My Life List at
age 14?
In preparation for reading the book The Life List with my book
group, I decided to flash back to 9th grade, in the fall of 1963.
(It's now 2 years later: we didn’t choose the book after all, but never mind!). These are notes I wrote, left undeveloped, as I'm hoping we'll get to that book some day!
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JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963
a Friday
My first basketball game as a JV cheerleader
Tall, geeky, not poised and outgoing in the same way Judy
and Cindy were. Kay seemed even more reserved than I was—wiry, stiff, how did
she and I get to be cheerleaders?
What would have been on my Life List at that age? I would
have been madly in love with an older boy, a sophomore or junior. Boys in our
class were immature and short. And greasy.
I aspired to be like Sharon Walker, knew I couldn’t reach
the status of her best friend Mary Atwood. What I thought Mary Atwood was, that
is. Sharon was the better choice.
I still had a decent relationship with my mom, was still
trying to adjust to my dad’s constant presence at school, Reps! (instead of
Pepsi) machine in lounge, was
friends with my brother Mark but he was starting to be the family hero and it
ticked me off. My sister Mary Jo was 8, we shared a bedroom. She was good
friends with Mary Ellen O’Keefe and the two of them were fine to have around.
Mike was a baby—only 2—and I was crazy about him. I had to babysit a lot, which
sometimes frustrated me, but mostly I loved it. Cindy thought my mom counted on
me to babysit more often than she should, and she was probably right, but I loved my little brother.
I don’t know that I ever consciously considered a plan for a
career, marriage, and a family. I just expected it would happen, but not
that I’d have to do anything intentional to promote it. I didn’t think about
college yet, just about high school and homework and friends and boys and
sports.
We didn’t have girls sports teams in Minnesota yet, but I belonged to
GAA, as did most of my friends. Peggy Anderson was the hotshot sports queen,
esp. in basketball. Judy Turbenson was a fireball, too. Cindy played well, meticulous and deliberate. I was
tall and a poor shot. Half court basketball was the thing back then for girls,
and despite that, we played hard and always ended up red-faced and panting. We
played ball against big GAA squads like Wykoff and Preston (I think Preston).
It was a big deal to get to go to an “away” game, and our entire season against
other towns was no more than 3 or 4 games, including both home and away. Usually it
was intermural stuff. Sometimes boys came to watch, and that was uncomfortable, but exciting!
My hair was darker brown than it is now, but lightened in
the combination of summer sun and chlorinated pool water. It was short, choppy looking, and I
had ugly glasses that were pointy. I felt incredibly geeky all the time. My
braces were finally gone in 8th grade, so at least I had nice teeth.
Top teeth, anyway. Dr. Wentworth,
my Rochester orthodontist, closed suddenly—probably retired, I don’t
remember. I had a top retainer,
but no bottom one, and so some of my bottom teeth moved out of alignment. I’m
only writing about that because it was irritating to my parents (and to me)
because they could barely afford getting braces for me in the first place. I accidentally threw away my top
retainer one night when I was working at the A & W a couple of years later.
In order to eat, I had to take it out, wrap it up in a paper napkin, and keep
it safe in my carhop apron. Only, when I cleaned out my apron later in the
evening, I threw out what I thought was a wadded up napkin….
This might have been the time that I still had my red
sweatshirt with the cut off sleeves. I loved that sweatshirt and wore it all
the time, with a white button-collar oxford shirt under it, or a long-sleeved
white turtleneck. Eventually it developed holes in it from all the
wear, until one day when I went into the big drawer in my closet to get it out to
wear and it wasn’t there. Mom told me she’d thrown it away because it was such
a wreck. I am sure I glared at her for weeks. What would I possible wear now??
Classes in 9th grade are hazy. English—not sure,
Math (Dad was my teacher for Algebra that year, then, Geometry, Algebra 2, and
Calc in succeeding years. At least I had a good math education), Social
Studies, PE (always Margot Anderson. When I finally learned what a lesbian is,
I was sure she was one. We all thought that, but apparently not. Eventually she
got married and had a family. No
guarantee, but it started to look more like we were wrong when that happened. I’ll have to write down later what I remember about Margot helping girls who
were deep in adolescent angst, and definitely lesbians, although as I said, I knew nothing about what that meant at the time.
PE is so memorable, not because of anything physical that we
did that I loved or hated, but for other things. For one, the PE uniforms that
were white pullover woven cotton tops, short-sleeved, a pocket on one side of
the chest, too short, and not comfortable to move around in. Shorts were dark
blue, woven cotton, too short, and not comfortable to move around in. We each had a PE number assigned to us,
based on alphabetical order, so we could number off for various games and
activities. And, of course, to let Margot know we’d taken a shower. I think we
had 12 minutes from hitting the locker room to heading out the door for the
next class. Maybe it was more, but it seemed short. We had to strip out of our
gym clothes, take a shower without spoiling our hair-sprayed hairstyles, wrap
up in a towel, give Margot our number (which she checked off a list attached to
the clipboard that seemed to be attached to her), get dried off, dressed, and
on our way. We could always tell who had her period, because that was a reason
not to take a shower (or to instead use the private shower stall instead of the
concentration camp mass shower we normally used). Of course, it required
announcing “23 M” which meant, “I have my period and now you all know it,” and
Margot would circle the number in red. Lordy. I remember Shirley Hinze having
her period several weeks out of every month. Ha ha!
Besides basketball, which was fun to play in PE—oh by the
way, it was GIRL’S PE. No co-ed back then—I remember track and field the best.
Soccer was good, although I wasn’t very good at it. Again, Peggy and Judy were
the superstars. Track was fun,
too, although we didn’t get much training with hurdles so we knocked them down
a lot. I truly believe Miss
Anderson wanted girls to have a good experience with PE and she made us work
hard. I didn’t appreciate it so much then, but later I realized we were lucky
to have someone who didn’t let girls get off the hook and sit around acting too
wimpy to participate.
That's what I've got for now. If we read the life list book, I'll see what else I can dredge up from my 9th grade year!
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