Meeting the Neighbors

As I went out to check on the horses one last time one windy evening in March of 1994, I noticed a reddish glow coming over the hill to the north of the house. It was 10:30 at night and I reasoned with myself that due to both the time and direction, it probably was NOT the rising sun. I wandered up the hill to investigate, and came about as close to experiencing heart failure as I ever have. A large wall of fire fueled by the 40 mile an hour wind, was racing across the dried grass land directly toward me. It was still about 500 yards from our property line, but was wasting no time in getting there.

“DaviiIiiIiiIiiIiiId!” I yelled as I ran toward the house. “DAVID!”
An irritated voice replied from within the house “Whaaaaaat?”
“Daviiiiiid, there’s a FIIIIIIRE!”
“Where?”
“It’s (pant) almost (pant) here!” I managed to say as I reached the house.
We had been warned that the fire department was all but useless out where we were. There were no fire hydrants – just a small stock pond on the eastern portion of the property which would likely be serving up boiled bass by the time any fire trucks arrived. Frantically searching through a mess of letters and scrap paper on the kitchen counter, I finally found the scrap of paper the last home-owners had left for me that simply read, “If you have any problems, call the Freemans at the following phone number.” The Freemans were our new “next-door” neighbors who lived three miles to our east. We had yet to meet them, but this seemed as good a time as any.

I dialed the number as quickly as I could, and after a few rings, a motherly female voice answered. Doing my best to be polite and introduce myself, I quickly filled Martha in on the details.

“Honey, I’ll git the boys and we’ll be right down.”

We then stood anxiously on the front porch to await the arrival of Martha and “the boys.” Reminiscent of some lost scene from The Beverly Hillbillies, an ancient, red pick-up truck came racing over the winding gravel road, kicking up a long trail of dust .There were a number of shaggy looking men standing in the back yelling “Yeeeeee-Haaaawww!” and clearly enjoying the thrill of the ride. As they grew closer it became apparent they were armed with shovels, pitch-forks and wide, excitement-filled smiles that showed various missing teeth. Ah, The Boys were here, and apparently ready to do battle with ogres!

The mostly rusted-out truck, which seemed to be held together by duct-tape and bailing wire, slid to a halt in our driveway with billows of dust emanating from muffler-less underbelly. “The boys” hopped out and introduced themselves as Brian, Mark and Hoss. Then Martha stepped out of the cab and shook my hand.
“Here we are!” she exclaimed.

Once the introductions had been made, someone noticed that the fire was cresting the hill and starting it’s short decent toward the house.
“Oh, BOY! Y’all got a REAL fire here!” called Brian from his new vantage point on the hill, where he stood precariously close to the offending flames.
Buckets were passed about and filled with water. Worn-out, denim Wranglers were submerged in the buckets. My husband was handed a jeans-and-water filled bucket and instructed to beat out the fire with the wet jeans. Shovels were slung over shoulders and the pyro-posse launched its attack.

Martha took me by the arm and led me toward the house, calmly asking how we liked our new place and wondering if we had any “little-uns” yet. Before I could answer or break down in tears from the stress, she went into a long explanation of which of The Boys had kids, how many, what ages and how many had already ridden a sheep in the mutton-bustin’ contest at the state fair rodeo.

If it had been up to me, I would have been outside beating flames into submission with wearable, wet weaponry, but Martha would have none of that. According to her, women shouldn’t do that sort of thing because they never knew if they might have a “bun in the oven.”

“It don’t do no good to burn your oven while you’re cookin’ your bun.” she stated wisely.
I must say her freely given insights and advice worked quite well to take my mind off my burning property. They didn’t make complete sense to me, but just trying to sort them out in my mind made the time pass quickly.

After finishing her lecture on prenatal health, she asked, “You wanna go out on the porch for a cigarette?”

I was sure it would have been very wrong to start laughing just then. I held my tongue as I accompanied her out onto the front porch where we could see a number of dark, smoky figures moving about, silhouetted by huge red and yellow flames. The acrid smell of burning hay and trees was oddly soothing, bringing back memories of campfires and ghost stories.

“Where are you going, hon?” Martha asked as I opened the front door to go back inside.
“I know I’ve got some marshmallows in here somewhere!” I called back as I ran toward the kitchen.

Not long after, another neighbor who had seen the flames showed up unannounced from the west bearing more shovels and jeans. For the next five hours the men fought the fire, keeping it away from the house and barn. Martha and I swapped stories as we took cold beer and more marshmallows out to The Boys. By three-o-clock in the morning we were all covered from head to toe with black soot and grime.

