In which my yenta dad doesn't forget his mission

I was hanging out with my dad and his cancer roommate, Jim. Jim had prostate cancer. It had metastasized.

Prostate cancer confined to the prostate is not the worst, but prostate cancer that has metastasized is very bad news.

Jim had almost no visitors. He and his wife had divorced years ago. He had a stepdaughter who lived a few hours away who came to visit once on a Sunday but couldn't come very often because she had work and it was a long trip.

My dad had lots of visitors because he and my mom had lived in San Antonio for about 15 years before the Sicily adventure. So we shared our visitors with Jim. He was a nice guy and we didn't want him to be lonely or feel left out.

He had nobody to take care of him when he left the hospital. He lived far from his stepdaughter, not that she would have been able to do much. When you work full time, it's hard to take care of a sick person.

Primo and I watched the movie 50/50 last night, about a man who gets cancer at the age of 26. He tells his artist girlfriend of a few months that if she wants to break up, that's OK, because it's a lot to ask of someone to take you to chemo and take care of you when you are throwing up in the middle of the night. She refuses to break up, saying she wants to take care of him.

I rolled my eyes. "This is not going to end well," I said.

Even when you love the person you are taking care of and have a lifetime history, it's very hard. You resent the cancer. You hate that everything in your life is about cancer. You hate the damn hospital and the fear and the despair and the not knowing. Towards the end, we all, my dad included, just wanted it to be over. He would wake up in the morning and say, "Why didn't I die last night?" He felt guilty that our lives were consumed with his cancer. All we wanted was to spend as much time with him before he died. But we still all hated the cancer.

Someone I'd only known for a few months?

No way I would take on his cancer. No way.

And of course (spoiler alert, so skip this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie, which you should because it's not often that you see a cancer comedy), she does ditch him, but only after being a really bad cancer girlfriend. She didn't want to ruin their karma by seeing him getting the chemo, so she just dropped him off at the front door of the hospital and then forgot to pick him up. I didn't blame her for not wanting to be his girlfriend any more, but I do blame her for not breaking up with him right away.

Back to Jim. He was being released, probably because there really wasn't anything else they could do.

"But who will help you?" I asked, which was, in retrospect, not the most sensitive question I could have asked.

"I have a plan," he assured me.

Dumb me. I thought he'd lined up a home health nurse.

He hadn't.

He had a plan for everything not to be an issue any more. When I found out, I was very sad. Nobody should have to die alone.

Unless the person is a real meanie jerk.

But a nice person like Jim shouldn't die alone.

Back to when Jim and my dad were still alive and in their room. I was sitting on my dad's bed talking to him. Yet another doctor made his way in to check my dad.

My dad introduced himself and me, then asked the doctor about himself. He always asked where the doctor was from, then about where else he had been stationed, then about family. He did the same thing with the chaplains. He got several visits every week from the hospital chaplains. His favorite was the Episcopalian chaplain, a woman. My dad, a lifelong Catholic, liked to talk to her about theology. When she showed up, he would tell us that we could go get lunch or take a break.

With this new doctor, my dad went straight for broke. "Are you married, Doc?" he asked.

The doctor shook his head. "No."

Have I ever told you that when I was in grad school and my parents were working in Saudi Arabia that my dad told me in a letter that he had started a support group called "Grandfathers without Grandchildren?" He was dying to be a grandfather. He loved little kids.

My grandmother was on the same bandwagon. She sent me a letter asking me if I had considered marrying a widower who needed help raising his young children. (Because that's just what every unmarried woman wants: the chance to raise a dead woman's kids.) "A friend of your mother's married a widower. They live in Marshfield now. She is very tall."

Blessherheart. I loved my sweet grandmother who gardened, taught me to make bread, walked to 6:00 a.m. Mass every morning, and made sure everyone around her, including my schizophrenic second cousin, was fed, but we had different ideas about life.

I wrote back to my dad and told him I could start my own club: Unwed MBA Mothers or Daughters Without Children.

I knew what he was getting at with the doctor. I had to head him off.

"Not married?" my dad mused.

I casually leaned over and took my dad's hand. I squeezed. Hard.

"What's your specialty?" I asked the doctor, trying to change the subject.

"What a coincidence! My daughter here is sing- OW!" my dad exclaimed as I squeezed his hand again.

The doctor looked confused. Jim jumped a little.

I looked at the doctor, blocked my left hand with my right as I pointed to my dad with my left, mouthed, "Morphine," and looked back at my dad. Except of course my dad was stone cold sober. He was just a father with a mission.

Jim looked at me and raised his eyebrows. He knew my dad was sober. They'd been talking about their days in Vietnam and my dad's mind was as sharp as a tack. He would get worse as he had to have more and more morphine, but on that day, he was just fine. He'd even been to physical therapy.

"He's the only patient I've ever had who asked to go to therapy," the therapist said.

"I'm bored and I want to exercise," my dad shrugged. He didn't feel too awful once they got the fluid off him and started him on painkillers and got him through his first round of chemo. The first time wasn't so bad, at least not in the first few days. It got worse every time, though. Chemo is really nasty.

The doctor told me his specialty. Which I don't remember because this was 15 years ago. He wasn't a surgeon or a nephrologist because those guys had already come and gone and said they couldn't do anything. This was a teaching hospital, so maybe he was just a wandering student doc, although he looked older than that. But cute. Older but cute. I wouldn't have minded knowing more about his singleness, but it was too weird to have my dad broker the deal.

I had nothing to say about his specialty. What are you supposed to say. "Oh! Cardiology! Well, there's a profession to love!" See? It looks stupid in writing, too. Here it is, 15 years later, and I still have nothing clever to say back to this guy. I probably just smiled and mumbled. That was my usual strategy when put on the spot. I might even had said something stupid like, "I was going to go to med school, but then I took freshman calculus and chemistry and realized I was not smart enough. Plus I realized I don't like being around sick people." Which is not the right thing to say when you are around sick people, so let's hope this sentence stayed in my head and did not come out of my mouth.

My dad tried to steer the conversation back to the doctor's marital status, but was unsuccessful. The doctor left and I was relived. I looked like crap. When your dad is in the hospital with serious cancer and you are spending every other night in the chair in his room, you don't spend a lot of time on style. You just wash your hair, brush your teeth, and hope that your socks match.

My dad scolded me: "I'm trying to take care of you! He could have been The One!"

Maybe. Maybe I blew it. But finding a husband was not at the top of my list at the moment. Bless my dad's heart.

In which my dad is a pincushion for a medical student

My dad was in the hospital. They'd diagnosed cancer and he'd started the chemo, which was brutal. His hair had started to fall out. We had a little head-shaving ceremony outside my mom's room at the temporary quarters on base.

