In which I punch a neighbor in the nose and my mom is glad I did it

My dad was not a violent man. He was not quick to anger. I never saw him get in a fight or a major argument, although my brother surely tried his temper more than once.

He was quite fond of political debate, though, and argued, via my daily message service between them, with my seventh-grade Texas history teacher, Mr Wilson, he of the doubleknit polyester jumpsuits in many colors, about whether one votes for the party (Mr Wilson) or the man (my dad, a GDI). Mr Wilson tried to convince us seventh graders that we should affiliate ourselves with a party for that was the path to political power, but the only power I wanted as a junior high student was the power to transform myself into a popular girl with Farrah Fawcett hair, gauchos and a wraparound sweater, an event as likely to come to pass as the sun falling from the sky. And yet I dreamed.

I wondered why history was sooo boring, although Mr Wilson's drone as he talked about the battle of San Jacinto or about Santa Ana making his escape in an enlisted man's uniform or how Texas retained the right to divide into five states might have had more to do with the dreariness of it all than with the subject matter, which, now that I have read a lot of Texas history on my own, is not dull at all.

More than politics, the main complaint that my dad, a Russian history major, had with Mr Wilson, was that he (Mr Wilson) was making history seem boring. Texas history! Boring! Only the worst of the worst of teachers could make Texas history seem boring.

Yet even with all of that, my dad never found it necessary to hit Mr Wilson.

My dad did, however, teach me to fight. "Don't put your thumb inside your fist," he counseled. "You don't want to break it." He was a practical man. He showed by example that not punching other people is the better way to go, but he also understood that sometimes, a punch might be called for.

And indeed, I have found a judicious punch in the nose the appropriate solution in a few cases. Sometimes, war is the answer and anyone who thinks it is not is a hypocrite who is perfectly happy to rest on the blood of soldiers without acknowledging the necessity of their methods. Do you really want to still be an English colony? Do you really want the South to be a separate, slave-holding nation? Do you think Hitler should have been allowed to take over Europe and murder all the Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals?

I have not punched anyone for decades, but most of the times I did, I do not regret. It wasn't necessary to stop a genocide or to protect my property, but it did feel good. Yes. Punching someone in the nose can feel good. As long as you are not punched back. That's the key. Hit first and then get away.

The first time I punched someone in the nose, I got in my shot and it was over. It was not necessary. I didn't need to hit this girl and in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, but at the time, it seemed like a good idea.

My best friend Lisa and I were maybe ten. Our families had gone out for pizza. Lisa and I were through eating, so we went outside to run up and down the sidewalk. Holding hands. For that is what little girls do with their best friends: they hold hands.

Some older girls saw us and started name calling. They called us "fags," which was a word that meant nothing to me as the concept of homosexuality had not yet been introduced to me. I knew all about fallopian tubes and vas deferens, thanks to the Time Life sex education books my parents had bought when I was in second grade, but the actual mechanics of sex eluded me and the idea that there might be so many variations was not on the horizon. I didn't know what a fag was and I will bet they didn't know what it meant, either.

I was ten. Back then, kids didn't have to learn about condoms and venereal disease and alternative lifestyles in fourth grade.

Yet I knew just from the way they were saying it that it was not a compliment.

We stopped in front of the name callers.

"If you don't stop saying that, I'm going to punch you in the nose," I said. (Advice: if you are ever in a real fight where you are truly threatened, don't tell the person you are going to hit him. Just hit him and run.)

The one girl bent over so her face was right in front of mine, then very slowly and deliberately said, "Fag."

So I punched her in the nose. And made her cry.

Yeah, it felt good. But yeah, it was completely unnecessary. Better to walk away from that kind of situation than to hit someone. Still, I'll bet she thought twice before she name called again.

The next time I hit someone, it wasn't necessary, either. But it still felt good, even though I didn't get away with it. That's the problem with hitting: it's so satisfying when done right.

We lived in a cul-du-sac in Lubbock. Nice neighbors all around us. G-mother and Alan, our adoptive grandparents with the candy drawer and the TV next door. We were not supposed to watch TV over there. The reason my parents did not have a television was not because we were poor, which is what everyone would ask when they found out. "Are you poor?" would be the horrified response, as nobody could imagine any possible reason for someone who could afford it not to have a TV.