The men had back-burned the property and kept the fire from spreading any further to the south or west. According to Hoss Freeman, there were rocky ravines to the east which would stop the flames soon enough. House and barn saved, the tail-gates came down on the trucks and everyone took a seat with a cold beer in hand. In the moon light, all that could be seen of our soot-covered guests and saviors were the reflections of the moon’s glow off a random tooth when someone laughed or the twinkle in a friendly eye. The party finally split up around 4:30 in the morning when Martha told The Boys to “round up all those old Wranglers” so she could get them into the wash. I have always wondered if they were planning on wearing them again, or if they just needed to be clean for the next fire?

Through our adventure we became fast friends with the Freemans. Sometimes new neighbors knock on your door bearing cookies or casseroles, and others show up Hillbilly style in the back of a beat up pick-up truck to help save your homestead. It seems these days it’s just nice to have neighbors that care either way.

* Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the toothless.

What Back-Breaking Work Martyrdom Is!

After three months in ugly-shag hell, my husband and I found a wonderful house way out in the Kansas countryside. It was a 5 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a wrap-around porch situated on 25 rolling acres. There were outbuildings suitable for the horses and even a pond. The price was outrageously low at sixty-thousand dollars.

We purchased the house and set up the dates and times to do the paperwork and move in. Unbeknownst to me at the time the arrangements were being made, my dearest, kind, caring husband set up the move-in date for the day before he was to leave for a month on an army maneuver... in California. This probably would have been all right had we also hired some movers and a truck, but using “saving money” as an excuse, David decided that we could be self sufficient this go-round. The day before David’s departure, he kindly got a friend to help him move all the “large” furniture to the house, and set it in a large pile in the middle of the living room. That was it. He was concerned about tiring himself out prior to his army adventure, and did not want to over-do himself, poor baby!

Now I’ve always been the strong, self sufficient type, and even at this time I was unwilling to admit that I’d been over-loaded. I stubbornly moved forward, never complaining to my lawfully wedded Bozo-Head that he’d shafted me. Oddly enough, I felt that if I did, I would somehow be admitting a weakness that would make me less attractive to him. Blond moment?

Along with many boxes of books, clothes, dishes, knick-knacks and other items for the house, I was also responsible for moving 17 panels of metal pipe fencing that would be used to complete the broken barbed wire fence around the perimeter of the property. This was rather important before the horses could be turned out in our property. Each panel was 10 feet long by 5 feet high and weighed approximately 100 lbs. each. They had come with the house but had been left down in a wash-out area that was inaccessible to motorized vehicles. The closest I could get my truck was about 30 feet from the wash-out.

One by one I started moving the panels, slinging them over my back and walking sideways through the brush, up the embankment to my truck. At the pace I was going I realized I wouldn’t get the horses out of the barn before my husband got home. In a stroke of brilliance I started moving two at a time, and then three at a time. At 5’0” of height, I’ve always taken pride in my strength. I was really proud of myself when I was able to hoist 300 pounds of metal pipe on to my back and get it up a hill and into the back of my truck. Perhaps this wasn't the most intelligent thing I've ever done, but without my faux pas, I'd have less to write about.

I could practically hear an imaginary crowd of impressed and loving husbands cheering me on as I got the work done before nightfall. Everything on my body hurt, but I was strong, and I knew I’d be fine in the morning. I got the horses turned out and finished the evening by loosing consciousness almost immediately after collapsing into the water bed I had erected myself that morning.

I awoke the next morning and WHOAH! Stupid me, but I had unknowingly made the mistake of trying to move. There was definitely something very wrong. I could not move any part of my body without pain shooting through my back like a flaming bullet. I had no phone service yet, and no one to call even if I had. At the time, personal cell phones were almost unheard of and there was no true internet (not that we owned a computer, anyway). I was a million miles from nowhere (well, maybe 50 miles) and I was very, very stuck! I started to imagine my dried-up carcass being discovered by authorities the following month after my husband finally realized he hadn’t heard from me.

S-l-o-w-l-y I edged one leg to the side of the water bed. After about 20 minutes I had my knee bent over the side and I was gritting my teeth against the pain. Another 20 minutes and I had swiveled myself around enough to get my other foot over the edge. An hour went by and I was s-l-o-w-l-y moving my body to an erect position. With every movement, my breath stuck upon some knife seemingly wedged under my left shoulder blade. My only thought was that somehow I HAD to get myself to a hospital so I didn’t die panty-less and alone in my ugly night shirt.

