Sink or Swim... or Get Eaten

In 2005, Lynnea and I were quite possibly the two most fascinating girls in the world. Or at least in our group of friends.... which consisted of boys... and us.

After I graduated from Westmont and returned home, I did what all college graduates do: I found a job that required hardly any of my schooling or qualifications, and played with my friends every conscious hour that wasn't spent actively in the workforce. I became an aide at a preschool, even though I had enough units to be a teacher (which could have gotten me $2.50 more an hour, but what did I know?); this meant that I got thrown up on, peed on, pooped on, I wiped man-sized boogers off tiny faces, and cleaned up toddler-generated messes in an infinite cycle. But I digress.

Being twenty-two or twenty-three years old yielded my friends and me a super power that if I'd realized I had at the time, I would have appreciated it more emphatically: we could get up at the butt crack of dawn, work an eight or nine hour day, and proceed to engage in countless extra curricular activities until we couldn't hold our eyes open and felt like collapsing. Then we'd start over again the next day. Our main group during this time consisted of four boys who lived together: Mark, Justin, JJ, and Andrew; and Jon, Lynnea, and me.

Lynnea and I had been friends since high school. I first remember meeting her at youth group, when we were both in the 8th Grade Girls small group, then shared a cabin at Hume Lake the same summer. She'd attended Atascadero schools, like everyone else, and I was the lone Templeton kid. It was akin to being a homeschooler as far as the A-town contingent was concerned. Nae was nice to me back then, and I remembered that later, when our mutual group of friends brought us together again.

By college, we'd realized how incredibly alike we were. We had the same sarcastic, biting sense of humor (which was very hard to find in the church college group girls... very hard), we could be around each other every waking moment without driving each other insane, and we didn't like to sit still for too long. To each other, we were the sisters neither of us actually had. The rest of our friends were always boys, because in general we enjoyed doing more active and extreme things than most of the other girls we knew. We rock climbed, skate boarded, biked, played dune tag, hiked mountains in the pitch dark, explored old mining shafts, broke into a dilapidated and fenced off insane asylum... and surfed.

I bought an old longboard from a friend for $5 (he just needed lunch money that day), and Nae ordered a custom-made board from CCS that featured her signature purple swirled into it. I purchased myself a used wetsuit I'd seen in the classifieds that took exactly an hour and half to squish myself into. Once it was on I experienced a perpetually-being-strangled-feeling and I couldn't move my arms. But at least I was a fraction of a degree warmer whenever I plunged into the Pacific. Nae even traded in her purple Toyota Tercel for a small Nissan pick-up truck... for the sole purpose of transporting our surfboards.

Our goal was simple. Once we got the hang of things, we would graduate from our plank-like long boards to a couple of sleek, sharp-nosed short boards that, under our precise guidance, would slice through the water like perfectly placed arrows. Were we slightly delusional due to our obsession with a popular film from 2002, Blue Crush? Maybe. Who doesn't want to have a career as a hotel maid, as long as you get to live on the North Shore of Oahu and moonlight as a professional, sponsored surfer girl?

This fantasy led to our decision that we needed to train. How could girls like us, with noodles for arms and eight-foot-long surfboards to maneuver, ever survive two hours of paddling out, let alone an entire Vans Triple Crown competition? We'd already mastered the "pop-up" and could actually get up fairly consistently, as long as the waves were no bigger than approximately two and a half feet.

We both had boogie boards and hypothesized that paddling around on them for a few hours every weekend would build the upper body strength required to become bona fide surfing phenoms.

That's where this story of terror begins.

We chose our surf spots based on the food selection in close proximity... Splash Café, a favorite of both of ours, was right up the street from Pismo Pier. So that's where we began our training. Neither of us had ever had a problem with the ocean. We loved playing in it as kids, and as big kids/young adults, we had the ability to swim or paddle out to imposing depths without hesitation. This particular day, we sloshed through the shallow white water, jumped onto our boogie boards, and began paddling out to the decent sized waves. We rode waves in, paddled out, rode them in, paddled out. Sure, we were getting tired, but we had our futures as Billabong Girls to think about. We'd probably been out for less than an hour when we both saw a giant shadow streak through the wave forming right next to us.