Wait. Let me give you some more context. My parents had moved to Sicily in August 1996 so my dad, who had been retired from the air force for about 14 years, could take a job teaching junior high math and science to the kids at the American navy base on Sicily.

In November 1996, he thought he'd pulled a muscle running a 10K.

It wasn't a pulled muscle. It was non-Hodgkin's blue cell lymphoma. I think it was stage four. If it wasn't when he was diagnosed, it became stage four pretty quickly. Stage four is the last stage. Then you die. If you get cancer, you want stage one. Of course, you don't want cancer at all. That's the best situation.

He had had a major physical before the Dept of Defense schools hired him in August. They don't want to hire sick people to be teachers and pay to send them abroad. That's a waste of money. There was no sign of cancer when he had his physical, but it showed up very soon after that.

After being medivaced back to the US in December 1996, he was at Wilford Hall medical center at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. I was living in Austin and unemployed, so I spent a lot of time down at the hospital. My mom was trying to find a place to live - they had realized my dad would probably not be returning to teaching very soon - and get their stuff shipped from Italy back to the US. It was a time when organized people triumph and disorganized people crater. My mother could move an army with her logistical skills, but even as uber-organized as she is, doing all this while her husband was in the hospital fighting cancer was brutal.

She had to return to Italy to receive their household goods, which hadn't even arrived by the time my dad got sick, and have them shipped back. Even super organized women can't be two places at once. When she went to Italy, I covered for her with my dad. Even when she was in San Antonio, she had things to do that only she could do, so I spent a lot of time just sitting with my dad.

I had been very discouraged that I couldn't find a job after the Peace Corps, but now I am very happy that I had that time with my dad. It was a blessing and a gift. Back then, I was so worried about my employment situation, but if I had to be unemployed for a year to be able to be with my dad in the last months of his life, it was a fair tradeoff. Now I am unemployed again and apparently unemployable, but nobody in my family is sick. I'm not sure how to classify this one.

I want to say something about "fighting" cancer. I hate it - hate it - when people praise cancer survivors as being "fighters" and "tough."

What cancer survivors are mainly is lucky.

When you say someone who survives really fought or really wanted to live, what you are implying is that someone who dies from cancer just didn't fight hard enough. Just didn't want to live enough.

I know that's not how you mean it. It never even occurred to you. But when I hear it - when other people who have lost loved ones to cancer hear it, what we hear is, "Only the people who really want to live survive cancer. Only the people who do it right live. If you die from cancer, it's because you did it wrong."

Which is not true. My dad didn't want to die. We sure didn't want him to die. But not everyone is cured. Someday, maybe, I hope. But today, people still die from cancer and it's not because they gave up. It's because they were unlucky.

My dad was in the hospital. We got him a day pass to leave and spend some time outdoors - it was a nice February day in south Texas. He was too weak to spend much time doing anything but sitting, but we pulled some chairs out to the sidewalk in front of my mom's room and sat in the sun.

Because of the chemo, his hair had started to fall out. Chemo kills all the fast-growing cells in your body. These cells include cancer cells, but also include hair cells and white blood cells, which is why some people lose their hair and why most people going through chemo have to be very careful about germs - they have no resistance with their white blood cells wiped out as part of the cycle.

The falling hair was becoming a nuisance. He asked us to cut if off. My mom had gotten an electric razor from somewhere. She must have borrowed it from some San Antonio friends. She is one of the most prepared persons you will ever meet, but even my mom doesn't carry an electric shaver around with her as a matter of course.

She does carry her gardening and house tools with her when she travels by car, though. The first time she came to visit me in Memphis, she spent the days doing minor repairs on my house and working in the yard while I was at work.

My mom is the houseguest you definitely want to return. She does not lie around waiting to be entertained. She doesn't complain that she can't watch TV and she doesn't drink all of your booze. She finds problems to solve and solves them and then she helps with dinner.

I asked my dad if I could give him a mohawk first. He rolled his eyes, maybe remembering my brother's mohawk when he was in high school.

At least my brother never got a tattoo. Hair grows. Tattoos are forever. I am very glad tattoos had not become fashionable when I was in high school. Not that I would have gotten one - I faint when someone pierces my skin with a needle, which is the appropriate reaction.

I shaved the sides of his head, then my mom took a photo of him smiling uncertainly with his mohawk.

It was not a pretty picture. He'd been in the hospital for over a month and had gained a bunch of weight (edema from when his kidneys started to fail before they started the chemo), then lost it. He was now much thinner than he had been, and he would get even thinner yet before the chemo was over. His normal weight was about 170, which is average for a man of 5'8". At its lowest, he was about 120 and skeletal. He was too weak to move. When the young airmen would change his diaper and his sheets - oh, yes - that is one of the things that happens with chemo - you lose control of your bowels - the one would lift my dad in his arms like a baby and hold him - a cancer pieta - while the other stripped the bed and re-made it with clean linens.

The entire time he was in the hospital, I never heard any of these young men ever call my dad anything but "sir." None of this first name business. Bad enough to lose your physical dignity but to lose all psychic dignity as well? That would be too much.

I shaved the rest of his hair off his pale head. He smiled again. A very small smile. It's hard to smile when you feel like crap and know you are probably going to die a lot sooner than you had planned.

A few days later, they wanted to give my dad a lumbar puncture. The test was to see how far the cancer had spread. The doctor came in with a team of medical students. The one intern was about to do her first lumbar puncture.

They can't anesthetize you for a lumbar puncture. I guess it's because you can't anesthetize bone? Any physicians reading please chime in.

My dad was wearing a hospital gown and nothing else, which was fine because he was covered with the bed linens. But the intern needed to have his back exposed to her. "Lie on your side and be perfectly still," she instructed as she pulled back the sheets and lifted his gown away from below his waist.

"I'll wait in the hall," I told my dad, as I could see that he would be almost naked for this procedure.

I stepped into the hall and stood next to the door. A few moments later, I heard a smothered scream. "Come back in here!" my dad gasped.

"I don't want to see your penis!" I told him in a loud whisper as I leaned around the door frame. And I didn't. Sooooo inappropriate.

"I don't care," he breathed. "Come back in here and hold my hand."

I walked back into the room carefully looking at my dad's face and not anywhere else. I sat next to his shoulder, still looking toward his face, and holding his hand. He clenched it so tightly that it hurt.

The intern couldn't get the right spot. Her face set with determination, she tried again. And again. She poked that needle in against the bone.

My dad squeezed my hand harder. He bit his lip, but I could still hear his moans. I felt the tears rolling down my face. I hated that intern. I hated her.

She finally got the needle in the bone. "Be very still," she warned, as she sucked out the fluid.

I stroked my dad's bald head and squeezed his hand back as the intern pulled his gown down and put the covers back. I didn't even look at her. She was dead to me.