Upon the success of the ginger removal of my body from its potential water-bed grave, I came to the gloomy realization that I now needed to figure out a way to get afore-mentioned panty-less butt into some sweat pants. The sweat pants took another 30 minutes, and then I had to conjure upon a creative way to get my heap of aching bones down the stairs.

Three hours after I awoke that fateful morning, I finally sitting delicately on the seat of my pick-up truck and driving down eight miles of gravel road on my way to the hospital. I can not tell you in words how driving down a gravel road feels on a back that’s already on fire. Not in words I want to have published, anyway.

I arrived at the Irwin Army Hospital semi-intact with a new goal of getting myself out of my truck and into the emergency entrance. I drove around for quite some time before concluding the nearest parking place was about a half mile away in the lower parking lot. The heck with that! In my gutsiest move yet I parked illegally in the fire lane next to the ambulance doors and wriggled gently out of the truck and on to the pavement. From there I scooted in a bent (or more accurately, broken) fashion up onto the sidewalk and through the doors of the emergency room. At the time it felt like the gates of heaven, as the relief of not being in my predicament alone any more swept over me.

I held my keys out in front of me as I slowly shuffled up to the receptionist.
“I need someone to help me out a bit. My truck is illegally…”
“We don’t offer valet parking, ma’am.” She informed me, gruffly.
At that point the flood gates opened. In broken sentences I attempted to tell her through my tears that I’d hurt my back and I couldn’t make the walk up from the nearest parking place. A passing doctor must have overheard and suddenly there was a flurry of activity around me. I was pushed gently into a wheel chair and taken directly back to a room. I can honestly say that in all my years as an army wife, that day I was given the fastest and best service I’d ever had at any army hospital!

Within an hour a doctor was tending to me. X-rays were taken and the conclusion was ominous. I had torn and separated a large mass of muscle around and under my left shoulder-blade. If this wasn’t bad enough, the muscles on the other side that were still attached were also injured and contracted, pulling everything that remained intact out of alignment. I was informed that I was to be admitted immediately, and might have to stay in some sort of traction for up to six weeks! Holy cow! Holy Horse! I had abandon my horses in a pasture miles from the nearest civilization and couldn’t recall if I’d given them enough water to survive the next day, let alone the next six weeks.

“I’m sorry. I’d love to stay, but I simply can’t right now.” I told the doctor politely. “My husband is at the desert training center for the next month in California.”
“Ma’am, I don’t think you understand. You’re hurt pretty badly and we’re not supposed to let you leave the hospital. We will have to have your husband sent home.”

After giving all the necessary information to the hospital staff, and worrying about how mad my husband would be at me, I finagled my way out of the hospital to just “feed and water my horses and dogs before returning.” I had strict orders to be back to the hospital by that night, and was warned that I left at my own risk.

As luck would have it, my phones had been connected in my absence. I got home and s-l-o-w-l-y fed my critters. I got back into the house just in time to receive a call form my dearest, caring husband all the way from California.
“What’s going on that you needed me to be pulled out to call you?” He inquired in an angry manner.
“I’m sorry.” I said quickly. “I seem to have hurt my back…”
“Do you realize what being sent home right now would mean for my career?” His tone was growing angrier by the word. “If I can’t complete this rotation, I might as well just forget about everything I’ve worked for in the last two years! Now I’m supposed to come home because you pulled a muscle or something?”
“I…”
“Whatever!” He practically shouted. “So what’s the real deal? Do you really need me to come home and ruin my career, or is this some sort of attention thing? I can not believe you had them call me here!”
“I guess I’ll be ok…” I stammered. I was a good girl and certainly did not want to be the cause of such a career ending move as he described. “I’ll be fine…”
“Great.” He said flatly. “Maybe if you REALLY need help, you can get the Jamesons to come help you once a day.”
“It’s 50 miles…”
“I’ll give you the number.”

Happy to have me out of his career’s way, my loving husband told me he loved me, and that he’d see me in a month. I now held the number in my hand for another army couple that lived 50 miles away, but had some knowledge of horses. All I had to do was pick up the phone and explain how stupid I was to some people I barely knew, and ask them to drive a 100 mile round trip to feed my horses so I could lay on my couch doing nothing when I was supposed to be unpacking the house. Great. Just yippee-kiaye great! I would savor every moment of this phone call. After the tears of frustration and loneliness passed, I gathered my courage up enough to call the Jamesons. I was happy to have some help, and having the neither courage nor heart to ask for more, I bravely told them I was sure that three or four days of help would be just wonderful!