Even though Primo maintains my family was poor because we ate out only about once a year and didn't go on flying vacations or to Disney World, which is crazy because in the mid-70s, only rich people did that sort of thing, we didn't have a TV because my parents didn't want us to waste time watching it when there were soccer games to be played and books to be read. When we were visiting my grandparents, we got to watch Wild Kingdom and Walt Disney, but as soon as Sonny and Cher came on, the TV was either turned off or we were sent out of the room.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents bought a TV. It was rarely on. We were allowed to watch Happy Days, which my parents liked, especially my dad, as he had gone to college in Milwaukee. My mom and dad would watch Mary Hartman Mary Hartman after we had gone to bed.

We had it for one year, then we moved to Central America. No point in having a TV when you live in a place with nice weather year round and the ocean a few minutes away.

This TV deprivation led me to some bad decisions as a college student and as an adult, when I would watch complete trash, just because of my earlier TV hardships. At the same time, I was not getting drunk every weekend (or at all) as a college student because if I ever wanted a taste of my dad's beer, he would let me have some. TV, not alcohol, was the forbidden fruit at my house.

The moral of this story is that you should let your kids have a little bit of everything so that they don't go crazy when they are on their own.

Back to our cul-de-sac. Next to G-mother and Alan was a family with three little girls. Then there was Renee's family. Renee was a teenager who wore halter tops, bell bottoms, and blue eyshadow and was an object of awe to us all. She smoked. She had a boyfriend. Who had a car.

And that's where the conflict was.

Renee's boyfriend liked to drive really fast in our little cul-de-sac. The cul-de-sac with the three little girls who played in their yard. (This was a long time ago when children actually played outside. I miss those days. There are kids in my neighborhood, but I almost never hear them because after school, they go to after school care instead of going home and playing outside.) With my sister, who was in third grade - not a big kid - who also played in the yard.

My dad asked Renee's boyfriend to slow down. "There are kids here," my dad said. "You need to be careful."

The boyfriend did not slow down.

The next time Boyfriend was spinning his wheels in the cul-de-sac, my dad called the police. Who came, gave Boyfriend a talking to or a ticket or whatever.

Renee was not happy about this.

I was out playing in the yard (because even seventh graders played in the yard back then) when Renee was out one day. We started talking and she started talking smack about my dad calling the cops on her boyfriend and I said you better shut up or I'm going to punch you in the nose and she didn't so I hit her and she hit me back and gave me a black eye.

Of which my mother has a photo. That she took after whispering, "I'm glad you hit her."

I was, too.

In which my mother slaps me and I deserve it

Remember how I told you my dad was not a violent man? My mother is not a violent woman, but I did once give her cause to slap me across the face. Even now, I know I deserved that slap for being a mouthy, uppity, bitchy kid.

My dad stopped spanking us when I was little. He decided it was not a good idea to hit his own kids. I don't remember when this event came to pass. Perhaps it was after the time when I, a budding four year old Cassatt, drew on my bedroom wall with crayon.

I knew I wasn't allowed to do that. I knew.

When my dad instructed me to wash the crayon off the wall, I respectfully declined. I should add here that it wasn't exactly our house to deface. We lived on base housing. The way base housing works is that the walls are white when you move in and need to be white when you move out. If you want to paint the walls purple, that's fine, but they need to be white when you move out. At move out, the house gets inspected and it needs to pass inspection.

There are some pros to this micromanagement on a military base. Nobody's lawn goes unmowed. There are no rusting, wheel-less cars propped up on cinder blocks in the front yard. People drive the speed limit. There is no litter. Parents don't worry about their kids walking home after dark.

But - the reason it's like this is because your career suffers if your lawn isn't cut. Or if your kids act up. Yeah - if the MPs catch a kid doing something he's not supposed to be doing more than a few times, they don't bother calling the parents. They call the (usually) dad's boss. How would you like it if when your kid was caught speeding, the cops called your boss instead of you?

Houses need to pass inspection.

That doesn't leave a lot of room for personal expression in the decor.