I know she was just doing her job and that everyone has to learn somehow, but maybe she could have practiced on something or someone who wasn't my dad first. I felt sick to my stomach then as my dad breathed heavily and quivered in pain and I feel sick to my stomach now as I write this, 15 years later. I can still feel his hand squeezing mine so hard that it hurt. But I didn't mind: I was glad to share his pain. If I could have, I would have taken it from him and felt it all myself. Is there anything worse than watching someone you love suffer?

The tests revealed nothing. The cancer had not spread that far. Yet. Extra pain. For nothing.

In which I could have been Mrs Robinson

UPDATE:

You guys, I am mortified to find that I already wrote about this story two years ago. I am losing either my memory or my mind or both. I am also apparently running out of material.

When I was still working at Consolidated Buggy Whips, a younger co-worker developed a crush on me.

By "younger," I mean, "I could have been his babysitter when I was in high school."

By "younger," I mean, "I had graduated from high school before he started kindergarten."

So there you go. I have it. Or I had it. Whatever it is that draws men.

Much younger men.

We had been working together for years. Billy was a nice, nice guy. Quiet. Shy, I thought. Sweet, sweet boy. I liked him. He was very good at his job and I was happy to have him on my team. He was a baby - a baby - when he first started working at CBW. It was his first job out of college. I was already a wise older lady.

After I had broken up with JT and during the Navy Pilot Who Kissed Mushily Drama but before I met Primo, Billy asked me out to lunch.

I wasn't suspicious. Colleagues lunch together all the time. No big deal.

But when we got to the restaurant, he told me this was his treat. I protested, but he insisted. I stopped arguing and accepted graciously, although I think lunch between colleagues should be dutch treat. But it’s ungracious to argue when someone makes a generous offer like that. When I offer to buy lunch for someone, I mean it, and find it insulting to have the person make more than a token protest.

What is the protocol for ordering under those circumstances? What if I'd been willing to pay for something more expensive for myself (OK, you may stop laughing now) but wasn't willing to have someone else pay it? If I know someone else is paying, I always try to order something not too expensive. When I treat someone else, I usually wait until we're done eating and then I just take the check. That way, my guest doesn't worry about overspending and orders what she wants. I'd rather not know if someone is going to pay until after I've ordered.

We had a nice conversation. On a big project we had worked on together, I frequently made brownies for the team. Chocolate is an amazing motivator. I might not have been able to give my team members a raise or a promotion - I was not their manager, but I could keep them well supplied with baked goods. “No brownies for you!” became a mantra when I was teasing someone.

Billy told me there was a guy on his team now who was always bringing elaborate desserts to work and that he – Billy – wanted to make something even better. (Men are so competitive.) Did I give dessert-making lessons?

No, I told him, but I would send him some recipes. And, I said, he might want to consider taking some cooking classes – that would be a great way to meet girls!

Then I got nosy. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

I asked that in a big sister way, not in a I wonder if he's available for me way. If I had actually been interested in him for myself, I never would have been so bold as to ask if he had a girlfriend. I would have been far more subtle. Asking, "So, what did you do this weekend?" or, "What are your plans for the holidays?" often gives one the necessary information.

“No, not right now,” he said, blushing. He’s a quiet, reserved guy – not the sort who would be out on the town all the time, I would think.

“We’ll have to figure out a way for you to meet a nice girl,” said yenta me.

Then he told me that he had gotten a cat and we compared kitten and cat stories. “You need to come over and meet my cat,” he suggested.

“OK, sure,” I said. I love cats. I like visiting other people's cats. Although some of the thrill of cats has worn off now that Primo and I have two Siamese/tabby blend cats who got not the best of each breed - no shedding and little talking - but the worst - constant constant talking and constant shedding. I love my kitties but I wish they would just SHUT UP sometimes.

Then he told me about the business trip he had taken to India. I was really interested to hear about such an exotic city. How come I only got to go to the convention center in Orlando? “I have photos,” he offered. “You can come over and see them if you want.”

“Email me some!” I said.

By now I was starting to wonder, but thinking, No! I am THIRTEEN YEARS OLDER than he is! I am completely misreading things here. (I did not pick up any gaydar, either, but I have completely lost my gaydar in the past few years.)

My friend Leigh thought he was interested in me and not in a I-am-old-enough-to-be-his-big-sister way.

I disagreed, but still took action. I tried to set him up with a young woman in the accounting department. “She’s your age!” I emailed. “She’s very cute.”

I asked her if she wanted to be set up. “I have a boyfriend,” she said.

Rats. I passed the disappointing news on to him.

“I’d really be more interested in getting to know you better,” he replied.

Holy smoke. Leigh was right.

What do you say when a co-worker (strike 1) who is 13 years younger than you (strike 2) is that direct (not a strike at all)?

I was hot enough (I blush as I type these words because they are so boastful and really, so inaccurate) to attract a much younger man. I was impressed with myself.

But I was also completely uninterested.

I consulted friends. "Why don't you go out with him?" my brother asked.

Not useful.

"Tell him you're not interested," said one friend.

Ouch. That seemed unnecessarily harsh. Especially considering I still had to work with him. I didn't want things to be awkward.

"Lie," another friend suggested.

That's the ticket.

I lied. Sort of. "Billy, I am so flattered," I said, which was probably not the best way to tell him because it is the opening line that leads to a "but." I should have just said, "Wow! Thanks! But I'm seeing someone."

Which is what I did say, more or less, after the first line. I thought that would be enough.

"Is it serious?" he asked.

I was getting more and more impressed with him. What guts! What woman doesn't like a man who is open about his desire for her? If only he were older.

That's when I lied. As I said, I was seeing the Former Navy Pilot Who Kissed Mushily and Who Still Shared A House With His Ex Wife. Neither quality appealed to me. And indeed, after the mushy kiss, I didn't see him romantically again. All we had were awkward encounters during the many, many meetings we had together at work, which is why you never date someone you work with.

But I told Billy I was dating someone and that yes, it was serious.

It was so far from serious you couldn't see serious from there with a telescope.

It was one kiss past over.

But it gave me a way out that let him save face. I liked Billy. I didn't want to hurt him. I just didn't want to kiss him.

In which I go to the beach as a babysitter and get bad cramps

You know that we lived in the Panama Canal Zone when I was in high school. All except for my senior year - we moved the summer before senior year and I got to be one of two new students in a class of 648, most of whom had known each other since kindergarten. Which stank.

However, the first part of my high school career wasn't awful, even though we were all convinced that if we were in THE STATES that our lives would look like the commercial where there were all these gorgeous people at the beach drinking something and the Beach Boys were singing Good Vibrations. What was that product?

Sunkist! That's it. That's what I suspected and the google confirmed it.