Let me clarify something here. In the summer of 2003, SLO county suffered the only shark attack from my lifetime that I remember hearing about. It involved a twelve to eighteen foot great white, a woman who routinely swam laps in Avila Beach's calm waters, and it was fatal. Lynnea, Jon and I immediately rented Jaws and proceeded to be bored out of our minds watching it (our memories had failed to remind us that Jaws is story-driven, and the lack of bloody action did nothing to quench our presently morbid fascination with shark attacks). Needless to say, the attack had happened a couple years prior, and no others had occurred. So the two of us had no qualms about plunging into the water mere miles away from the attack site.

Despite this lack of fear, I assume I don't have to explain exactly where our minds jumped when we saw an immense, fish-shaped shadow whiz past us, our puny, weak, seal-costumed human bodies becoming glaringly apparent.

One of us may have yelled "SHARK!!!", but that might have been my own thoughts pounding loudly against my skull. I also may have said (trying desperately not to become hysterical), "It's probably a dolphin! Is it a dolphin?!" All I know is that the second time the shadow shot past us, we abandoned any pretense of bravery and instantly began flailing in the water, attempting to "swim" back to shore with all our limbs in tact and no blood loss.

Nae was an accomplished swimmer in high school, and much shorter than I. Logically, I knew that if the shark got anywhere near us, the long legs hanging off my sluggish body would be the first morsels to be devoured. We kicked urgently and propelled our hands into the sea, digging in and pushing desperately against the water's resistance, our hearts punching our ribcages so hard that all sea life on the West Coast could probably hear them.

All at once, we realized after less than a minute (that seemed like hours) of swimming as fast as we possibly could, we had hardly moved any closer to to the beach. Hysteria set in and we started howling with frantic laughter, knowing that we could both die at any moment. As we tried not to suck down ocean water, gasping for breath between panic stricken guffaws, we slowly but surely doggie paddled back to shore. Adrenalin pumping through my veins, I spastically spun on my heel to survey the water. I wanted to see if our "buddy" was still visible. Then I saw it: the friendly, curved, gray fin, along with a gust of moist air being forced through a blow hole. "SHARKS DON'T HAVE BLOWHOLES!!" I screamed triumphantly. As our delirious laughter continued, a real surfer trudged through the sand toward us, holding his short board in the crook of his elbow. Looking at us with tremendous concern, he inquired, "Dude, did you guys see the shark?!?"

Nae and I just turned to each other and giggled as he walked away, our hearts still regulating themselves back to a normal rhythm. "Want to get some chowder?"

The Reunion - Part Two

Ahhh, Facebook... the double-edged sword.

Some days it is the bane of my existence. Friend requests from people I hardly talked to in high school, some I may have met once through a mutual friend, and occasionally even a person I have truly never met in my entire life. Status updates such as "I am now at home" (neat), "Little Timmy finally pooped in the big boy potty!" (gross), or "Oh no you didn't just say that to me." (how passive aggressive)... it's to be expected from teenagers, and even the early-twenties crowd, they feel entitled to have their voices heard. But those of us pushing thirty, and up: No one cares. No one. 

Then there's the positive side: being a part of friends' lives who have moved to different states, following pictures of rapidly growing babies and children, having things to talk about with real friends you haven't seen lately and the ability to still feel connected. And there's always the possibility of a reconnection.

That brings us back to Jasmine, Erin, and me. Jasmine had been a professional dancer, traveled the world, and lived in the Pacific Northwest before making her way back to her hometown; Erin spent years in the Bay Area after graduating from Cal Poly before migrating home; I had moved home after graduating college in Santa Barbara, gotten married, taught elementary school for a couple years, and had a baby. We had all come from, and were currently in, very different places in life. But one day, soon after Erin had moved back to SLO, she sent out a Facebook message suggesting a get together. A very casual coffee date.