Crayoned walls do not pass inspection.

When my dad told me to wash the wall and I refused, he told me again.

No.

He told me if I didn't, he would spank me.

Oh heck to the no. You are not the boss of me! was my four-year-old mantra.

He spanked. My dad was good on follow through. No empty threats from him.

I refused.

This went on for a while, threatening to spank, spanking, until I finally, furious, with tears running down my cheeks, hiccupping, surrendered and scrubbed that wall.

After that, my dad devised more creative ways to punish us. If I slammed the door, he made me walk through the house ten times, opening and closing each door quietly. Acting up in church - which was a given, seeing as we, at the ages of 5, 7 and 9 were not bribed with food, toys or books but actually expected to sit, kneel and stand still for an entire hour - was met with sitting in the corner. Really, kneeling in the corner. Straight up. No slouching. Hands behind the back. A kid in each corner on most Sundays.

Lots of grounding. Which didn't bother me so much because I didn't want to go anywhere anyhow.

My mom was the master of the slow burn. She was more of the silent treatment, "You've really disappointed me" guilt-trip type, but I don't remember any big dramatic punishments. You should know that I rarely did anything worthy of punishment once I was past my drawing days. I was a boring kid who just didn't challenge authority much. Unlike the rabble-rouser you see before you today.

But one day, I wanted my mom to buy something that I could not afford with my 50 cents a week allowance that was supplemented by my 50 cents an hour babysitting jobs. I could have dug up dandelions for half a penny apiece (full root must be attached) or washed my dad's car for any loose change I could find under the seats, but either I didn't want to work or neither of those jobs would have yielded enough cash.

I was badgering her and whining and she snapped and told me to knock it off.

"Why do you care?" I asked. "It's Dad's money."

Oh silence.

Oh bad silence.

Some background.

My mother was the valedictorian of her high school class. She went to college on a full scholarship but dropped out after her freshman year to marry my dad, whom she met at the bar of the bowling alley of their hometown after she had taken her younger twin brothers to a high-school basketball game. The twins went home with someone else. My dad drove my mom home at 2 a.m. They necked in the car, then he got stuck in the snow. He called his brothers to haul him out rather than wake my grandfather, whose motto about kids coming in late was, "Don't bother to go to bed [because you need to milk the cows in an hour anyhow]."

She had three babies right away, for that was how things worked back then. My dad went to war. She stayed back here with three kids under five. He came home, we moved. And we moved. And we moved. Every time we moved, my mom managed the process.

We lived abroad. For wives of soldiers, there are not many employment options, as the short-term, non-career type jobs that one would normally take in those situations - secretary, cashier, lifeguard - were reserved for people in the civil service or for foreign nationals from the host country.

When I was in high school, the only jobs available for me and my friends were babysitting and lawnmowing. Lifeguarding, working at the movie theater, teaching swimming, bagging groceries - all reserved for Panamanian nationals.

It wasn't as if my mom had the chance to have her own career. The jobs just weren't there and even if there had been opportunities, who wants to hire someone who's moving in a couple of years?

Had my mom not gotten married and had a family when she did - had she finished college and struck out on her own for a while - I have no doubt she would have broken barriers right and left. She is amazingly smart, scarily organized, and ruthlessly tactful. She could have climbed any corporate ladder she wanted to. She had the ability. And she knew it. She loved her family but wasn't always thrilled to have her interests subordinated to my dad's.

My dad couldn't have had a family and had his career at the same time if my mom had not been there in the background. He could have done it as a bachelor, but if they both had been working outside the house, neither of them would have ever slept.

But I was a snotty kid and thought I would be a smartass.

"Why do you care? It's Dad's money."

That was when the hand flew up from my mother's side and made contact with my face.

Oh snap.

My mother had never slapped me before.

But I had never been this bitchy before.

I'd have to say we were even. You can't take back words, even as you see them hanging there before you in all their insulting glory.

You can't take back a slap - an instinctive reaction to a breach of protocol and civility so strong that it leaves one breathless.

Many years ago, my mom apologized for The Slap. She'd felt bad about it for a long time.

Uh uh, I told her. I deserved that slap. It was earned fair and square.