Needless to say, I did not return to the hospital. I kept as still as I could on my couch for a few very lonely days. The T.V. got one station which I had no choice but to watch as I could not hold up a book for more than a few seconds. I made my own meals and shuffled down to the barn to tend the horses as best I could. I was miserable, yet proud that I could be such a martyr for my dear, loving husband.

What did I expect form my stoic actions? I expected to be praised at length when my husband got home for being so strong and good natured about everything. I expected to be held in the highest regard for my sacrifices. I expected that my husband would love me more and treat me better for being so understanding and supportive of his career. Did any of that happen?

Rolling on the floor laughing out loud! What happened is my husband realized he had an easy target. He found out that if he treated me poorly and with disrespect, there would be no ramifications for his actions. He learned that I expected to be treated poorly and I would not fight back. If I did put up any fight, I would back down quickly to keep the peace. I’m sorry to say it took quite a few years before I developed any senses to come to. Being a martyr is back-breaking work.

As I write this chapter of my life twelve years after the fact, I still feel the burning ache under my left shoulder blade that never quite healed itself. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I know now how that phone conversation should have been different.
“What’s going on that you needed me to be pulled out to call you?”
“You made the choice to leave me here by myself to finish moving heavy objects, and now I need lengthy medical attention. If you’re not at this house in the next 24 hours to help me, I won’t be here when you do get back. If your career is more important than our marriage and my health, you don’t need me to stick around longer than that, anyway. Do I make myself understood?”
I rather doubt he would have left me miserable and alone after that. I suppose it took a back injury and a lot of years for me to "grow a spine" but at least I have one now... albeit a slightly crooked one.

Mother Nature’s Revenge

I graduated from college and was then faced with the dilemma of what to do next. Taking my fore-mothers as my example, it seemed a logical thing to get married. In hindsight it wasn’t logical at all, but at the time I somehow thought it was something I was supposed to do. I couldn’t imagine life without some male figure making me miserable, so I said “yes” to an offer from a man who would become an army lieutenant in the October following graduation.

I had just a few months to throw together a wedding in the D.C. area where both my fiancé’s and my parents happened to live. Why rush in? Simple. He was to leave for Oklahoma in October, and everyone knows that good girls don’t live with men before they are married! I had dated him for eight months and I couldn’t just drive off into the sunset with him unless I was legally bound and gagged to him, could I?

I wasted no time and requisitioned my parent’s house for the reception, found a pianist and a caterer for the event and bought a size two wedding dress off a tiny window mannequin at the local bridal boutique for $200. The tailor cut the bottom three feet of fabric off the dress, sewed in a huge amount of stuffing where my breasts should have been and I was good to go.

In barely more than an instant I was married and off to Oklahoma. Oklahoma was… OK. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it. I learned my duties as a military wife (barf) and attended the officer’s wives meetings on occasion. I worked at a crummy local day care center for lack of “real” jobs in the area. My husband was only stationed there for six months, so it was barely worth sending out a hundred resumes to all the local establishments. In Lawton, Oklahoma, the busiest industry at that time dealt in dancers of an exotic nature, and was not exactly my stiletto of tea, anyway.

I had brought my horse Super Mario from college, and we acquired a Boston Terrier and two more equines while in Oklahoma. My non-horsey husband simply could not be outdone by his wife and had to have a steed or two of his own. At least the extra horses gave me something to do once I quit my job at the crummy day care.

After the Oklahoma stint was done, it was on to the lovely state of Kansas. All I knew of Kansas prior to moving there was that it was flat and that without prior warning one could be whisked off in a tornado to a strange Technicolor parallel universe inhabited by musical animals, vegetables and minerals. In its defense, certain good fairies with annoyingly high, wavering voices, have thought it wise to send lost girls back there, so it couldn’t be too bad, could it?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the north east portion of Kansas actually has rolling hills, real trees and no portals to other worlds. Even better it was the country life-style I had always longed for growing up in the D.C. and Philadelphia suburbs. It was easy to find our “starter home” with almost four acres and a barn. It was the first house we looked at and it was perfect!

The house was barely one thousand square feet, but it had everything we needed. We went to the closing and started signing our way through the sky-scraper of paperwork. I distinctly remember laughing upon finding out we could add flood insurance for a whopping twenty-five dollars a year. “You don’t need it,” the lender advised us but for that kind diddley amount we figured it would be fun to purchase just for the heck of it.