At that time, Jasmine and I had practically been neighbors for over a year, but due to very different lives, and settling into our niche with the hometown friends we'd already connected with, we simply hadn't made plans together. I would literally pass her house several times a week, pushing my jogger and occasionally waving as she cruised by in her car, or honking as I rolled by her adorable white farmhouse on Santa Rita Road.

Erin returned to SLO county and was ready to mingle, and she is one to make things happen. She got us off our complacent butts and we committed to a coffee date. I was more than a little nervous. I was the only married one, and also had a just-turned-one year old daughter. Some people truly don't know what to talk about unless they are in the exact same life stage, and I was ready to let the other two talk about their fabulous young, "single" lives without boring them with my mommy stories. An even worse theory went through my brain as well: What if we have nothing to say to each other? Thank God for Kealani, the one-year-old circus act... if nothing else we could just watch her be herself, which can entertain even the most anti-kid Scrooges for hours.

On St. Patrick's Day in 2010, the three of us, plus Kealani, met up at Amsterdam Coffee in Paso Robles (now one of my all time favorite places to relax and chat with friends). The hesitation that we (but maybe just I) had felt almost instantly melted away as we began to catch up on each others' lives. Boy, had we missed a lot. The fear of living too different a life from the other two faded as conversations that included three unique perspectives commenced, and our time together passed as quickly as a midnight train. When Kealani's dinner and bedtime crept up and we had to part ways, we dragged our feet, not wanting the reuniting to end. The three of us decided that we needed to make meetings a regular affair. Especially since our ten year high school reunion was quickly approaching (the subject of which may or may not have been 50% of our conversation that particular night) and we needed moral support from each other in order to even consider attending.

What began as a leap into the unknown - meeting old friends I'd known well at one time, being unsure that there would be any common thread holding us together anymore - resulted in the cultivation of two of the best friendships I could have ever imagined obtaining. The three of us are basically the same people we were in high school, minus the naivete, lack of self confidence, false wisdom, and acne (most of the time). We share a very similar sense of humor, basically the same view on relationships, and we each bring a sense of worldliness and experience to the table, due to travels and heartbreaks chalked up over the last ten years. There are times it feels like those ten years never passed, and that we didn't live completely separate lives for a whole decade. But some of the best dishing sessions include stories from that decade. Stories that we weren't together for, or even around to hear about. I think years will be spent catching up on the rest of those untold stories. In the meantime, we're authoring new stories, in which the moral is this: Some friendships are meant to last forever.

(Days before our class reunion last summer we got together and sat in Jasmine's living room in our pjs, grazing on Trader Joe's snacks and sipping wine while we browsed old yearbooks... Inserted here will be the message I wrote in Jasmine's 2000 yearbook at the end of our Senior Year... Currently that book is in a box somewhere.)

The Reunion - Part One

The three of us were in the same third grade class at Templeton Elementary School: Mrs. Hatfield's.

Jasmine and I noticed one morning that we had the same pair of K-mart black corduroy slip-on shoes on our feet. From across the classroom, we made eye contact, pointed at our shared fashion-forward statements, grinned, and one of us mouthed to the other, "Want to play at recess?!?" What followed was the blossoming of a tried and true friendship that included sleepovers, "scary" movies (Young Frankenstein, Clue, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein may not be found in the Horror section, but Psycho sure scared the bajeezus out of us), pool days, creating and performing plays and dance numbers, wearing our faded TES shirts and black pants on Fridays as we stood in line for our once-a-week Hot Lunch (burgers and fries with chocolate milk), binder organizing nights, mystery parties, the Older Sisters of Little Brothers Club, borderline certifiably insane boy-craziness, and our very own secret meeting place: Terabithia (a tree at the edge of Jasmine's property). Jasmine was an incredible dancer, and despite my own hesitation to become involved in a practice-every-day-of-the-week activity just yet, she took it upon herself to teach me some moves and choreograph routines that I could actually handle.