In which my orange polyester doubleknit pants split in the back while I am at the blackboard

You may remember my stunning seventh-grade wardrobe. No jeans for me. No sir. Not windowpane jeans or the kind with the seam going up the back of the leg and hugging the butt and then going back down the other leg. No gauchos. No wrap-around sweaters. No tube tops.

I wore clothes I made myself.

It wasn't that my mother didn't try to take me shopping. She did. But I refused to go. So she sewed some of my clothes and I sewed the rest.

For my first day of seventh grade, I wore a doubleknit polyester pantsuit with a halter top. My shoulders were modestly covered by the jacket, of course. We did have a dress code at our school. This was Texas, not some heathen godforsaken place where boys and girls exposed their hormone-throbbing junior high midriffs and shoulders to one another. [Have things changed that much since then or are the writers of Friday Night Lights completely out of touch? I promise that when I was in high school in Texas, nobody was allowed to dress like that.]

The elastic-waisted pants were a green and white floral pattern. The green short-sleeved jacket had white piping and white buttons. The halter top was the reverse pattern of the pants. The pants and jacket could also be worn with a white blouse and I have a photo of myself in that very outfit, long white sleeves emerging from under the short sleeves of the jacket for indeed that was the fashion of the day.

Shut up. It was adorable. My mother made it for me. My mother is a heck of a seamstress. She can make bound buttonholes and make a tailored jacket. She doesn't do it anymore because she (and I) have discovered the beauty of consignment shopping and why not just live off the fat of the land instead of spending all those hours sewing? Now you can get a nice outfit, halfway well made, for less than the cost of the fabric to make something.

My mom couldn't hold a candle to our modista in Spain, though. That woman was amazing. She would come to our house to sew. [I know! My dad was a captain in the air force and we had our own seamstress? And a maid? It was like we were rich or something! The something = Spain was extremely poor in the early 70s and a dollar went a long way.] It wasn't just that she could sew well. It was that we could show her a photo - a mere photo - of what we wanted and she would nod, throw back her shoulders, cut and tear fabric, sew, sew, sew and voila! a reproduction of the desired outfit, only live and in person. She did not need a pattern. She was incredible.

She made my favorite dress in third grade - a maxi dress with ruffles around the bodice and the hem. I loved that dress. Loved it. The only person I've found since with close to that talent was a young seamstress I met in Chile who did some alterations (turned the collar of the jeans jacket my college boyfriend had given to me when the collar wore through - they can do that if you wear them all the time for 10 years, you know) and a little bit of sewing for me. She did not need a pattern, either. Just a photo. She was in college, studying to be a civil engineer. She had the right intuitive sense for it, I think.

Back to my seventh-grade wardrobe. No jeans. Lots of polyester. Funny-looking glasses. I was a fashion icon, all right.

My pants were all variations on a theme: elastic-waisted, doubleknit polyester. In many colors. The pants of many colors that my mother made for me. She had stumbled across a huge remnant sale at Hancock Fabrics or TG&Y or whoever was the reigning fabric store in Lubbock at the time. Bunches and bunches of remnants, almost all polyester, for it was the 70s and that was how we rolled back then - the fabric that didn't need to be ironed! - for a quarter apiece.

For a thrifty household manager who knew how to sew, this was a sign. A sign to sew her children's clothes from these remnants. At least, her child who was not in Catholic school and who did not wear a uniform to school.

Fine by me. I didn't like shopping. Still don't. Hate to look at myself in a mirror. If I owned a women's clothing store, the first thing I would do is install soft lighting and skinny mirrors in the dressing room. Why would anyone want to buy clothes after seeing herself in florescent light?

I had a dozen pairs of polyester doubleknit pants with an elastic waistband. With the pants, I wore either bought shirts or t-shirts I had made, for I, too, had mad sewing skills.

My favorite t-shirt had black trains running across a white background. Set-in sleeves. I was more advanced than raglan sleeves by this point.

I wore that shirt with the pants of many colors that my mother made for me, because black and white go with anything, including neon orange or lime green, right?

One fine day, I was wearing my orange doubleknit polyester pants with the elastic waistband and the black and white train t-shirt. I had been called to the board to do a math problem. I dropped the chalk, bent over to pick it up and felt a rip.