The irony of it is that our lives were far more like that commercial in the Canal Zone, where we wore shorts and flip flops to school and could go to the beach whenever we wanted because it was a mile away, than they would have been had we been back in THE STATES. We discovered when we returned to THE STATES that soda was really expensive and that you couldn't get Purple Passion or Tahitian Treat and they didn't sell empanadas in the school cafeteria. The beach was a few hours away. We couldn't wear shorts to school. Welcome to school dress codes.

One of the really good things about living in the zone and on base was that my friends and I had a lock on the babysitting business. There were lots of young families around and we had as much work as we wanted. With my babysitting money - I think I was charging $1 an hour by then, I saved enough to buy a bicycle, a 35 mm camera, and most of my clothes. That camera cost over $300.

I babysat a lot.

A new family asked me to sit. When I got to their house, I discovered they were Jewish.

I had never met anyone Jewish before. At least, not knowing they were Jewish.

Don't laugh. It's not like there are a ton of Jews in the air force. Yes, the base chapel was used as a synagogue when required, but I usually saw it as a Catholic chapel (they put the crucifix behind the altar) or a Protestant one (crucifix was replaced with a cross).

When we lived off base in Lubbock, we may have had some Jewish neighbors, but if we did, I didn't know they were Jewish. I just googled: there is one synagogue in Lubbock. The entire county has about 278,000 persons. The big religious accommodation that the schools made for religion was that there were no school activities on Wednesday night. Wednesday night is the night that the Baptists and some of the other serious Protestants have extra church. As Catholics, my family went to church once a week plus Sunday school and that was quite enough for me, thank you very much. But there were no Friday night/Shabbot accommodations, which made me think the Jews didn't have much power there.

Interestingly, Memphis has about the same number of Jews as it does Catholics. Memphis actually has the largest eruv west of New York City, or so I think I read once. Memphis has Catholic churches and synagogues and Catholic schools and Jewish schools. Once you get out of the city, though, and into the country, you find only Protestant churches - and not very many of them are Episcopalian. Memphis is not a southern city - it is a river city and river cities develop in very different ways from cities in the interior.

In Memphis, the Catholics have just surrendered and they have Wednesday night church stuff, too. I don't know about the Jews. The more conservative Jews were in their own schools, so maybe it just wasn't an issue.

Back to the family. They were from New York. I hadn't met any New Yorkers before. I loved their accents, but it took me a little while to understand. They kept kosher. Mrs S showed me the two sets of dishes and explained all the rules to me. I was terrified of doing something wrong, so theirs was the one house where I never ate. Usually, I plowed through the good stuff - the Captain Crunch, the Cheese Nips, and anything else my mom never bought because she said it was overpriced crap - when I was babysitting, but not at the S's house. I didn't touch a thing in the kitchen.

Mrs S was gorgeous. She was round and voluptuous with thick, glossy, curly dark brown hair. Mr S, who was a JAG, which is a military lawyer, was not so cute. I thought she outranked him in the looks department, but he was nice, which is what really matters over time.

They had two gorgeous plump dark-haired little girls. Bethany, who was four, and Sarah, who was one. I had never heard the name Bethany before and I thought it was so exotic. I still think it's a beautiful name, but now it's been tainted by that Real Housewives of New York who said in a national magazine that she and her husband had not had sex in six months and there were cobwebs on his penis, which made me think, "Wow. And I thought I might reveal too much personal information on my blog that a few hundred people read. I can't hold a candle to this lady." Then I thought, "She must not be interested in repairing her marriage because she just completely dissed her husband in public and that probably won't go over well."

Yes I am embarrassed that I even know about this. I have never seen the show, but I have stood in many a line at the grocery store and waited to get my hair cut, so I do read those magazines. Please don't hate me.

I became their babysitter. I liked the girls and Mr and Mrs S were nice to me. What wasn't to like?

One day, my mom said, "Mrs S called me. She wants to know if it would be OK to ask you to go to the beach with them next weekend as their babysitter. They would pay you [whatever - I don't remember] and they would want you to watch the girls at night while they went out and help them during the day."

It sounded like a great deal to me. A free trip to the beach!

I agreed to go. The first night was fine. I watched the girls while Mr and Mrs S went out to dinner with their friends. We were staying at a resort. I think we were at Santa Clara on the Panamanian Pacific coast. Once you get away from the canal and water isn't being churned up by all the ships going through, the beaches are nice.

The next day, on the beach, with Mr and Mrs S, I forgot that I was the babysitter.

Parents - take heed. Even when I was a lifeguard and being paid to watch your kids, I couldn't watch all of them at once. Don't think you can drop your kid off at a pool full of children and just leave. It only takes a second for a kid to go under and sometimes, nobody, not even the lifeguard notices. If your child is not a super strong swimmer, then do not abandon him to the pool. Do not trust that the lifeguard will be watching only your child. Because she won't. She is praying that nobody drowns on her shift and she is watching as closely as she can, but when there are dozens of kids, there is only so much one person can do.

Not to mention sometimes - just sometimes - I was distracted by a cute guy (rare, because the cute guys didn't hang out at the Converse city pool) or (more likely) thoughts of the Frito Pie I was going to buy from the snack stand for my lunch.

If you have never had Frito Pie, I feel sad for you.

What is this mysterious Frito Pie of which you speak? you are asking. You are especially asking this if you knew what a taxi medallion was before you took Econ 102 in college. I don't think I had ever ridden in a taxi before college. I may have, when we first moved to Spain when I was six, but I don't remember. I had always lived in places where people drove their own cars. Taxis were not part of my world. When the econ textbook used taxi medallions as an example of restricted supply, I had NO IDEA what they meant.

I was also too timid to ask the prof, so in the end, my ignorance was my own darn fault.

Still, textbook writers - not everyone who reads your book lives in New York. That's all I'm saying.

If you live in Texas, you might not know what a taxi medallion is, but you will know what Frito Pie is.

It is Fritos covered with chili, cheese, and raw onion. The best way to have it is in the bag. That is, you cut open the bag of Fritos, then pour the chili, cheese, and onion on top of it. Mix it all up and eat it out of the bag.

It is divine.

I bought myself Fritos for Thanksgiving this year. Primo spent Thanksgiving with Sly and Doris, but his Christmas present to me for the past three years has been that he will visit them without me. I didn't like not having him for Thanksgiving, but then, I am not the one threatening suicide (I am not making this up) if he is not present.

Just a wee bit manipulative, don't you think? I wish he'd call her bluff. Honestly. What kind of mother does that? I guess the same kind of mother who says two weeks before the wedding that she's not coming.

