Near-by the sound of the river chuckling over rocks is somehow soothing. I can feel the cool breeze on my face, and the shadows of the leaves above dance on my closed eyelids. Finally I have time to reflect, to look back on the winding path that led me to this moment.
My mother had always taught me to plan ahead. She instilled in me the need to think about where I was going and to design the paths I needed to follow to reach my destination. When I was ten years old my father disappeared. Well at the time I thought he simply disappeared. Years later I learned he had taken off with a woman he met at the PTA. But when I was ten he simply disappered. My mother picked herself up and suddenly I was a latch key kid in a neighborhood of two parent families. The other mothers watched out for me when I came home from school each day. During the summer I would spend a month at camp and a month visiting from neighborhood home to neighborhood home. I never knew I attended camp on a scholarship or that our church paid a small amount to various families to keep an eye on me while my mother worked.
Once I reached Junior High School my mother moved me into the public school system. I think the church would have continued to "sponsor" me since we were still struggling financially, I was a "good kid", and I was a VERY good student. But my mother wanted me to move out of the sheltered world I lived in undoubtedly because she was well aware she could not continue to keep me safe from reality.
I hated my first few months at Bay Ridge Junior High School. The other kids had all gone through elementary school together and knew one another by sight if not by name. Suddenly I had to decide what to wear each day instead of pulling on the same old uniform. That had seemed an exciting change until I actually had to do it. The first couple of weeks I struggled to fit in, often wearing the "wrong thing". Skirts when the other girls wore jeans, shirts tucked neatly in when the other girls wore loose tee-shirts.