My pants had split. The seam in the back of my pants had split. As in, everyone could see my waist-high flowered underpants.*

Seventh graders are not kind. Lord of the Flies and all that, remember? Seventh graders are also very happy when the focus is on someone else's misfortune because when the focus is on someone else's misfortune, it's not on them. This time, I was the misfortune. Even if everyone else had felt sorry for me and empathetic, they would still have had to laugh, for it is funny to see someone's pants split. No matter how mean it is to laugh, it is funny.

It's just not so funny when you're the person with the split doubleknit polyester pants with the elastic waistband.

The blood drained from my face. I was already so many strikes behind cool there was no way ever to catch up - I played the violin, I rode my bike to school, I was smart, I wore glasses, I wore funny clothes, I didn't go to church on Wednesday, I was new - but split doubleknit polyester pants with an elastic waistband pushed me permanently to the loser side.

The teacher rushed me out of the room, gave me a pass, and sent me to the principal's office, where the school secretary called my mother to bring me another pair of doubleknit polyester pants with an elastic waistband. She arrived forthwith with the brown doubleknit polyester pants with an elastic waistband. I changed, slunk back to class, and prayed for disaster to befall someone else so my little event would be forgotten.

It took me years to overcome my revulsion against polyester after seventh grade. I am only now slowly coming around to accept that polyester has changed since the 70s and that my underwear will not show and my pants will not split.

* I discovered later that they could see them anyhow as the orange doubleknit polyester elastic waisted pants had a translucent quality to them that revealed the flowers on my underpants to anyone who might take more than a passing glance at my ass.

In which the orchestra teacher chews us out

When I was in seventh grade, I went from the Catholic school, St Elizabeth's, to the public school, Mackenzie, which was about two miles away from our house. There was a Catholic junior high school, but it was across town and my parents were not big fans of parent-provided transportation to school. Kids can get themselves to school was their attitude.

My dad left for work too early to be able to drop me off, anyhow. I would often wake up at 6 a.m. because I would hear the farm report from the radio turned on in the kitchen. He was up then because he had to be at work early and because he often rode his bike to work, which was 20 miles away. There was no sympathy from him that I had a mere two-mile ride on my bike.

I do wonder about the moms I see picking their kids up at school now. We live in a town where there are not school buses, but probably because no kid is more than a couple of miles from a school. We have an elementary school one block from us. The next elementary school, which is across the street from one of the two high schools, is less than a mile from our house. There is a junior high three blocks from our house. Most kids walk to school, even in the winter, and many times without the proper warm clothing, but the streets are not littered with the corpses of frozen teenagers, so they must be warm enough.

But some kids get dropped off and picked up, which makes driving at that time of day a real pain in the neck and makes me wonder about the parents: Really? Your fifth grader can't walk a mile home? What kind of tales of suffering will those kids have to tell once they are grown up? That they had slow internet? That they didn't have movies on demand?

Back to Mackenzie. I rode my bike. Cynthia E., whose dad was a botany professor at Texas Tech, lived five blocks from me at 26th and Chicago. We lived at 29th and Chicago. She would wait for me on the corner and we would ride our bikes up to 12th and Chicago together, our violins balanced across our handlebars for yes, I was just as cool in junior high as I was in grade school. Now in addition to wearing funny clothes (more about those when I tell you how I split my pants) and glasses, I also played the violin! Everyone knows how popular orchestra kids are.

Despite my fifth-grade music class of singing along with The Carpenters, Lubbock had a really good music program. String education started in sixth grade, then you could be in orchestra starting in junior high. I missed the sixth-grade classes because I was in Catholic school and we didn't have violin lessons there, but when I got to Mackenzie, I decided I wanted to be a musician and joined orchestra. I didn't know how to play but really, how hard could it be?

Not that hard. I already knew how to read music from taking piano when I was in third grade. My mom was a clarinetist, so between the two of us and a few books, I picked it up, going from last chair at the beginning of the year to first or second most of the end of the year.