Erin and I shared our third-grade crush: Roy. This may have made us rivals of sorts at first, but I think we were ahead of our time, letting no man come between us strong, independent women. Many recesses were spent together (with Jasmine) sitting on the school's front lawn, where the old bell sat tempting countless eleven-and-unders to slip their hand under its dome and "discreetly" bang away on it before a yard duty could blow her screeching whistle at them. We spent time picking the red berries off the bushes in front of the office, and most likely talking about Roy's beautiful brown eyes. I remember lounging in Erin's bedroom, stroking her fluffy red cat, Sally, and making calls on her fabulous juicy-red-lip shaped telephone. Erin's dad reminded me of my own: a super cool rockstar with a goofy sense of humor, who had an enviable relationship with his daddy's girl. One night he showed me his record album of Alice Cooper and unknowingly introduced me to the mystery of guy-liner.

The eight-year-olds who became friends in third grade slowly but surely grew into adolescents. Berry picking and binder organizing transitioned into shopping trips to San Luis and lunches at Fresh Choice. Simple crushes were remodeled into infatuations-of-the-week and covert missions as we stalked boys around the gym each time a school dance was put on. Gone were the innocent days of being young girls, only to be replaced by the horror of cliques, glasses, braces, leg-shaving, self-chopped bangs, and more drama than we ever thought possible. Somehow we survived, and our friendships were still in tact. Bonus!

Finally, we entered high school, where the beginning stages of figuring out who we were began. At our small school, we all remained friends, while preserving other friendships we'd enjoyed since our elementary days, and accumulating new ones to add to our directory... depending on what activities we involved ourselves in and what classes we took. Many of my new friends were on my sports teams, but this didn't detract from my loyalties. Plenty of weekends were still spent at Jasmine's house, confiding anything and everything to each other, and I would forever have respect for Erin because of her amazingly sarcastic/genius sense of humor (my favorite) and the fact that she never compromised who she was just to be "cool".

Plenty of people who graduated from Templeton High School have a catch phrase: "Templeton's so small, we don't really have cliques."

Well... if "sporty", "brainy", "artsy", "druggie", and "girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else" sound like cliques to you, then THS had cliques. Lucky for most of us, the size of our class did make it easier to cross the barriers, and most students were identified with more than one of those groups. We'd all known each other for so long that we could still conduct decent, civil conversations with the Others. To say there were no cliques at all would be far too naive, though. I'm sure there are plenty of individuals from the class of 2000 out there who would consider their time in high school a special kind of hell.

Jasmine, Erin, and I considered ourselves "drifters", meaning we had cohorts in several different areas and got along just fine with all of them. The only one we avoided were the girls-who-think-they're-better-than-everyone-else. We simply mocked them behind their backs (some things never change... more on that in a later post: Class of 2000 Ten-Year Reunion suckas!!!)

The time came for everyone to go their separate ways. Our class was the first in a long while to have a high percentage of graduates to not only attend college, but go off in various directions. As is common, we lost close touch with those we had been closest to for so many years. New towns, new living arrangements, new roommates, new friends, new boys, and new lifestyles were distractions that made keeping up with our oldest friends more difficult than ever imagined. Occasional e-mails, even less frequent phone calls, and short visits during school breaks spent at home were opportunities to stay connected that grew fewer and farther apart every year. Eventually it happened: precious friendships had morphed into disconnected acquaintances.

Along came Facebook.

