was a moniker that stayed with me until graduation. I entered in seventh grade whereas so many of the girls had started together in kindergarten.  They formed an impenetrable group fondly known as the Twelve Year Club.

One of my new friends invited me to go with her family to Florida for spring break. Before I was allowed to go I had to meet her parents. This was quite intimidating as they lived in some huge mansion in the fancy old part of town.  They made it quite clear that I had to audition for a spot on the  traveling squad.

I was pretty wowed by the stately old antebellum home in the historic    Garden District.   I was just a simple middle class girl who wanted to fit in.  I didn’t even know how to pretend to fit into this world of eleven foot ceilings, maids in proper uniforms and formal seated dinners.  I got a little tripped up when the maid walked around the table with each serving dish, displaying it to our side.  Was I supposed to grab the spoon and dish out the mashed potatoes myself or would she do it for me?  I think I held my own until confronted with a small bowl of warm water.  What the hell was it?  I stared at it for a couple seconds too long.  I looked around to see what everyone else was doing.  They were sticking their fingers in it.  Go figure.  I did the same.

I thought I had performed reasonably well but I didn’t get a call back.  Oh well.  This was going to be harder than I thought.  Going to a new school is never easy.  Falling into an alien universe is just plain impossible.

When I was accepted to the University of Virginia, I was invited to interview for an Echols Scholarship.  This is not something I have talked much about, because, quite frankly, it did not go all that well.

In order to explain how well it did not go, I have to go back. Way back. Back to ninth grade.  I was a junior cheerleader and was doing whatever junior cheerleaders do at senior basketball games.  The next day some guy called me on the phone and said that he had seen me at the game the night before.  Well of course he had, I was a cheerleader. We probably did some sort of routine during one of the time outs.  

I had never heard of this guy. He was a senior. It was easy enough to check him out. My brother was in his class.  Any normal parents would not have let their freshman daughter go out with a senior, but as we have already established, I did not have normal parents.

I could change the name to protect the innocent, but I won’t.  His name is just too good to change.  Kip.  That was his real name, I kid you not.  Kip.  He was cute. Short, but cute.  He was the vice president of the student council and all around BMOC in a very nerdy/cool sort of way.

Kip was my first real love.  We dated most of my freshman year until April of my sophomore year and then he dumped me for some college girl.  He broke my heart.  

Because Kip went to UVA and I had visited him at school, UVA was always one of my college choices. When I got invited to interview for the Echols Scholarship, I called to let him know what was going on. He was excited for me and offered to entertain me the night before the interview. We had a fun time, getting reacquainted and hanging out with his friends.

The next day I had a full schedule with campus tours, meetings and finally an interview with the selection committee. I was so out of my league. To say I was unprepared was an understatement. I was totally unprepared. And I was ambushed.

I walked into the office and there was a small group of men, maybe three or four, five at the most.  Very sober. Very serious. Very frightening to a young 18 year old girl. And there in their midst was Kip, that son of a bitch.  He could have at least given me a heads up.    

What happened next was a blur.  All except for one question.  The question that caused me to lose the scholarship.  Who’s to say if I would have answered the same had Kip not been sitting three feet from me.  It doesn’t matter.  I blew it.  

You see, Kip was not the only BMOC.  I was something of one myself.  They asked me what I had learned from all my various leadership roles and activities and I said, “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”  

And that was the end of that. 

I am still holding a grudge.  I hope he’s fat and bald.



  

Growing up with a sad mom, a sleep deprived maid and a workaholic  father, we mostly governed ourselves.  I’m not quite sure how we survived our childhood, but we did.  We were unsupervised, unprotected, and undisciplined.  It was unfettered freedom at its best. 

Not just in the general sense that our parents did not hover like helicopters. Not even in the broader sense that  our generation did not wear helmets, or seat belts, or use car seats. We didn’t wear shoes all summer, we played outside until dark, sometimes after. We learned to swim by being thrown into the deep end. We kept track of our own school work. We set an alarm clock and got ourselves up and dressed in the mornings.