My main competition - if you can even say that, as she was far more talented and hardworking than I - was Hannah N., who was an Only Child who got Dropped Off and Picked Up at school. Bless her heart. She was a bit of a priss, but she didn't know any better. Her mother dressed her way younger than her age in frilly, full 50s-style dresses. She had short bangs, a little curly ponytail and pouty red lips. If I saw a girl like that today, I would think she was just as cute as can be, but as a fellow outcast seventh grader, I wanted to elevate myself on the social scale and the only way I knew to do that was to climb over the other nerds. Her clothes and her innocence were blood on the water to the junior high sharks.

Hannah wore an undershirt - the kind with lace straps and a little flower on the bodice - instead of a training bra. She didn't know any bad words. One day, she asked me why everyone had laughed in social studies when the teacher read from a letter written during the Civil War with the endearment, "Puss." She asked me because I was a fellow nerd, but I didn't want to be her guide to cool. I didn't have far to fall, though, to be as un-hip as she was. For PE once, we had to choreograph a dance to music of our choice. She did her dance to a Lawrence Welk record. I did mine to a Neil Diamond song. Not a lot of space separating us on the loser scale.

Let's stop while you picture that scene in your mind. Me, in my seventh grade glory of long blonde hair (which was the one feature I had going for me, except I didn't have it cut properly into a Farrah or wings), funny glasses, and my mandated gym suit from Penney's of light blue double knit polyester shorts (a wee bit tight) and a light blue and white striped sleeveless V-neck top, also too tight. A smelly light blue and white striped sleeveless V-neck top, because I undoubtedly did not take my gym clothes home for laundering nearly enough. It was a pain in the neck to take them home, what with balancing my violin across the handlebars and all. Nothing can hold a smell like polyester.

Then me, in my blue, blue and white outfit. Dancing. To Neil Diamond. [Whom I continued to adore, so much that my senior year of high school, when I worked at the Woolco across the street and got my $38.50 in cash at the back of the store every week, I could not walk to the front of the store without detouring through the record department and buying yet another Neil Diamond album.] In all my uncoordinated, unathletic loveliness. To a song that set my classmates snickering. How uncool could I be? Neil Diamond? Really? All the cool girls danced to Barry Manilow or Paul McCartney.

Hannah was what saved me from being the lowest on the cool ladder. As soon as she put on that Lawrence Welk record, everyone forgot about me and Neil and focused on Hannah and her precise, this is the show my grandma watches movements. Thank God for Hannah is what I say.

She has since become a flight attendant, flying to Europe and Asia for work. She is also a professional musician, playing violin with an orchestra in New Mexico. She looks nice. But I don't think I'll friend her on Facebook - if she remembers me at all, it might not be with fondness.

Neither of us, however, was a loser-y as poor, bless his heart, Ryan W. He was kinda funny looking. He was skinny. And meek. Had a runny nose. Was not a very good musician. OK, he was a horrible violinist. But that's no excuse to be cruel. Yet we were mean to him. We were awful to him. During school. At Tuesday night orchestra rehearsal.

To which I did not have to ride my bike because my parents didn't want me riding that far after dark. Cynthia's parents and mine took turns taking us to practice. Note: Rehearsal was not on Wednesday. No! When we were picking the night for rehearsal at the beginning of school, Miss Bonnington, the director, asked for suggestions. Someone suggested Thursday, but that wouldn't work because of basketball, etc. I finally raised my hand and suggested Wednesday, which nobody else seemed to have thought of, and every head in the room swiveled to look at me.

Miss Bonnington laughed and said not Wednesday. I asked why not.

The girl next to me hissed, "Because we have church on Wednesday night!"

I had never heard of Wednesday night church, but then, I was one of about ten people in town who weren't Baptist. Did you know that Baptists go to church on Wednesday night? I didn't. One day a week is enough for Catholics. It was sure enough for me. Two services a week would make me seriously consider converting.

We were mean to Ryan. So mean. Not physically, although he may have been beat up by other boys. In orchestra, we we beat him up with words and with the lack of words. Who wanted to talk to Ryan and be associated with him? He could do nothing but drag you down. It hurts me even now, 35 years later, to think of that poor kid, shunned and mocked by everyone else in school. I was only moderately uncool and moderately teased and I still remember it. He was tormented.