A Short List of the Boys I Have Loved

Originally written in the Fall of 2003
 
1. Eric Jordan. Eric was my first real best friend, first "kiss", and first proposal for marriage. He lived two doors down the street in a house that was exactly the same floor plan as my own, only backwards. He was like a brother, but my feelings for him ran deep. He taught me how to skateboard, and I showed him how to put a lawn chair on a skateboard to make a "wheelchair" (endless fun down huge driveways as long as one didn't fall off). We were born fifty minutes apart. We also decided that if neither of us were married by the time we were twenty-eight, we'd tie the knot on our birthday, April 6, in 2010. Unfortunately I was out of luck early in the game... Eric found a girl in the Air Force and married her at age twenty.

2. Teddy Swan. Teddy was the biggest boy in school, at about five feet tall, when I met him in first grade. He remained the biggest boy in school all the way through high school and used it to his advantage on the basketball and football teams. Teddy had soft brown hair and eyes, and even though he was teased for being so tall, everyone wanted to hug him. I first knew of Teddy's feelings when, in the middle of our first grade class as we sat on the carpet, he rolled up a piece of paper into a tube, raised it to my ear as Mrs. Bailey talked about finger painting, and whispered through his handmade megaphone, "I like you." My heart jumped and that moment marked the beginning of my love for Teddy. Being seven years old, "out of sight, out of mind" was reality... so this love had a deadline: the end of the school year.

3. Roy Coffman. Roy had strawberry blond hair, brown eyes, and was covered head to toe in freckles. He had straight teeth (a quality hard to come by in third grade) which were exposed often because Roy liked to smile. My friend, Erin, and I competed for his heart. She said that she and Roy were meant for each other because they both had red hair. I argued that my dad had red hair, so wasn't that close enough? No one ever knew who Roy actually liked back then. He remained mysterious about those matters. If I really wanted to know I could ask him... he goes to UCSB and works at the Beach House.

4. Philip Patti. Philip was my first "bad boy" experience. In fifth grade my class was made up of mostly the Bad Kids. Long before I had the strength to stand up against bad influence, I let myself become a delinquent for one year. Philip and I sat together in the back of the classroom and talked through most of the lessons without getting caught. From those conversations I learned about condoms, drugs, and Metallica. At some point Philip and I decided to "go out" (of course meaning that we would continue sitting together in class, talking through lessons, and never see each other outside of school), but two days later it was over. Probably because I had to talk him into going out with me in the first place. I've had a thing for bad boys ever since.

5. Roy Coffman. Ok, so in sixth grade I liked Roy again. Old flames never die. At least this time he liked me back.

6. Chris or Pat English. The new twin brothers who joined our school in seventh grade. First of all, they exhibited fresh faces, as opposed to the ones we'd been staring at for the last six years and watching grow out of their fat phases. Secondly, I was enchanted by their tall stature, dark hair, green eyes, and beautiful brown skin. Chris had a quieter and sweeter disposition. Pat was funny, possessed straighter teeth, and his voice changed first. I liked Pat because he happened to be in my wood shop class. The Twins did quite a number on all the girls' hormones at Templeton Middle School. Ask any girl in our class, and all of them are sure to say they liked either Chris or Pat at some point. If they're like me, they switched back and forth between the two for years, the Chosen One being whoever looked in her direction more often or shared a class with her.

7. Steve English. No relation to Chris and Pat. The truth is I never really had a thing for Steve. He was the sweetest, most polite boy in our class, and he had a high GPA. For some reason, in the minds of all my friends, this meant we were perfect for each other. We were both polite, sweet, Christian, relatively well-liked, and good at school. Basically Steve and I got talked into going out by the whole eighth grade class, only to converse a few weeks later and mutually agree that we didn't even like each other. We're still friends.