When I mean we weren’t supervised, I mean we weren’t supervised.  We trespassed onto neighbors property to fish in their ponds and were brought home by the police.  We were dumped drunk at the back door by our dates.  We dug underground tunnels to connect our forts.  We drove with a coed group of friends to Destin for Spring Break with no pretense of a chaperon. We swung by our knees on an unanchored swing set. We did flips off our boat house roof into the lake. We stood on the seat of our stingray bikes as they sped down our hilly street, crash landing in order to stop.  We played poker, played in the middle of the street, had fake IDs.  We carried our friends’ dog up the tall water slide on our dock and let sent him slide down into the lake. (before you get all PETA on me, he enjoyed it). We shot guns in the back yard. We threw snow balls at cars, sometimes with rocks in the middle. We were driving by the time we were 13, usually making shopping runs for our parents. We were given sips of beer by the neighbor during barbecues. We dove off diving boards before we knew how to swim. When I say we, I mean mostly me and David. (Melisse was well behaved and I looked after her, except she was the one who knocked her tooth out on the side of the pool.)  But we survived with  no broken bones, a couple of chipped teeth, a ruptured spleen, a few stitches here and there.  

Sure, I wish we had been a Norman Rockwell family, but I wouldn’t trade the freedom for anything. It is what shaped my independence, made me self sufficient, gave me the resiliency to stare down this damn disease without blinking. (OK, sometimes I blink). And it’s given me a treasure trove of memories to write about. 

When I was in tenth grade I dated a boy named Jim.  We had a mutual friend named Lane.  We all had houses at Pickwick Lake and one weekend they came over to my house to ski.  

Jim showed up at Lane’s with a T shirt that said, “I Was Born Horny”. Lane suggested to Jim that he at least turn his shirt inside out before coming to my house to meet my dad, but he didn’t see the need. I’m not sure Dad noticed the shirt or if he did, he didn’t say anything.  Dad had a sophomoric sense of humor, so he may have thought it was funny.

Jim, Lane and I took our ski boat out for the day.  Pickwick Lake was formed when the Tennessee Valley Authority damned the Tennessee River in the 1930’s.  It has a lot of old tree stumps in various parts and can be tricky to navigate.  Lane drove while I skied and we hit one of those stumps, knocking a hole in the boat. We somehow made it back home to our dock. Lane was worried about telling his father, Big Ben, what had happened.  We called him Big Ben, but not to his face. My Dad assured him that it would be okay. It could happen to anyone and he offered to go over to Lane’s house to talk to his father and smooth things over.

We piled into our cars and headed over to the Carrick’s. When Mr. Carrick saw all of us, he assumed the worst. He was not happy with my dad for running interference for Lane until he realized that it was our boat, not his, that had the hole in it.  Things got tense for a moment, but once the details were cleared up and Lane was safe, we went home.

I ran into Lane at our 35th high school reunion and we reminisced about that day. Afterwards, when I got back home, I told Dad about seeing Lane. Without missing a beat, he said, “you remember that time his dad jumped down my throat when Lane knocked a hole in our boat.  It really could have happened to anyone.”

And that’s the way my Dad was. He didn’t sweat the small stuff and it was all small stuff.  

My first grade teacher was named Mrs. Schuester.  She was a Yankee from Boston.  She pronounced fine with a long “i”. So I did too.  My mother thought that was funny.  She was older than my mother, so she seemed old to me.  

A hot lunch cost 25 cents back then.  A quarter.  We had fish sticks on Fridays to accommodate the Catholic kids, even though it was a public school.  The Jewish kids got to take their own holidays in addition to the Christian ones. It’s funny how we all used to get along that way.  

One day we were standing in line waiting to march to the cafeteria like a little miniature army battalion.  As an aside, I don’t like putting kids in lines.  They still do that.  I guess it is better that a stampede or a melee, but there is something very prison-like to me about putting little kids in line.

Anyway, we were standing in line waiting to go to the cafeteria. Mrs. Schuester had put two book cases back to back to make sort of an entry way into her class room. They were stuck together somehow, maybe nailed.  I was standing there in that darn line waiting for the rest of the little soldiers to fall into place.  While I was waiting for the others, I rolled my quarter around on the top of the bookshelves.  Oops.  That dang quarter slipped in between those two stuck together bookshelves.  I should have kept my mouth shut and either gone hungry or eaten off of someone else’s plate.  What happened next changed my life forever. For it labeled me.  I am a nuisance.  That is what Mrs. Schuester said when she called the custodian, who had to stop throwing that pink stuff on kids’ vomit long enough to come to our class room to unstick those book cases to get my quarter out.  Why didn’t she just give me a quarter and ask me to bring two the next day?

