My mom loves to tell a certain set of stories about me over and over. This is one of them: on my first day of first grade I came home from school and drew a diagram of the classroom. My mother already knew I was the smartest kid in California, but this was honest to God proof.

What do you think?

Frankly I’m more impressed by my ability to imagine my whole family in ballet costumes. I’m pretty sure my mother didn’t have a tutu. Thankfully I didn’t give my dad one. Poor Alice, no arms.

Both of these items were pasted into my scrapbook, together with my first grade teacher’s bio. My mother was nothing if not thorough. Please note the M.A. from Stanford. Palo Alto has been proud of its great teachers for generations. I remember Mrs. Clark vaguely but fondly.

I bet if I look I can find more photos. Wouldn’t that be scary?

I grew up in a three-story apartment building in Palo Alto, California – a rectangular concrete building that still stands at the corner of Grant Avenue and Ash Street. Today, that part of town is crammed full of chic restaurants and expensive condos, but in the 1960s and 70s it was just a little neighborhood, tucked into a sleepy college town.

The school bus stopped at the corner, alongside the church parking lot. We were a raggedy bunch of kids, all elementary school ages, all white. Girls wore dresses, boys wore short pants. There were plenty of black kids in Palo Alto, but not on our block. My elementary school, Escondido (still standing on the edge of Stanford campus), was overflowing with kids from all over the world, their parents students at the university. I had friends from Finland and Iran, as well as the son of George Schultz, then Secretary of Labor for President Nixon. (That’s a story my mom always told when she wanted to impress people. I bet he doesn’t remember me, if it’s true. I don’t remember him.)

I remember standing in line at that bus stop, small kids first, bigger kids at the back. I remember other kids riding their bikes around the church parking lot; they must have been too young for school, so why were they on bikes? I remember some serious beehive hairdos and plaid coats, some moms with curlers in their hair under big scarves. I wonder, in all honesty, what I really remember and what’s just a dream.

The bus was huge. A hundred kids could fit in it. Green vinyl bench seats, rough and tacky. Big heavy glass windows that opened from the top. I think I fell asleep on a school bus one time, returning from a field trip, and talked out loud in my sleep. Other kids laughed at me. Can that be true? It makes another good story.

I’m pretty sure the bus was real. Nothing that big could ever be forgotten. Today you couldn’t find a school bus in Palo Alto if you offered a million dollars. That’s a shame. They were the great dinosaurs of my youth.

Author’s Note: The photo at the top was taken in September 1966, on my first day of first grade, and that bus was taking us to Garland Elementary, not Escondido. My memories of that vacant lot paved over as a parking lot must be from later. And clearly, it was the big kids at the front of the line, not us little squirts. That’s me, short brown hair, light green coat, looking over my shoulder at the photographer. I think that’s Lisa O.’s mom with the camera; with her back to the sun, she’s clearly a more experienced photographer than (probably) my mother, taking this picture facing directly East. It was my mother, however, who printed this from the slide and gave it to me the day I graduated from college.

No drugs. No alcohol, even if we were over 21. (We weren't.) No female visitors after 11 on weekdays or midnight on weekends.
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You always see stories and comic strips about teenage boys eating refrigerators. I was a skinny teenage girl, and this is what I ate on any given day:

7 a.m. – Raisin Bran

10 a.m. – Frozen/thawed/reheated bean burrito from the snack shop at school

12 p.m. – Brown bag lunch by Mom: Two (2!) sandwiches (one lunchmeat with cheese, one PB&J), bag of chips, chocolate chip cookie, apple

2 p.m. – Snickers bar from the corner pharmacy where I worked after school

3:30 p.m. – A&W Teen Burger while out on my rounds delivering prescriptions for the  pharmacy

6 p.m. – Dinner (for example: meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas, frozen fruit cocktail sliced into rounds)

 

8 p.m. – Ice cream or more cookies, or both

 

YUM!

When I was a senior in high school, my mother was balancing a full-time job as an assistant principal, being a mother to me, my 14-year-old brother, and my 4-year-old and 3-year-old sisters — and being the wife of a man who didn’t help out a lot.

She is an amazing woman, my mother. But that’s a topic for another post.

The day I was supposed to move into my residence hall as an entering freshman coincided with the day she had to start school for the fall. She absolutely had to be at her school. I absolutely had to be at college.

So, she found a solution. She dropped me off a day early.

This was no little feat. She had to convince the college to let me arrive a day before the 200 other members of my freshman class arrived and to let me sleep in the dormitory before anyone else was there. And she had to let go of the pain and anguish it caused her to do this.

I had no idea, and I’m only realizing now as I write this, how difficult that had to be for her (note to self: Call Mom and thank her).

To me, it was a great adventure. We packed up the powder-blue Datsun station wagon with everything I’d been collecting for at least a year in advance of Going To College. I had my new electric, Smith-Corona typewriter from my grandparents, (the entire desk shuddered with each keystroke), a red West Bend Hot Pot for heating water for Top Ramen or hot cocoa or tea, a few stuffed animals (I was still barely 18), a poster for a bicycle race that I didn’t get to go to (but that Greg LeMond raced in), a new blue Swingline stapler, and a no-name plastic, battery-powered pencil sharpener from my brother. I had the stereo my stepfather blew my mind by giving me and the handful of records I’d acquired (an odd mix from Barry Manilow to Bartok).

Mrs. Hayes, the resident director, met us on the brick steps of the Mediterranean-style building erected around 1908, and invited us in. It was the most beautiful place I had ever lived. It felt like a villa – my own private villa. The living room featured a large fireplace, two long sofas and a grand piano. Above the fireplace hung a dark portrait of the gentleman whose name the hall bore. Off of the long wood-floor hallways, covered in carpet runners, were a small library and a sitting room. Down one of those hallways, turn right and enter into a trio of rooms, all singles. One of them mine.

Mrs. Hayes’ white hair was still “done” at the beauty shop, and she wore a plaid skirt, white blouse with a peter pan collar and cardigan sweater. About her was the faint whiff of cigarette smoke and coffee. She wore sensible shoes. As for her age, she could easily have been my mother’s mother.

Mrs. Hayes left us to get to business. My mother made my bed, with new twin-bed sheets (I had a double bed at home) and a lime-green corded bedspread. She arranged my stuffed animals and throw pillows. I unpacked a little.

I honestly don’t remember much more about that day. I’m not even sure I remember my mother leaving me. I was so excited to be at college, I was not the least bit afraid of being in the old residence hall alone (with no other student), and I was secure in knowing that my mother wasn’t dumping me off.

I hadn’t cried on my first day of kindergarten, and I didn’t cry on my first day of college. But I suspect my mother did.

Come to think about it, this post is about what an amazing woman my mother is.

My grandfather died when I was a kid, but he gave me a love for the game.
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