8. Jacob Rodrigues. Jacob was the good-looking, popular sophomore bad boy who one day decided that Heather Eaton was the "cutest girl in the freshman class". This information, passed to me by a friend on the volleyball team, instantly formed a good opinion of this Jacob in my mind. I hadn't noticed him before that point. Once he was brought to my attention, I liked what I saw: dark features, a great smile, and a football player's build. We mostly communicated through mutual friends, and eventually I got brave enough to start ditching study hall so I could sit and listen to him play in the quad during his guitar class. He called me occasionally, and we even met at the movies a couple of times with a bunch of friends (behind my parents' backs since no dating was allowed until I was sixteen... I had just turned fifteen). We would hold hands while his friends snickered behind us, and I'd catch him staring at me out of the corner of my eye. I assumed if I returned the gaze, he'd try to kiss me, and since I was petrified of this scenario, I stared straight ahead and didn't move during the entire flick. The magic lasted for about a month until Jacob realized the good girl appeal that had attracted him wasn't what a teenage guy with raging hormones needed, especially when he was going to have to wait a year until I could legally go out with him.

9. Jordan McCaffrey. Jordan and I met at our youth group's winter camp sophomore year. On the bus ride up, he and his friend happened to be sitting across from my friend and me. We all started talking, because that's what we did on bus trips: talked to the people around us and sang praise songs loudly and off key. I developed a crush on Jordan in the six hours it took to get up the mountain to the snow. He had scruffy dark hair, brown eyes, big white teeth, and huge biceps. Unfortunately, when the bus stopped, and everyone stood up, I noticed immediately that looking into Jordan's eyes required me to look down. No up, not straight, but down. My crush continued for a couple months after winter camp and Jordan called me several times a week to talk for hours at a time. He came to my sixteenth birthday party and gave me a beautiful cross necklace. But the height thing bothered me, so the next time he called I told my mom to say I wasn't home. (Oh, the travails of being gifted with above-average height.) When Jordan first locked eyes with me across the bus aisle, he couldn't have guessed that he would be my first experience blowing a guy off.

10. Nick Jangaard. Nick was the class clown and a troublemaker, and looked the part. He had dark red hair, green eyes, and a devilish smile. His sarcastic sense of humor meant that people who didn't know him were offended by his remarks (actually, sometimes so were the people who did know him). We became close friends until eventually Nick decided that we should "be together." We'd hung out every weekend and enjoyed each others' company, so why not? We had even been voted Junior class Winter Prince and Princess (an enormously high honor... so much so that as far as I know, THS has never had a Winter Court since). So we switched our status to "dating" and proceeded to cause the downfall of our relationship. We didn't talk to each other much because we didn't know how. As friends we had never had deep conversations, so now what were we supposed to do? We basically held hands while watching movies and went to each others' sporting events. One night he mustered the courage to kiss me for the first time, and it was not the wonderful experience I had envisioned. Kissing a good friend, I realized, is like kissing your brother. Gross. Not long after that we ended it, and it took months for our friendship to return to normal. I knew I was over it a few months later when my best friend Lauren started dating him and I didn't care. About five years later, I was a bridesmaid in their wedding!

11. Abel Miller. I fell for Abel the summer before my senior year on our youth group's annual trip to Mexico. He had just graduated. I fell for his sense of humor, his charm, his heart for other people, and he wasn't too shabby looking. I spent the majority of the following school year wishing that we could date, but having to wait until I was officially out of high school. Abel had joined ABC's Jr. high youth group staff. At the time there was rule stating that staff members could not date students. The reason for this rule was to keep pervy twenty-somethings from perusing the selection of teenage girls. Unfortunately for us, the rule went across the board, and it infuriated me that an 18/19 year old guy couldn't date the 17/18 year old girl who had become infatuated with him. We would hang out in big groups, and a couple times even went on "dates" with other couples. (We wouldn't call them dates, since most of the time we left from our youth pastor, Rich's own house.) Finally June came, and the night I graduated, Abel kissed me goodbye before I hurried to jump on the bus for Grad Night. The next night he officially asked me to be his girlfriend. I left for college in Santa Barbara, and we proceeded to make our relationship work for two years. A break or two later, along with living on different continents, brought us to a place where we finally understood that we weren't meant to be together. As painful as it was at the time, after five years courting/dating/waiting/reuniting, I'm so very thankful that we didn't force it to work. I will always be grateful for the time spent with Abel; for what I learned about love from him, and the relationship I had with him. I believe I was better prepared for my next and last love, because of the many hurts and trials of this first serious relationship. My first and only real broken heart was over Abel.