Back to the story about Bethany and Sarah and beach. I forgot I was in charge. Bethany was in the water. I looked away for a while. A wave knocked her down. Mr S ran to get her and yelled at me. I can understand that - he was terrified that his child might have drowned. I didn't like being yelled at, though, but now, as an adult, I understand. I understand that he probably also felt guilty because he had entrusted the life of his child to a 14 year old girl.

The main point of this story, though, is I got sick that afternoon and Mr and Mrs S were really worried.

They didn't have to be.

I got cramps.

Which always happened to me. I got really bad cramps every time I got my period. The doctor had suggested that I go on the pill, an idea that horrified me. Perhaps if he had explained it a little better, I would have been willing, but all I knew was that anyone I knew who was on the pill was a Bad Girl.

Crazy crazy crazy.

I don't think I even knew of a single girl who was on the pill. There may have been some. Maybe other girls had problems with cramps, too.

For years, I was miserable every month. Painful cramps, sometimes vomiting. I took prescription painkillers that were apparently so strong that when I got my individual health insurance when I quit my job to go to grad school, the policy excluded any diseases of the reproductive organs.

I finally surrendered and went on the pill when I was in grad school and I thought, Where have you been all my life?

No cramps.

None.

Over ten years of cramps and now they were gone and they could have been gone the entire time but I was too ignorant and dumb. Dumb me.

But I had cramps and I was miserable and this was before I started taking the motrin, which was available only by prescription at that time, or at least it was only by RX in the dosages I was taking.

I had an upset stomach and I was in pain and I was sweating.

Mr and Mrs S were very concerned. They thought I might have food poisoning. Or sunstroke. They didn't know what.

And I wouldn't tell them because I was too embarrassed.

Here's another hint for parents: if you hire a teenage girl to accompany you on a vacation as the au pair and she gets sick, keep in mind that she would rather D-I-E die than tell a man she is having her period.

I might have told Mrs S if she had asked me on her own, but she and Mr S were hovering over me together. They asked if they should call my mother. They were so worried.

I could have alleviated their concern with one simple sentence, but I was fourteen! Nobody talks about that stuff when she is 14!

After two hours, I was fine. They went out again. Bethany, Sarah, and I hung out in the condo. We had a lovely time.

But they never asked me to go out of town with them again. And I never told them what had been wrong.

In which I run over the neighbors' mailbox and nobody holds me to account for it

I was 16 and I was up late doing something with my college application. It was warm enough that I could walk out of the house after dark in just my nightgown. It was dark and it was a very modest nightgown. Now, of course, people go to church in their pajama pants, but 32 years ago, it was considered tacky to wear nightclothes and visible undergarments in public.

I went out to put whatever it was in the mailbox and saw a car come careening down the street, over the curb, and on to our driveway, where it smashed into my dad's car on the passenger side, completely destroying the passenger door.

I stood absolutely still, shocked and stunned. Then I started screaming and ran inside to get my mom and dad out of bed. They had already fallen asleep, so it took a minute or two to explain that someone had just CRASHED INTO THE CAR!

My dad ran out. Nobody was hurt, but his car was in bad shape. The crashing car had already backed up and was on its way when my dad came out. He got in front of them and made them stop. The driver was a young man and the passenger was a kid of about 14.

The man claimed his foot had slipped and he'd hit the gas instead of the brake. We knew there had to be more to the story because we lived on a dead-end street that was only two blocks long. Our house was in the middle of the two blocks. How does someone get going that fast accidentally? Although you don't have to be going very fast at all to damage a car broadside.

I don't remember if my dad called the police. I say he should have. He suspected that it had actually been the kid driving. Which may be illegal. I don't know. It is definitely unwise. When my dad taught me to drive, a very stressful experience for the both of us, as I maintained that the lack of a traffic signal in my lane meant that even though the light was red in the other lane, I still had the right of way.

Thank goodness it was late at night and there was no other traffic. I'm surprised my dad didn't have a heart attack.

I maintained that only once, though.

I don't think the driver had insurance. I definitely would have called the cops with that. The few times I have bumped bumpers with someone, the first thing I have done is write down my insurance information for them. Each time, the person has told me he would rather just get cash from me, but I'm all, "No way jose. Just deal with USAA. That's why I have insurance." Funnily, they never do. Which makes me wonder who was at fault, really. I know that the few times someone has hit me, I have been all over it, wanting my money from their insurance company.

The one time the guy did take my insurance information and called the police, the insurance company AND THE POLICE HAHAHAHA! said that the accident was his fault, not mine, so pay up buddy.

I had to go to court to get my ticket waived. When the cops first showed up, they gave me the ticket, even though the guy had been turning right from my left side. I took photos of the accident - this is why you always have a camera on you - and of the area around the accident. I took the photos to court, along with matchbox cars to re-enact the accident, only to discover they already had little cars there.

"Nobody has ever brought her own cars before," they said.

I wore a suit. I was the best-dressed defendant in there. I say that if you want the court to rule in your favor, it might help just a little if you don't wear baggy sweatpants and dirty tennis shoes. But that's just me.

Anyhow, when the administrative judge looked at my photos and heard my explanation, she said, "You couldn't have caused that accident" and cancelled my ticket.

The insurance company said the same thing.

I hope they went back and gave a ticket to the guy who hit me and then lied to the police about it.

My friend Leigh, who is five feet tall and 90 pounds, was hit once when the other driver, a big lady, ran the light. Leigh got out and asked the big lady and the big lady's friend for their insurance.

They had none.

"That's illegal!" Leigh hissed. A witness came and pulled Leigh away from the big lady.

"Just sit here and wait for the police," the witness said. "Let them deal with it."

So the driver didn't have insurance and my dad ended up getting a new door at a junkyard and doing all the repairs and body work himself. When my mom and dad drove up to see me perform with the Small Private School Marching Band at the Small Private School- Big State School football game (oh what a tradition that was - Small Private School vs big State School for the annual humiliation), the new door was still yellow with filler in it, a lovely contrast to the green of the rest of the car.

Good thing my dad grew up working on cars and knew how to do these things. He sure wasn't getting any money from the driver.

I say all that as preface to the real story, which is what I did to a neighbor's property late one night. And then didn't have the guts even to apologize to them.

I was late to driving. My dad taught me some when I was 12, when we would drive around empty parking lots. But when it came time to really learn so I could get my license, I was slow. We moved from Panama back to the US when I was 16. In Panama, you had to be 17 to get a license, so I didn't even take driver's ed. They might not even have offered it at my high school in Panama. I never paid attention.

I took driver's ed at my high school in San Antonio and my mom and dad took me out to practice, but then I failed the test my first time. I refused to take it again right away. I didn't need to drive: I took the bus to school and my part-time job was at Woolco, which was walking distance from our house.

That spring, though, my mom insisted I get my license. I had secured a summer job teaching swimming on base and I would need to drive to get there. "I am not going to drive you to work every morning," she warned me.

