The Early Years...Straight "A"s!...

...in penmanship! Seriously though, I did get As in penmanship my entire school career. I was, after all, your typical first-born perfectionist. I still am. It's a sickness.

I soon found out in grade school that my parents really didn't care much about what I did in school. Lacking attention at home, I enjoyed the attention I received from my teachers so I performed well...for a while. I did get all As throughout the primary years but then around 4th grade I started to fall off. Two things happened. First, there was some homework. Forget about it. Second, that was about the time I took over almost complete responsibility at home - cleaning, cooking, laundry, ironing, you name it - thus, forget about the homework getting done! I barely made it out of grade school and on to Junior High School. In my day, Jr. High began with 7th grade. My grandson informs me that nowadays, you would be considered a "tween", or as he prefers, "double digits".

I loved art from the very beginning. Even if it was just writing. I remember getting in trouble (when wasn't I?), at home for deciding to arrange my goldfish on my nightstand in a very creative way. (It wasn't a very good outcome for the fish.) Anything I could "arrange", cut (as in hair), color, paint, etc., was. I actually began my 32 year career with my last employer as a Graphic Designer in their in-house graphics and printing dept. For you older folk, remember the first electronic typesetters where you could only see the code on the screen for your work until you printed it out? We were actually code writers and didn't know it. You had to see beyond the code and imagine what something would look like as "bold" or "centered", etc., even though it didn't appear that way on the screen. All you saw was the preceding code and then the word it applied to. Of course you had to "turn off" the code after the word too. I digress.

Of course I only got to walk across the street to school for kindergarten before my parents decided to move a town away, so the rest of the grades in that school meant a very long walk for very short legs. And, there was that walk home and back for lunch time as well. Those were the good ol' days of frostbite and frozen tears. Most lunch times, my mother was still in bed or had just gotten up. My regular for lunch was chocolate ice cream (which was supposed to be only for my mother, but who would know?), in some milk. I watched Bozo Circus until the Grand Prize Game and then I knew it was time to walk back to school. I met Bozo once. I don't think he liked kids...