12. Jon Richert. I've chronicled much of Jon's and my relationship. We were best friends for two years before we started dating, and got married a year and half after that. What Jon and I have together is more than anything I ever expected from marriage. In a world that gives up far too easily and a society where "starter" marriages are a growing trend, I am thankful to say that I have an accomplice who won't give up on me when things get difficult. We work together, and enjoy doing so. Sure, there are days when we may not feel very romantic, but at least when the romance is stripped away, we are still each others' favorite person to be around. I've seen Jon grow from a young man who is fiercely loyal and respectful to his mom, to a man who takes pride in taking care of his family, to a man who is just fearless enough to pursue a career that may have at one time seemed impossible. I respect him as a man, a friend, a believer in Christ, a fellow traveler, my husband, a provider, and as the father of our daughter. I can't imagine having the same life I enjoy now with anyone else.

Elementary to Big Time

My parents wanted me to switch schools after fifth grade. Templeton had a middle school for the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to attend. My dad taught in Atascadero, where sixth graders were still included in elementary school. In Atascadero, sixth graders were the big cheese: the sophisticated, oldest kids. In Templeton, sixth graders were puny eleven year olds walking around the same halls as fourteen year olds. That meant we were thrust into the same habitat as lanky, tall boys with funny voices and hulking girls with massive chests. I won the argument with my parents, despite their attempt to make me an elementary school baby for one more year. Who would I hang out with at Dad's school? Dad? No way! My real friends were in Templeton, and I needed to stay there.

Luckily most of my closest friends were in my core class. Even though we were in middle school, unlike the seventh and eighth graders our classes traveled together as we switched every period. I suppose this made the transition easier on the prepubescent small fries. My group at the time consisted of Lauren, Anita, and Tarah, as mentioned in previous posts (I seem to have plenty of memories from this year in school... maybe 7th and 8th grade were so horrific I had to block them out completely...?). Lauren and I had been pals since third grade, our parents had also become good friends, and we spent the bulk of our weekends at each others' homes; Anita was the tallest girl in sixth grade, with thick strawberry blond hair down to her butt, and though most people didn't know it due to her shyness, had a biting wit that far surpassed many full grown adults; Tarah was short and dark, polite, and earned the best grades (probably in the entire school). We were a tight group. We were also complete and total dorks, we just didn't know it.

We all decided we loved volleyball, and not only did we go out for the team that year, but I bought a really nice, official regulation size volleyball from K-Mart for about six dollars. (You have to be willing to spend some dough when you discover your calling.) We played with it every day at break, at least until one of the colossal eighth grade boys would invariably steal it from us and kick it across the blacktop. We'd simply take off and chase it, return it to the circle, and hope that if the predators realized it didn't phase us, they might actually throw it back to us the next time.

We had a homeroom teacher named Mrs. Hays. She was from Boston and said things like "di-ah-ree-er" in place of "diarrhea"; the boys made her say it at least seventeen times a day. Mrs. Hays had long blond hair, both on her head and on her upper lip. Whenever Mrs. Hays walked by our table, Anita pointed out the mustache, and Tarah responded with, "At least her mustache is blond and not black like mine." We had to agree.

Mrs. Hays was in tip top shape; she had even run the Boston Marathon a couple of times. She was always training for her next race, and she enjoyed taking off her shoes to let us see for ourselves how her big toe looked: like a juicy purple grape, ready to pop, right before the deteriorating nail fell off and made way for the new baby nail underneath. It was creation at its best.

Thank goodness I was allowed to attend middle school or I never would have added these experiences to my repertoire.

