First Day
First day
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My twelve year old
heart was pounding despite lying on the bottom of my numb, late-blooming body.
My Mom’s Grecian gray 59 Chevy station wagon matched the color of my state of
mind as the journey to my new school was nearing the dreaded end. We had hit
the driveway, rolling past the convent and the classrooms of Our Lady of
Guadalupe were in sight. Tears rolled down my face as my worst nightmare was
taking place. It was the culmination of several worried months in the
kid-golden Summer of 1959. First there were whispers, then grumbling, threats,
crying and finally the irrefutable decision by our tyrannical father to rip out our
happy American dream childhood and move to Orange county. Our blue collar suburb was no longer good
enough for this family on the illuminated highway , later called white flight
toward the south. It might as well have been Dante’s “vestibule of the futile”
for any of we children or my pouting Mother to stop this uprooting. So the normally sweet final weeks before
school were drenched in melancholy as this horror unfolded. Up until that day I grew up in an archetypal
baby-boomer neighborhood. There were kids everywhere and by the time we all
learned our lessons from Walt Disney we were allowed to roam free as long as we
were home for dinner and did not get grass stains on our school clothes. For me
that was kind of easy as we wore intentionally lame uniforms that were not to
be seen on the playground exactly one half block from our house. A boy’s wardrobe in that time was fairly
simple and was comprised of two sets of uniform corduroy pants, two matching
beige shirts, a pair of Billy the Kid levis, a pair of Billy the Kid levis cut
off at the knee and a couple of t-shirts, some underpants and socks as needed.
Catholic school did not allow tennis shoes so you had hard shoes for that and a
pair of Keds for the rest. I was thought to be odd since I always insisted my
shirt and socks matched. It hardly mattered since boys ended up dirty at day’s
end and my sisters always looked like they had just come out of the bath.
I stood on top of
the world when I turned 12 in August of that year, having made the
all-star-team in Pee-Wee league and had a crush on a girl who looked like a
mini-Marylin Monroe and a boy who looked like a junior Audie Murphy, my
favorite actor. I was at a cross-roads
but it turned out I only liked the boy for his really cool baseball hat from
the Kansas City A’s. The girl went on to
break many hearts and got pregnant in her sophomore year in High School. None of this mattered since we were leaving
this elysian valley and moving to hell next to a smudge-pot stinking “house of
the future.” On the third morning in the nouvelle house in La Habra I started 7th
grade at this new school where I was certain everyone would make fun of me for
having an egg-shaped head. It was one of my brother’s failed arguments on why
he should not be jerked out of his Senior year in high school where he had
access to my big sister’s comely friends. The guy had it made.
Now, I sat in the shotgun seat of the station wagon nearly paralyzed with fear mixed with misery. My Mom tried to console me, I think by cursing my father but eventually I opened the door of that hunk of Detroit steel and headed for the last door on the right. It was a new school so there was no 8th grade yet, at least not until my class matriculated from 7th. At least we were to be top dogs for two whole years. I literally floated toward the door and everyone was in their classrooms so when I opened the door some 30 kids stared at me wondering how such a shrimpy kid could be in grade 7. Was I lost?, wasn’t grade 4 on the other side of the cinder block prison? I was introduced, I took my seat and became number 31 in Sister Mary Anthony’s class. The first week was nothing short of the Hanoi Hilton for an agonizingly shy late-bloomer who never had to fit in before. In my previous iteration I was just "one of the Creasons" but out in the orange fields I was a just "the new kid."
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