This is how bad it was:

One day in orchestra, Miss Bonnington sent Ryan to the office on an errand. She walked to the back of the room, closed the door, and returned to her stand. She looked at us, arms crossed, and didn't say a word.

Then she began speaking softly but emphatically.

I want you to quit being mean to Ryan, she said. Stop it. Stop it this minute. Quit picking on him. Quit teasing him. I am ashamed of you all. Ashamed!

The first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos and the bass all dropped their collective jaw. No teacher had ever spoken like that to us. Ever. Well, to me, anyhow. No teacher had ever scolded other students for how they treated another student. It hadn't happened up to that point and it didn't happen again after, either.

But it was her tone more than anything. She wasn't yelling at us, which would have been easy to defend against. Kids can tune out yelling easily.

She was calm, measured. She went for the "I expected better of you" tack, which is a far better method of shaming kids, at least children whom have been reared with a modicum of human decency. Who wants to feel that she has failed to live up to the standards set by someone she respects? We did know better. We knew we were wrong to tease Ryan so mercilessly. And we had done it anyhow.

There was not a sound from the students as she continued. We hung our heads in shame.

I don't remember what happened after that, although I would guess that after a short honeymoon, we slowly slipped back into our old, tribal, junior high ways. Ryan did not return to orchestra in 8th grade - you actually had to try out and he just couldn't play. I hope he is an internet millionaire somewhere, hanging out with his nerd internet millionaire friends and his sweet wife who loves him for the nice guy he probably was.

In which Missy G says she'll be my friend but only if I don't tell anyone at school

We moved to Lubbock when I was in fifth grade, in the middle of the school year. For the first time in my life, we weren't in base housing (except the year my dad was in Vietnam and the rest of us lived in an apartment 35 miles away from my grandparents) and for the first time in my life, except for the first two months of kindergarten, I wasn't in a base school. The house my mom and dad bought was across the street from Bowie Elementary School, so that's where my brother, sister and I were sent to school.

[Of course you know who Jim Bowie was! The guy who fought at the Alamo and whom the knife is named after! Didn't you have Texas history in 7th grade?]

There is nothing like being the new weird kid in the class in the middle of the school year in a school where kids aren't in and out all the time. On base schools, there are always new kids. New alliances form and disband, as they do anywhere, but nobody has the advantage of having been at the school since kindergarten. Everyone is new.

But I was the only new one in the fifth grade at Bowie. There were two girls of note in my class: Jennifer C., with her cool aviator-frame glasses, her long brown wavy hair and her yellow gingham double-knit polyester pantsuit, and Sandy M., who was an early developer, which is not such a great thing for a fifth-grade girl to be.

Jennifer was the arbiter of cool.

I was not cool.

Not that anyone in the class was really cool, unless you think that a music class that consisted of the teacher handing out a mimeo with lyrics so we could sing along with Karen Carpenter and her brother once the teacher touched the needle to the record was cool.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe every fifth grader really wanted to know all the words to Yesterday Once More, We've Only Just Begun, and Rainy Days and Mondays by heart.

Yes, I still know those songs.

It's just what you want your ten year old to sing, isn't it?

Talking to myself and feeling old
Sometimes I'd like to quit
Nothing ever seems to fit
Hangin around, nothing to do but frown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

What I've got they used to call the blues
Nothing is really wrong
Feeling like I don't belong
Walking around some kind of lonely clown
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down

Depression, not fitting in. This song is the fifth-grade anthem.

I did not make any friends those few months. I did, however, get glasses, as the school nurse, doing a routine vision screening, identified my myopia. I didn't know I couldn't see the board. I mean, I knew I couldn't read it from my desk, but I had no idea that wasn't normal. Despite my vision problems, I still skipped a grade and always read with the class ahead of me. It didn't hurt me academically. I could see up close.

I couldn't see up close fast, though. The highlight of my school athletic career was at Bowie when I hit a softball that was pitched to me. The problem was that I hit it after it had passed my bat, so I hit it into my mouth.

It hurt.

Yes I was always picked last for any team. Why do you ask?