I had once seen an aerial photograph of our quaint little house and its land. I noted that our house was nicely nestled in a picturesque spot in the “Y” of the Blue River and the Missouri River. Other than finding the area strikingly lush, I never gave the geography of local irrigation a second thought until the summer of 1993.

Having tried my hand at car sales and selling men’s fragrances at a local department store, I had moved on to selling very “hip,” hip-hop clothing to adolescents and their forty-year-old parents with the Peter Pan syndrome. One afternoon I was exercising my brainpower to the max, making certain that all the team logo sweatshirts were folded in exactly the same way when the store manager called me over to tell me I had a phone call. As many of my co-workers were adolescents or suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome, there was a strict “No personal phone calls” rule that I was overtly breaking.

My manager stood glowering at me as I picked up the phone. “We’re being evacuated for a WHAT?” I slammed the phone back into its cradle and looked my manager in the eye.
“I have to go home now. The army reserves are evacuating us because there is going to be a flood.”
My manager clearly did not believe a word of it. It was made clear to me that I would most certainly be fired if I was making this up to go to a concert.

I rushed home to find military vehicles blocking off the roadways to my house. After showing my driver’s license to a uniformed male who probably didn’t shave yet, I was allowed to continue homeward. There were no outward signs of rising water what-so-ever, yet we started the task of moving everything off the ground. We stacked photo albums and books on chairs and the chairs on tables. We stuffed garbage bags full of clothing and necessities. We were in the process of throwing everything into the cars when we had to stop and wonder. Where were we going to take all this stuff?

We also had two cats, three horses and four dogs to move. The horses were taken to Kansas State Veterinary Center who had generously offered up stalls to animals misplaced by the flood. A veterinarian at the school offered to take our Great Pyrenees dog. That left us with just the smaller dogs and the cats.

The sofa and love seat were hoisted into the hayloft of the barn. All other hatches were battened down to the best of our abilities before the “get out” deadline hit. Making one last pass through the house was like leaving a dog at the vet to be euthanized. It was a beautiful evening when we said “goodbye” to our starter home.

Within days the house and barn were standing in four feet of sewage-laced water. It was truly an adventure canoeing home to visit the carnage. For safety reasons, no one was allowed to venture into the swollen river. Army Reservists were strategically positioned around the once-inhabited neighborhoods to prevent residents, thieves or thrill seekers from entering. We cleverly outsmarted the reservists by sneaking down to an empty corn field to launch a boat. Canoeing through corn stalks is odd enough, but it became truly surreal when we started boating past the houses of our neighbors and friends.

The first thing we noticed aside from our new indoor swimming pool was that the trees were full of every kind of critter imaginable. There were feral cats, mice, rats, bugs and even snakes seeking refuge in the branches. The flora was now about thirty percent fauna in my estimation. A kitten clinging to a Styrofoam cooler lid had washed up in a corner of the house by the back door. She had an insect infestation the likes of which no veterinarian has ever seen. There were grasshoppers in her ears and roaches covering her back. I wasn’t going to leave her there, but I sure as heck didn’t want to touch her! As cruel as it sounds, I upended the small, populated island with a stick and dumped the kitten and her residents into the water. As the kitted surfaced, I grabbed her and swatted off the remainder of the bugs. Though angry, frightened and wet, the kitten never thought about trying to jump ship on our way back to safety.

My husband and I had taken up temporary residence with some local college students. They gave us a room and allowed all our pets into the house too. After a few weeks when it became clear there would be no moving back to our own soggy house, my husband found the nastiest, trashiest, most dangerous trailer park in all of Junction City Kansas to move us to. The single-wide trailer was approximately sixty years old, but luckily it had been redecorated in the early 1970’s. The carpet was a lovely thread-bare, burnt orange, brown and green shag, though it more resembled the head of a burn victim. The trailer came fully-loaded, with holes in the floor (air-conditioning) and a leaky roof (shower).

I know somebody else in the trailer park had keys to our new abode because each day while I was at work, the sticky-fingered elf would pick a few things to permanently borrow. There were train tracks within fifty feet of the trailer, but luckily there were about thirty trailers in between ours and the tracks. That helped cut the noise down from the hourly trains. There were lots of children in the park, though I rarely saw any adults. Things like that always made me wonder.

