the beginning

I was born on July 5, 1960 – the day after Independence Day. I have always joked that I was a dud, since I went off a day late.  Because I’m a shy person, people always express sympathy when I say that, like they need to make me feel good about myself.  It’s just a joke.

I am not what you call beautiful.  My freckles were always too few to be cute and too many for my skin to ever be defined as “alabaster” or “porcelain.”  Now the freckles have been joined by age spots that beg to be ruled out as melanoma. I have a widow’s peak - - on the back of my head, which is called something much less glamorous than widow’s peak, cow lick.  I don’t have dimples that we can talk about and my eyes are not blue.  I’m not sure why I always thought it would be better to have blue eyes.  Now that I am all grown up (and out) I realize that my brown eyes are just fine, and they go nicely with my brown hair.  Well, okay, it was brown and now it is Pravana #4.

I don’t have a lot of childhood memories, mostly just shadows of things I almost remember and a sense of something good.  I’m sure there are reasons why the smell of water from a sprinkler hitting the hot sidewalk makes me feel happy, or why an open window on a summer evening with the aroma of fried food wafting out still seems to call me in for dinner.  I remember parades, car trips and birthday parties.  I miss the first day of school, with new shoes and pony tails and always, that hope of something great about to happen.  There were things I could always count on, like my parents always being where I expected them to be and doing the things that I knew they would be doing.  Mom always packed lunches and cooked dinners. She cleaned and sewed and did sweet things for every birthday and holiday.  I got my wit and sometimes naughty sense of humor from her.  My dad worked.  He left for the woods before dawn cracked and got home just before dusk.  After his shower and dinner he worked on other things – building models and later in his life he restored antique cars.  I always knew I could find dad in his shop grinning over his latest project.

Life isn’t like that now – life isn’t small town idyll as it was when I was growing up.  It is diluted down to something most of us hardly recognize