So I practiced and I got my license, even though I was and still am a very bad parallel parker. It's not something you need to do much in the south. There's enough parking there. And here, Primo does almost all the driving when we're together because he is a control freak who can't bear it if someone else is driving while he's in the car.

I was also, apparently, a bad backer upper.

One night, I backed into our neighbors' mailbox. I knocked it completely over. I didn't even see it. That's what happens when you don't look.

OK. That happens. That can be fixed.

But I didn't do the right thing.

I knocked it over and instead of leaving them a note or going to their house the next morning to tell them that I had knocked over their mailbox and I was sorry and I would arrange to have it fixed, I said nothing to them.

Nothing!

I wish I could write them a note of apology now, but they're dead.

It wasn't even like they were mean people and that they would have been nasty. They were a lovely elderly couple who were always nice to me. I didn't like being in their house so much because of the cigarette smoke, but they were nice.

I didn't tell them, but I told my dad.

He raised his eyebrow at me.

He should have told me to get my butt over there to apologize, and then come home and get ready to work.

I am now really curious about why he didn't do that. Maybe he thought that if he hadn't taught me the right thing to do by this age, it was too late.

A few hours later, I saw my dad across the street, digging a hole. He poured concrete down the hole and then stuck a 2 x 4 in it. Once the concrete had set, he attached the mailbox to the beam.

Nothing was going to knock that mailbox down. Perhaps my dad was thinking that he still had two other kids who would be driving and he might as well take care of the problem for once and for all.

He never said a word to me about it.

In which I lie lie lie to my boss

I finished college a semester early, in December, just so I could save one semester's worth of tuition, which would have been about $2,000. I was living rent free in the garage apartment of some very nice people who lived in a fancy neighborhood not far from the Small Private School campus. Their only request was that I occasionally babysit their nine year old daughter, but if I had something else going on, they would say, "Don't worry! We'll have the maid stay." They were just nice, nice people who had some space and hated to see it being wasted.

In January, I started grad school in English at Big State School.

What a mistake that was.

I hated it. It was boring. It was not challenging. There was no writing. I did discover I have a knack for reading Middle English out loud. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" rolled trippingly off my tongue, but I could not believe that I was in grad school and we were reading the text in class instead of discussing it.

So I dropped out. I just quit. But I didn't officially withdraw - I just stopped going to class. There was method to my madness, though. If I were not a full-time student, I would not be on my parents' health insurance any more. I knew this even though this was 1985 and I was only 21, which is why I roll my eyes at the people who are shocked, shocked that they can't get insurance once they let their coverage lapse and then discover they are sick. This information was not a secret even 26 years ago.

The result of my not attending class was that I got an 'F' in every class. Every class, that is, except the PE class I was taking - squash and racquetball. I got an 'A' in that class. Even though I attended only half the classes.

The other result of my not attending - and getting almost all 'Fs' - was that when I started at Ut's graduate school of business five years later, I was on academic probation. I didn't even know it. They admitted me, but put me on double secret probation. I found out a year later when I was talking to my advisor and he mentioned I had recovered quite well from my earlier academic misdeeds.

I had found a few part-time temp jobs while I was still in school. One job was working at the bookstore during the book buying rush. For those of you under 30, let me explain. In the old days, you would go to class the first day and get your syllabus. That was after you had already stood in line for a few hours (at Big State School, anyhow) to get into (hopefully) and to register for your classes.

On the syllabus would be a list of the books you needed. You would go to the bookstore and hope that your books would be there. Sometimes, they wouldn't have arrived. Usually, there were almost no second-hand copies and if there were second-hand copies, they weren't much cheaper than the new books. You collected your books and then waited and waited in line to pay for them. At the end of the semester, you would try to sell them only they always seemed to change the edition - as if differential equations changes so much from one year to the next - so you were stuck with a book you no longer needed.

But the bookstore job didn't last. Now that I wasn't a student, I really needed work. I wasn't out too much tuition. At the time, I think grad school tuition was about four dollars an hour. Maybe that was undergrad. Maybe grad was $12 an hour. I think I paid about $35 an hour for business school. Whatever it was, it was a lot less than I paid for college and a lot less than anyone is paying now. I think tuition these days is a big racket and college kids are getting screwed.

I somehow found a temporary - tax season - job at the IRS service center. It paid almost seven dollars an hour, which was almost twice minimum wage at the time.

The money was especially good when you consider that we spent a few hours during training assembling our training manuals. You know - taking hunks of paper and putting them into a three-ring binder. I calculated the cost to the taxpayer of our assembling the books. Thirty new employees/trainees x two hours x seven dollars an hour = $420.

The state school for handicapped children did this sort of work for one dollar an item. So not only were the feds overcharging the US taxpayer for this work, they were depriving handicapped children of the chance to be useful and to earn some cash.

A lot of my cynicism about government work started while I was working at the IRS. There was a lot of waste. For example, we had to complete timesheets every week, accounting for our time in six-minute increments. How to complete the timesheet was a big part of training. There was a work category on the timesheet for completing the time sheet, which I found rather metaphysical. Wait. That's not the right word. What's the word for when what you are doing refers to what you are doing? I think there's a word. Maybe it's German. Some of the best words are German.

If I had stayed there - as my supervisor asked me to do when I told her I was quitting, I would still have a job today and would have one until I wanted to stop working and then I would have a very nice pension.

It was an easy job. Kind of tedious, with some moments of comedy. I was reviewing 1040xs, which is the form you complete when you made a mistake on your taxes, like forgetting to include a deduction. It wasn't always clear what the taxpayer was trying to do, so I would call to ask.

There is a feeling of great power in saying, "This is the IRS."

That gets people's attention. Nobody makes you wait. They get the person you are calling for.

I tried to use my power for good, of course. I felt so bad when this couple wasn't allowed to take the deduction for the two foster children they were raising. I tried to find ways where people would get more money back. Legally, of course. If people made mistakes on their returns, I corrected them. Nobody should be punished for a math error on his 1040x.

It wasn't hard. I started on time and left on time. I got paid.

That doesn't seem so bad now.

Hours were 3:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Those hours were not a problem. Except for Friday. Not that I usually had anything going on Friday nights. My college boyfriend, Calvin, was still in Big Southern City. We didn't have the money to travel back and forth that much. Even with gas at 1985 prices, a 200-mile trip was daunting. 1985 prices went with 1985 wages.

One of my roommates was a drama major. She had a role in "Sweeney Todd" and my other roommate and I wanted to see her perform. I had listened when some co-workers and I were taking our break, drinking our cokes in the shabby little break room.

Taxpayers, you will be glad to know that although the IRS wastes money on putting together training manuals, they do not provide lavish break rooms for their employees. The whole office was grim, with a Brazil-like feel.