We lived in that trailer for about three months. I say “we” but my husband was away for much of that time playing “soldier” with his army buddies. He assured me I’d be just fine, and even adopted yet another dog from the pound to “protect” me. The dog was huge, not house broken and barked non-stop for the entire three months. On a positive note, nobody ever complained about the noise. I doubt anyone could hear it over the roar of the trains!

Thou Shall Not Major In…

One thing I did not realize upon entering college was that of all the fun and interesting majors offered at a school, there were only a few acceptable ones to choose from. I’m lucky my parents set me straight, or I might have majored in writing, and according to them, lived in their basement for the next 25 years trying to write a book that could actually get published. How awful!

Finding the right major was a matter of trial and error. I came dangerously close to majoring in art near the beginning of my college career, and later had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the threat of the theater. My loving parents finally sat me down for an intervention. Let me share some of the wisdom passed down from generation to generation in my family so that you don’t make any of the horrible mistakes I might have made had I not been set straight.

Unless you wish to be a teacher and retire at the age of eighty-two, penniless and lonely, you must stay away from a major in English, History, Philosophy, Art, Theater, Dancing, Voice, Equine Studies, Women’s Studies, Art History, Classical Studies, Creative Writing, Film Studies, Photography… and the list goes on. Everybody knows an Art major can’t actually support herself by selling art. The same thing holds true for thespians, dancers, singers or writers. Evidently the lot of them subsists on dry crackers and water as they lurk in the dank basements of frustrated retirees.

It was a tough lesson for me to learn, but I’m certain my parents saved me from a miserable life withering away in their basement or behind a teacher’s desk. After long deliberation, it was decided I should major in Communications. A communications major could work for a television news station, a film company, a newspaper, a museum, a publishing house, or even as a teacher! The opportunities were endless, though in my opinion not exactly interesting.

The saving grace to the whole matter is that I loved college! I had unending choices of engaging classes, horseback riding was considered one of the colleges’ most successful sports teams, and I even explored Germany for a month and got college credit for it! I performed in almost all the theater productions and atop everything else, I graduated… early. That was a mistake! I should have stayed in school. I look back now and think of all the degrees I could have earned to compliment my Bachelor of Arts in Communications.

Fourteen years after graduation, I can honestly tell you I have never lived in my parent’s basement or been a teacher. I have been a stable manager, worked at a daycare center, sold cars, clothes and perfumes, been an office manager, a veterinary assistant, an inside sales representative, a Vice President, sold office furniture, been a secretary and run a home daycare. I have also never once worked a full-time job within my major. Well, maybe not until now. Go figure!

The Rust Ride

When I was sixteen years old and still going to high school, like any other new driver, my first priority was getting a car. My parents made it quite clear that I was more than welcome to own a car provided I earn and put forth the purchase price. Even back in 1985 the average new economy car was well out of monetary range of a high school girl with a job as a caretaker of horses. After a short search of used vehicles I turned up a true boon. It was quite literally a car owned by a little old lady, the mother of my parent’s mechanic, who drove it to the grocery store and back on occasion.

Thelma, as I named her, was a 1973 Chevy Caprice Classic with a huge 7.4L 454 V8 engine and only forty-thousand original miles on the odometer. Though she was originally blue in color, by the time I purchased her she was a bit of a “calico” with areas of crumbling rust on her body. Her front and back bench seats were covered in aging gray vinyl, yet each could comfortably fit four teenagers. Her trunk interior was an amazing 5 feet in width by 5 feet in depth. I happen to know those dimensions because, yes, I once got in the open trunk and found I could comfortably lay flat in both directions. She had more power than I ever needed, more space than I ever wanted and above all, she gave my parents a sense of confidence in allowing their precious daughter out on the roads alone.

I loved Thelma dearly and had her back window and seats decorated in all my childhood stuffed animals. With the front seat in its forward-most setting, I still was able to further accessorize with two pillows behind me to allow me to reach the pedals and one pillow under me so I could safely navigate my vessel. Thelma was constructed of seemingly indestructible iron that was apparently wrapped around the same kind of girders used to build sky-scrapers. She proudly wore a “Don’t Laugh, It’s Paid For” bumper sticker on her iron-clad rear fender and a faux-fur steering wheel cover. She was the perfect rolling, impenetrable teenage “hangout” with plenty of seating for chatting and a good radio to play all the most popular tunes. In short, she was an estrogen filled tank.