The first boy who ever tried to kiss me was named Billy Reuben. Who names their kid after a liver enzyme?  He sat in front of me in third grade.  Third grade was a traumatic year for all of us.  Our sweet, young, beautiful Miss Carmichael did the unthinkable.  She got married over Christmas vacation and did not come back.  Mrs. Wilson never had a chance.  I almost feel sorry for her now.

Any way, Billy Reuben tried to kiss me and being totally repulsed at the prospect, I resorted to name calling.   In an effort to save face, Billy replied, “You mean, I am mud spelled backwards?”  That’s what he said, mud spelled backwards.  I didn’t have a come back for that one.  All these years later, I can still see him slowing turning around and uttering some of the stupidest words ever said in the history of the English language, you mean I am mud spelled backwards.  He had no game.  He wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in my house. That’s all I remember about Billy Reuben, other than his liver enzyme name, which didn’t even mean anything to me at the time.  That was way before I started preparing for my liver function test more than I did for my college entrance exams.

Then one day I go to take the GMAT. This is during the days when you dragged your sorry butt up from a late Friday night, made sure you had a number two pencil and you showed up. That’s all you did.  You showed up. It’s a competency test.  I casually looked over at the paper of the guy sitting next to me and whose name do you think I saw on top of that test?  You got it, Mr. liver enzyme himself, Billy Reuben.

ps.  all you literal types, I know Biliruben is not an enzyme.  It’s just fun to call it one.

Before Pearline, there was Lilly.  She was Pearline’s sister and she used to wash my hair in the kitchen sink.  We took her to Pensacola, Florida the year David almost drowned. Some man on the beach saved him. You’d think with three adults to watch him he wouldn’t have almost drowned. Lilly was afraid to go over the bridge into Pensacola, so she hid herself on the floor board of the car.  Lilly had diabetes and couldn’t take care of us anymore, so her sister Pearline started working for my family.  I was five.  

Pearline knows our secrets.  When I left home, I also left Pearline.  She was collateral damage.  Not to say I never saw her again.  It’s just that we were not close the way most people are with their primary caregiver.

Pearline worked at the county hospital when she wasn’t with us.  She came to our house every weekday from 2 o’clock in the afternoon until 10 o’clock at night.  She was there when we got home from school, she did our laundry, made our dinner, did the dishes.  She also drove us around. Then she went home and got five hours of sleep before getting up for her job at the county hospital. She didn’t have any children of her own, but she took care of her nephew.  She used to be married. We were told that she had killed her husband.  If she did kill her husband, he needed killing.  Pearline continued to work for my family until about eight years ago, way beyond the time she could actually clean the house. She used to go upstairs, leave the vacuum running and take a nap on the floor.  Mom and Dad hired younger maids to come clean the house when Pearline wasn’t there, but they didn’t let her know that. Before my mom died, I asked her if Pearline had really killed her husband. She said, “that’s what they say.”   I think she made it up so that we would mind her.

I was a math whiz in high school.  Mrs. Beaumont was our high school math teacher and she is my inspiration.  I can still see her nicotine stained fingers busily writing algebraic equations across the blackboard, chalk in hand.  I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the formulas.  I have the Sloas math gene.  The solutions and the logic were as clear to me as a  hidden picture in a Highlights magazine.  It was almost like cheating.  But I was mesmerized.  Those arms. Those wobbly, saggy, undulating arms.  I can still see them.

We were active kids from the get go. We would go outside to play after breakfast, stop for lunch at whose ever house we happened to be near and come home at the sound of the dinner bell.  Pearline would ring this big ole cow bell and shout “Shahhhh  nahhhhh, Mahhh leeeee ahhhhh” (thats how she said Melisse). We climbed trees, made forts, played tag, jumped rope, rode bikes.  Then we started swimming on a competitive team and we did that five or six times a week.  I wasn’t all that good, but I was right there in the thick of it.

Me at Swim Meet