My co-workers were talking about their strategies for not returning to work Friday night after their supper break, which was an hour. "I'm just going to tell our boss that my car broke down," one said.

Another chimed in. "I have a friend who fell and hit her head in the shower once. I'll say that happened to my roommate and I had to take her to the emergency room."

In retrospect, there was probably no reason we couldn't have said, "Would it be OK to take the second half of Friday night off without pay?"

Actually, in retrospect, there was probably no reason I couldn't have gone to the play on Saturday night, instead. What was wrong with me?

But no. We had to be big fat liars.

I usually didn't leave work for supper. I usually brought something to eat and stayed in the break room. But the Friday that my roommate was in the play, I went home at supper time. I didn't leave anything at work.

And then I didn't go back.

I didn't even call.

Because my excuse was going to be that I had gone to take out the trash while I was home and had locked myself out of the apartment.

I have locked myself out of my car once in my life and I have never locked myself out of my home. Never. When I locked myself out of the car, I was lucky enough to be a college student (i.e., young and attractive enough to inspire gallantry) on the base where my dad was stationed. I walked back to the BX and asked one of the clerks to call the MPs for me. They came and unlocked the door. I owe you one, taxpayers.

But if I were locked out of my apartment (which I wasn't), then how could I call my boss to tell her that I wasn't returning to work that night? All I could do was wait for one of my roommates to get home and let me in. Oh the tragedy.

I went home. Met roommate #1. We went to the play.

I felt guilty the whole time.

As well I should have.

Shame on me. What kind of work ethic was that?

When I got to work on Monday, I found my supervisor and told her my lie.

She just looked at me.

She was no fool.

"I hope this doesn't happen again," she said.

I shook my head. "No, it won't," I promised.

And it wouldn't. I felt too guilty.

For the rest of my work life, I did not miss a day unless there was something genuinely wrong. I think I have taken five sick days in 14 years of corporate work. If I wanted to goof off, I just told my boss I was taking a vacation day. I don't lie very well.

In which I have a weird roommate who thinks the peeling tile in the bathroom is my fault

When I first moved to Temuco, the city where I lived when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I shared a house with two other gringas.

It took me a while to get used to using the term "gringa," i.e., female foreigner. In Panama, where we lived when I was in high school, it was a serious insult, on the level with the n-word. When I moved to Chile, I heard "gringo" and "gringa" bandied about casually and I flinched every time I heard it. I asked one of the Chilean Peace Corps trainers about it and she laughed, telling me it just means "foreigner" in Chile.

Not all words mean the same thing in all Spanish-speaking countries. When I was working in Miami, the company had marketing materials where they referred to one of the product features as a "pico." "Pico" means "beak," as in a rooster's beak, but in Chile, it is also slang for man parts. I tried to point out the error to my boss - they had had the translation done by a firm in Cedar Rapids because you sure can't find any translating agencies in Miami, but he just shrugged.

Back to Temuco. I don't remember how I found Bridget and Yolanda, my roommates. Bridget was a Scottish student majoring in Spanish and Portuguese. She was spending her junior year in Chile. Yolanda was American, working on her thesis in political science, I think.

Bridget and I got on like a house on fire.

Yolanda and I - not so much.

It was all three of us for the first month. The house was big and old, but had only two bedrooms. I had what was essentially a closet - a small room between the two bedrooms that didn't even have a door. I had a sleeping bag that took 2/3 of the width of the room. My feet almost touched the wall when I was lying down. I am not that tall.

I stacked my clothes on top of my duffle bag next to the sleeping bag. I had brought my boom box with me (why? why? why would I transport something like that all the way from the US to Chile by air?) and had some cassette tapes. That was the extent of my decor.

After the first month, Bridget left for a few weeks, so I got to stay in her room on an actual bed. Poor Yolanda. She was strange. I didn't help matters, though, by hosting a Peace Corps Christmas house party at the house. However, I was paying a third of the rent, so it was as much my house as it was hers. Still, having over a dozen people strangers - to her - in the house for three days was maybe a little much.

That was when I discovered that one can leave a turkey - a cooked turkey - out overnight and survive to tell the tale. We didn't have a refrigerator in the house - used appliances were hard to find and I sure wasn't going to buy a new one for a rental property. Yogurt, too, does not have to be refrigerated.

Yolanda and I didn't spend much time together. She creeped me out. When we would eat together, she would pick at her toenails, then reach for her food. With her fingers. I don't mind the picking of the toenails and I don't mind the eating with the fingers, but the two should never mix and they should definitely never mix when one is not eating alone. Toe picking is a solitary activity that should be followed by hand washing.

She had grody underwear. I know she didn't have much money, but I have never seen such dreary, gray, drab, elastic shot underwear in my life and I am known for my thrifty ways. But there has to be a line somewhere and that somewhere is underwear that looks like my grandmother wore it 50 years ago and then used it to wash the floor. Of the basement. After a flood.

But her nastiest habit was the way she wiped the bathroom floor with her towel. And then didn't hang it outside to dry. And then used it again. On her body.

We had a troublesome shower. It was completely inside the house, with no windows to the outside and no other ventilation. The showerhead sprayed water out of the shower and onto the bathroom floor, no matter how you had the showerhead adjusted. This meant the bathroom floor was wet after every shower.

I used a rag to wipe the bathroom floor, but Yolanda used her own towel.

Which, as I mentioned, she then left inside, where it did not dry but merely went from sopping to damp and then to horribly stinky. That bathroom reeked with her nasty mildewing towel.

I stayed in that house for about six weeks, then found new quarters. I didn't like living with Yolanda and once Bridget returned, I did not want to pay a full third of the rent to sleep on the floor in a closet. Bridget and I moved out to Maruja the Bruja's house and we were happy, except for the bedbugs and the shower that almost killed us, etc.

A few weeks after we had moved, Yolanda came to my office. She had moved as well, as she could not afford the rent all by herself. Her landlord was keeping her deposit to repair the peeling linoleum on the bathroom floor.

Yes, that is what happens when a floor is exposed to water for two years, which was the time Yolanda had lived in the house. The adhesive gradually loosened under the tiles and the linoleum curled up around the edges.

I would maintain that the landlord has the responsibility to ensure that the showerhead is directing water within the confines of the shower and not without, but if the landlord is not informed of the problem by the person who signed the lease and who has a financial interest in keeping the property as she found it, perhaps that problem belongs with the tenant.

Yolanda wanted me to pay for part of her deposit.

I had lived in the house for less than two months. She had been there for two years.

No, I told her. No way.

But it was my fault that the floor had gone bad, she said. The problem didn't start until I showed up!