While in high school my family and I lived in a hilly portion of Pennsylvania. On my way home from the barn one day I was stopped by a red light at the bottom of a particularly steep incline. I became momentarily confused when a car pulled up next to me in the lane meant for on-coming traffic. Upon inspection I saw that it was a Porsche Boxter driven by a balding, middle-aged man who was gunning his engine. Ah. A mid-life, speed crazy imbecile was challenging me in an immature battle of rolling rivalry.

As the light turned green I threw my normal over-bearing caution to the wind and pushed down harder on the gas pedal than I had ever done before. Pulling about 2 G’s up that hill I left my stomach behind me and almost swallowed my tongue. Though a gravitationally disrupted stuffed dog had suddenly obstructed the view from my rear windshield, I knew from my side-view mirror that the cute, expensive, compensating-for-something car was trailing far behind me. I gained a sense of satisfaction and power from the experience. Though I was generally too nervous to try a stunt like that more than the one time, it was simply nice knowing I could blow my dust in someone’s face if I ever chose to.

On another occasion I was side-swiped by a full size pick up truck while on my way to work one summer morning. The sound was awful, but Thelma barely moved. The pick up truck and I pulled into a side street to assess the damage. The owner of the truck was dismayed to find that the brand new truck had sustained severe damage to the front and side panels and the frame had been bent from the impact. My dear Thelma had a bit of a scratch in some of the remaining paint on her front quarter panel.

Thelma ran on leaded gasoline and I used to joke that she got Gallons Per Mile instead of MPG. She never broke down and I made sure she received regular maintenance from the son of the lady who sold it to me. There were a few minor things that went wrong in my time with her. Her horn stopped working at one point and it cost me $15 to have it fixed. Another time I was told that she was not running well because her “vibrator” was broken. Evidentially this was one of those parts not found in today’s cars, but my Thelma had to have one to be happy. It raised my parents’ brows when they came across my receipt for a $48 vibrator. I explained that it was so expensive because it had to be industrial strength. I’m sure they were relieved to later learn it was for my car.

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the last chapter, the staff and students at my well-to-do private high school were not nearly as enamored with Thelma as I was. The girls that had cars generally had very nice, shiny, expensive ones. There were Broncos, Thunderbirds and even a few Corvettes. Poor Thelma stuck out in sheer size as well as aesthetic value. As her unpopularity grew amongst my teachers and peers, the hour at which I would arrive to school diminished in proportion. Instead of giving in to the blatant lack of consideration of the fact that I was the only student at my school that purchased her own car, I chose to park her in the choicest of parking spots. In my own silent rebuttal, I made sure that Thelma was given the place of honor each day.

One day in the winter of my senior year, Thelma earned her place, even among her most vocal of adversaries. That particular morning was rainy and cold. By the time school started a cold-front had moved into the area turning the rain to snow and the already wet roads into ice. By noon there was already a foot of snow on the ground and classes had been canceled for the rest of the day. Cars lined the ditches of most of the area roads and a travel advisory had been issued. Calls from stranded parents flooded the school office along with calls from the parents of girls with shiny, new cars. The general theme of the calls was the same. “Send my daughter home with that girl with the giant, blue car thing!”

Fourteen book bags were tossed in the trunk, and fourteen girls climbed into my giant car. Murmurs of “I can’t believe I’m getting in this thing!” emanated out from under embarrassed rolling eyes. Though the roads were treacherous, Thelma’s immense weight, wide base and low center of gravity served her well. My rout home that day was much longer than normal, and another foot of snow had fallen by the time all fourteen girls and I made it safely to our homes. Thelma did not once slip or slide, even down the steepest of grades. A few of my passengers were coldly polite, thanking me for the ride home while others seemed to take an interest in the huge boat and her excessive power.

The word must have spread because Thelma was never again on the receiving end of snide remarks made directly to me. In fact on one spring day the principal came to my class room to ask that I be excused for a few minutes. Thelma was needed to pull a car whose emergency brake had given way, out of a deep ditch behind the school. Thelma even received a standing ovation from the teachers and students who witnessed the excitement from classroom windows.

When it was time for me to leave for college, I learned that underclassmen were not allowed to have cars on the college campus. It broke my heart, but Thelma had to be sold. An advertisement was placed in the local paper touting all of Thelma’s wondrous attributes and she was sold within days. Where do giant, blue vehicular monstrosities go to live out their days? Thelma, for one, received a body transplant at an auto racing track. I am quite certain she had quite a wonderful time with her engine encased in a shiny, new body, blowing dust in the windshields of any cars that tried to compete with her.