Early Life as an Eaton

Originally written in the Fall of 2003
 
I was born with a full head of black hair. At Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, one of the nurses' jobs was to stick a red bow on the girl babies' heads. That way, at a glance, baby observers could tell which red-faced, squished up piles of human were boys and which were girls. In a photo taken hours after my entrance on that day, April 6th, 1982, it's obvious that my dad was so proud of me. I hope that when I have my first baby, my husband looks at it like that.

My first home was a condo that my young new parents owned. Apparently I was quite the crier, and my internal rhythm kept me on a very strict schedule. Every night, right as my parents were sitting down to enjoy dinner, I would find something to scream about. (Now that I'm a mom myself, I realize that sometimes the only reason a baby needs to cry is the fact that she's alive.) My mom and dad would try to feed me, hold me, talk to me, rock me around the room, but I remained inconsolable.

Our stylish 80s furniture collection included a couple of small wooden end tables. They looked like they were from the Old West, stood about the height of my parents' knees, and had just enough area to accommodate a couple of magazines and the occasional plate of food. Somewhere in the midst of one of my best performances, Dad came up with a fabulous idea: let's stick Heather underneath one of those. It was brilliant. Not only did it muffle the sound for them so they could enjoy a hot meal, but usually after a couple minutes, the resonating echo of my own screams of fury eventually annoyed even me, and I would stop. The folks called this the Doghouse, but I was the only dog around to use it.

*            *            *

Our next home was another condo, this one in Laguna Hills, California. This is the first place of which I have real memories. We moved there when I was three. It had a cozy living area, bathroom, and kitchen downstairs; the bedrooms were upstairs. In my room, next to my full sized bed, there was a window.

When I eventually grew tall enough to open it myself, I wondered one day what would happen if I left the window open and hid in my closet. (I was a very considerate preschooler.) Naturally, my parents came looking for me; I then learned that this had been a terrible idea. They thought I had fallen out of the window. Frantically, they called my name, taking turns poking their heads outside, searching for my lifeless body on the sidewalk below. 

I hesitated, not understanding the distress in their voices, but knowing enough to assume I'd be in a predicament if I responded. I was right.

*            *            *

Although I don't remember my mom being pregnant, I do remember the day my brother came home from the hospital. It was about three weeks before my fourth birthday. He was small and helpless, didn't open his eyes even when I talked to him, and had an abundance of soft red hair. I liked the way my parents looked at him. I never hated my brother like some jealous firstborns. I'd been excited for Jesse's arrival, assuming that it meant I would have an instant new best friend. I was a tad disappointed when he came home and all he did was sleep. From the moment he was placed in the wooden cradle downstairs, enveloped in pastel colored blankets, I loved him, but I wanted him to play with me. 

I adored holding him. I must have liked the idea of having a real live doll to carry around. I was very careful with him. The fiery red hair he wore coming out of the womb never thinned, and the color never faltered. My dad was my favorite man in the whole world, and Jesse came out looking just like him. That might be why I loved him so much. I wanted to protect him from the hypothetical bullies that I figured could show up later in his life. He was helpless, and my new mission in life was to keep an eye out.

We'd have plenty of time to drive each other nuts later.

*            *            *

One day my neighborhood buddy, Johnny, and I were sitting on the fence in front of my condo that overlooked The Ditch. Really just an old rock quarry (that is now home to a track housing complex), it was The Ditch to us. As we were sitting on that fence, Johnny noticed movement down below. A live creature slinking along, probably searching for young children as prey. Somehow he knew its identity: a coyote, something I'd never seen before.

After hearing about them, I thought of coyotes as devil animals, since for years I'd had recurring nightmares about wolves attacking me (my parents had let me watch the animated version of Peter and Wolf an unhealthy number of times). Coyotes were brothers to wolves, as far as I was concerned, and much more mysterious. This coyote, at least a mile away, would never consider traversing the gigantic hill up to my patio, but even still... I had nightmares about wolves and coyotes for years after our "encounter".