My brother made friends. Lynn O lived next door with his sister Lisa and brother Lanny. His mom and dad were very nice. Mr O was a morning radio show host and would play Malaguena for my mother. Mrs O had her pretensions - she acted fancy and name dropped a lot [My mother would roll her eyes and mutter, "Yeah, I know your uncle is a congressman. You already told me. Like 400 times.] - but she let me come over and play their piano whenever I wanted. That made up for the time that she gave my mom a bunch of Lisa's outgrown clothes for me and then asked to have them back a few weeks later because she wanted to have a garage sale. I didn't care: Lisa had reached the age where she needed to be wearing deodorant but nobody had supplied her with such, if you know what I mean.

My sister always makes friends. People flock to her.

But I was weird. Kinda funny looking. Well, not really, but I thought I was.

The next school year, my parents put us in the Catholic school that was about a mile from us. It's not there any more - there's a golf course in its place. The three of us rode our bikes to school through the cotton fields, which wasn't as great as it might sound because there are frequent windstorms in Lubbock and wind + dirt = duststorm. That dirt gets everywhere. We would ride the long way through Lubbock Christian College to avoid the dirt, but that didn't always help.

Missy was in my class, one of the other four girls. There were six boys. We had our own Girl Scout troop and met after school in the cafeteria. One of the girl's mothers, who was Mexican, gave us a lesson in making flour tortillas from scratch. The secret is lard. Sorry if that bothers you, but it's true. Lard is also the secret to pie crust. It won't kill you. My grandfather ate bacon grease on his toast and he lived to 82. It was the smoking that killed him. Not the pig fat.

Missy lived only three blocks from me and also rode her bike to school. We would ride together, our plaid skirts pushed up to accommodate the crossbar and our pants underneath our uniforms to keep us warm. Lubbock might be in Texas, but that doesn't mean it's warm in the winter. It's in the high plains. Blizzards, etc.

I have to tell you a Lubbock joke. When I was in the Peace Corps in Chile, another volunteer, who was from New York, was planning to get a PhD and was applying to various programs, including Texas Tech (which is in Lubbock). This volunteer liked his beer.

You know Lubbock is dry, right? I asked him.

He looked at me, puzzled. Yeah, I know it doesn't rain a lot there. So what?

I laughed. He did not know this dry of which I spoke.

Back to Missy. We rode our bikes to school together. We spent afternoons at her house. We were in Girl Scouts together. We learned American Sign Language from our brothers' Cub Scout handbooks together so we could communicate across the classroom without the teacher knowing. (I had my glasses by now so it worked.)

Until we got caught, we stole pecans together from the lawn of the old lady in the big house with the huge pecan trees on Slide Road. The old lady saw our bikes leaning against her tree, saw us picking up pecans and stuffing them in our pockets, and came out to scold us.

Are you Baptist? she asked. [Maybe she asked if we were saved. I can't remember. It's the same difference to some people.]

No, we answered. We go to St Elizabeth's. We're Catholic.

Of course we were heathens. We did not say "No ma'am." NO MANNERS.

She shook her head and sighed. Oh bless your [pagan, anti-Christ] hearts, she told us. I'll pray for you.

I thought Missy and I were friends.

But again, I was not a cool kid. In St Elizabeth's sixth-grade class, Steve S. and Steve R. were the ones who decided who was in and who was not. I don't know why Steve R. should have been a cool decider - he was about as nerdy as they come, with his nerd glasses repaired with tape and his skinny, sixth-grade body. But he was Steve S's best friend and Steve S. was a good looking blond kid from a rich family who lived on Slide Road near the fancy pecan lady who was going to pray for us.

Missy valued their opinion and esteem.

So one afternoon, she laid it out for me: I'll be friends with you, she said, but you can't tell anyone at school.

The right answer would have been, Go to hell. Either we're friends or we're not.

But this was way before the self-esteem movement. It was back when kids handled their own problems without involving the adults. It was back when most kids had a strong intuitive grasp of realpolitik.

The answer was obvious.

I could either have self respect. Or I could have a friend.

I shrugged and said, OK.

Unfortunately, our friendship lasted only until the end of the year. Once we started junior high, she went to the Catholic junior high and I was back in public school. But more about that later.