I pointed out that the reason the problem hadn't shown up until recently was that it had taken two years of her getting the floor wet - without complaining to the landlord - for the problem to develop.

She was just like Crazy Carmen, the Washington DC landlady who blamed me for the leaky shower that caused the ceiling problems. I lived in Carmen's house for only a few months. I noticed that water dripped from the shower door onto the floor, so I bought a squeegee and squeegeed the door every time I showered. The other renter, with whom I shared the upstairs shower, did not squeegee. After I had been in the house for a month, the plaster under the shower became damaged. Carmen was convinced it was my fault.

Correlation is not causation, ladies. If I am squeegeeing the door and wiping the water off the floor, then I am not the cause of the problem. Or, better said, I have taken all reasonable steps to prevent the problem and the next step is the landlord's: repair the showerhead, re-grout the bathroom, whatever.

Yolanda claimed that it was me plus my many houseguests who had caused the problem. I laughed and told her that most of my Peace Corps friends were environmental education volunteers who did not believe in daily bathing. Even the business and municipal management volunteers were known to skip a day. Or two. Or three. It was cold in Chile! And we had to pay for the gas to heat the shower water. Nope. Not their fault.

Yolanda was furious, but I was not giving her $200 - of my $600 monthly stipend - to cover her deposit and her problem.

She had no way to compel me. I suspect that if she ever got into the subleasing business again, she asked for a share of the deposit up front. I would.

In which I don't let the popular boy cheat off my government homework

You know that we moved the summer before my senior year of high school. I went from a school full of military and embassy kids who were used to being the new kid and to having other new kids to a school with students who had known each other since kindergarten. Of the 648 students in my senior class, only two of us were new.

That is not a good formula for making friends, especially if you are a bit of a shy nerd.

But there were a few really nice people at school, so I wasn't completely miserable. Michelle W was so nice to me. She told me about the water safety instructor class she was going to take so she could teach swimming.

I was already certified as a lifeguard, which I think you had to be before you took the WSI course. I had done that in Panama, where I had my first lifeguard job and where I was either fired or chastised for reading on the stand but there was nobody in the pool! There was nobody at the pool except me!

Still, I will agree that my supervisor had a legitimate point - that reading on the lifeguard stand Is Not Done.

I wanted to teach swimming as well. It paid better than guarding. Guarding paid minimum wage, which was $3.25, I think, and for that money, not only did I guard but I also had to clean the poop off the floor of the boys' restroom. We had one summer where a bunch of kids thought it was really funny to defecate on the floor rather than in the toilets and we guards had to clean it up.

There is nothing like cleaning poop for minimum wage to make you think that maybe college isn't so hard after all.

The good thing about that job was that the snack stand sold Frito pie. Once or twice a week, I would treat myself to a Frito pie. If you don't know what Frito pie is, I feel sad for you. You slit open a small bag of Fritos - I have a large bag in my freezer right now that I bought as my Thanksgiving treat for while Primo was at his mom and dad's for Thanksgiving (as if not being with Sly and Doris wasn't enough of a treat) - pour chili on top, then garnish with chopped onion and shredded cheese.

If you eat that, you don't get hungry again anytime soon.

Michelle not only told me about the class, but she gave me a ride every day to class. I had neither a license nor a car. Then she got me the teaching job that I had for the next three summers.

There were a few other nice people - actually, I'm sure there were many nice people, but when you are a shy teenager who is one of the new people in school, everyone looks like the enemy. Better I should say that I did not make many friends and maybe part of that is because I didn't make the effort. Oh I hate to take any blame for anything, but this is a two-way street.

But I was new and I felt completely out of place - I hardly had socks! we had just spent three years in Central America! I wore sandals and flip flops to school every day. The fashions in the Canal Zone were not the fashions in San Antonio. Not that I had been fashionable in the Canal Zone, but there seemed to be more leeway in the Zone because there was such a big mixture of people: embassy kids, military kids, Zone kids, rich Panamanians, poor Panamanians.

I was academically out of sync as well. My high school in Panama had been staffed with teachers who all had masters degrees in their subjects. Texas teaching standards at the time were not so high. (Witness the yearbook advisors.) At the time, to be a high school physics teacher, I think the teacher needed only six hours of college physics. I had six hours of college physics and I was an English major.

OK, I was an engineer turned English major, but still. I would expect more than a college freshman knowledge of physics from someone who is teaching at the high school level.

I had already covered everything we were studying in Trig in the last six weeks of my Algebra II class. I should have taken calculus as my counselor had suggested, but I was scared of ruining my GPA. How dumb was that? When I got to college calculus, I didn't have a clue. Better to screw up in high school than in college.

My English teachers - I took three English classes that year - were excellent, though.

I didn't know how to be popular. I didn't know how to fit in.

And I did not help matters the day that I refused to let Kevin whoever cheat off me in government.

I always did my homework. I almost never had to do it at home because they just didn't give that much homework back then. I feel bad for kids now. They have all this homework and then they have to "volunteer." It was a lot easier to be a teenager in the late 70s. And the music was better. I think we can all agree on that.

It was a few minutes before class. The teacher was outside of the room. Kevin, who had never said a nice word to me and why would he? He was one of the Popular Boys - football player, etc - looked at me, looked at my homework sitting on my desk, and said, "Let me copy that."

I was not a fan of copying.

When I was in second grade, I let a classmate copy my workbook. The teacher found out and ripped my workbook in half. That will scare a little kid.

Still, despite my principles, I used to let Gerry, my 11th-grade physiology lab partner, copy my lab notes. We were dissecting the worm, the frog, and the pig together, so I justified it by telling myself it was joint work.

But I was really letting Gerry copy my notes and homeworks because I had a crush on him, not that I could admit it back then because my friend J had a massive crush on him and had for years, so she had first dibs.

But Kevin? I didn't have a crush on Kevin. He wasn't my friend. He hadn't escorted me to the stage at the National Honor society thingy even though Lisa S thought he should escort her and she didn't talk to me again after that, not that we had ever been friends. Even at our 20 year high school reunion, when I saw Lisa in the Ladies and said hi, she ignored me.

Bitch.

Kevin had never been nice to me. What was in it for me?

I put my hand over my homework. Kevin looked toward the door. "Give it!" he said.

I picked it up and pulled it toward me. "No," I said defiantly.

The girl behind me gasped.

His eyes widened.

"Bitch!" he hissed at me. His posse glared at me. I was dead to them.

The teacher walked in. I was safe. Kevin gave me one more dirty look before turning around. The rest of the week, he and his friends glared at me and whispered when I came in. Good thing there wasn't facebook back then. I did my best to ignore them, but I knew I had made myself a pariah.

The best I can hope for is that he ended up in prison.

What do you guys think?

Which pen name do you prefer? Helen Tennesen or Sylvia Stasek?