It Only Gets Better After High School

Somebody once told me that high school should be the best years of a person’s life. What a load of crap! Perhaps if a person was the most popular kid in school and star of either the football team or cheerleading squad, completed by his/her own personal entourage of teeny-bopper admirers... then maybe. I, for one, can only wonder how existence could have gotten more dreary or tedious. How sad that statement would have been had it been true!

My life following high school has been filled with the most exciting of floods, fires, back injuries, uterine anomalies, divorces, and hives… all of which were far more entertaining than high school! It is only after cliques, SATs, driver’s ed. and high school graduation that we learn the most deliciously wonderful lessons life had to offer. The best part of the whole process is that these lessons are abundant, worthwhile, free, endless and quite unlike algebra, useful. Some of them are quite difficult and others may allow us to transcend to a point within ourselves beyond anything we ever thought possible.

The biggest lesson I learned in high school was that I was a socially inept looser, doomed to a life of dull mediocrity. There were thirty-eight of us in my graduating class at a private all-girls school outside of Philadelphia, and out of that, I think I called two of them my friends.

High school was a very interesting study in social behavior. Even with such a low number of students, the school still had the same kinds of cliques every large, public high school has. We had the Over Achievers, The Athletes, The Beauty Queens, The Street-Wise Tough Kids, The Brains and The Losers. Either one fit in, or one ate lunch alone every day.

It seems to me now that I was a one-of a kind. Of course back then it seemed to my peers and me that I was just plain weird. My passions included art, writing, theater and horses. I landed a role at a nearby college in a production of Peter Pan. The group performed each weekend for a number of months and then the show was extended to weekdays. We performed for area schools and later, traveled to schools well outside of our area. For me the best months I had in high school were the ones I was away performing with the group on a professional level. I received assignments from my school and completed them on the road. The few moments out of my week that I wasn’t performing, I could be found on the back of a horse, gallivanting about the countryside. Much to my chagrin, the show had to come to an end and I had to go back to high school. Oh, the horror!

In addition to my other oddities, I went to a girl’s Catholic school at the same time I was going through a “questioning everything” phase. As I was sort of a Presbyterian, I often chose not to attend Mass, to stay silent during certain prayers and to ask where all the dinosaur bones came from in religion class. This little quirk earned me the title of Class Rebel. Oddly enough, out of all the pious Catholic girls in my graduating class, I would count myself as one of the least rebellious I knew. Nobody knew me well enough to care what was hidden in the 5”0” frame toped with short, blonde hair. I believe I was voted “most likely to write a screenplay called ‘My Life at the Barn’” by yearbook staff members that had spent all of ten minutes conversing with me in our four year high school careers.

A few extra-special school memories come to mind. There was the time I got my hair cut rather short and styled in a spiky manner that was very “in” for the ‘80’s and worked well for my male role in Peter Pan. As I arrived at school, one of the teachers walked up to me and said in a honey-sweet tone “I think I liked it better before you had it cut.”
I was thinking “Ok, well I’ll just grow it back before the bell rings” as loudly as I could. Of course I just smiled and nodded like a good little girl.

This same extra-special teacher found out the next year that I regularly went down town to be on an ‘80’s American Bandstand type TV show called Dance Party USA (I hear tell that Kelly Rippa was on the same show but I can not personally substantiate those rumors). I was called to the office to discuss the matter. This teacher felt it was “inappropriate” to take part in such an activity. Dancing! What might come next… happiness and joy? If only she knew what some of the other girls in my class did after school. At least the whole country knew what I was doing and who I was doing it with.

With the exception of my wonderful high school English teacher who thought I could actually be somebody someday, the staff did not overly approve of my plethora of curious extra curricular activities and personal habits. Working at a horse barn in the mornings and coming to school smelling like an equine was unladylike. Early in my senior year I blatantly ignored the pleas to park my 1973 Chevy Caprice Classic elsewhere and by doing so I am sure I completely obliterated the school’s wealthy image. Traveling with a theater group practically made me a gypsy, and dancing on TV? Well, it was obvious I’d be going to hell someday. In my opinion I graduated from there in 1987.

As most other adolescent girls, I survived high school. I was never popular and I was never on the honor roll, but I survived that too. I was accepted early admission into Bennington College in Vermont because the faculty there was so impressed with my illustrious list of extra-curricular activities… unthinkable, I know. I decided to transfer after a semester and ended up at a women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia that I absolutely loved! Please note that the women at such a college will point out that there is a big difference between a girl’s school and a women’s college. High school was most definitely a girl’s school. I can honestly say from experience that it only gets better after high school.