image 74 My fifth grade school picture, rocking a denim jacket and Berg Eltz t-shirt.

It’s interesting that diving things up by year gets torn asunder by the school year straddling two halves of each year. Once again, we are starting the new year 1988 with the summer months. This reflects on how profound the school year is on kids and their perception of time. While I could do some of it, trying to remember what happened on what side of January first each school year is extremely difficult.

In the summer of 1988, one year after West Germany, we undertook the second cross country drive to Canton, Ohio. We hit up some of the hits from the trip before, staying in Park City for sure this time. Park City, Utah is a ski resort town just up the interstate from Salt Lake, we found during our travels over the year that one can make it from Davis to there in about twelve hours. Why is this important, well if you are travelling during the summer as we were, all the hotels were discounted and were going to be considerably nicer than the other ones we stayed at along the way.

Saying hi to the Little America emperor penguin on the billboards again. This trip, however, would be the year we stayed at a Little America on the way back home. Where I got to see the big stuffed emperor penguin himself finally. Little America probably wasn’t as wonderous as I thought it was with its cute penguins, but it was large and after driving through the country a few times it was awesome to finally see where these billboards led.

Figure 1 A Little America billboard and the inside of the Best Western in Park City, UT.

Once again the parts of this story that deal with Canton are hazy. I am pretty sure they moved into a different house by this trip, it was bigger and a bit nicer. But what we did there still just not registering with me. Especially after the Germany trip with all the pictures, I am puzzled by the lack of documentation we have of this trip.

However, we drove with Cindy’s family to Washington D.C. during this trip. That I remember. We stayed in Bethesda, Maryland and were treated to Beetlejuice being the movie on the movie channel and watched it quite a few times while we stayed.  I know strange to drive from Ohio to D.C. and then the first thing you recall is sitting in a hotel room and watching a movie. But one has to remember Melanie and I are ten, which was kind of one of the wheelhouse’s demographically for that movie, and that means Cindy is just in her late 20’s which is another wheelhouse demographically. So that was an activity deal with it.

When we were out and about, we split into groups, my group did the capitol building and the Smithsonian all day. I think we did the Air and Space and Natural History museums, while other’s adventured to other parts of the mall. I remember liking the trip enough that next year in the fifth grade I did my state report on Maryland. Even though we were just as close to Virginia.  I guess Virginia is a commonwealth and therefore cant be done as a state project! Take that lovers! Anyway, back on track.

I don’t remember who my group was, but I am guessing it was Me, Dad, Rich and Will, especially considering we pick the capitol itself then airplanes and dinosaurs as our museums. I know we were not in Mom’s group because her priority was seeing Dorothy’s red shoes, which is in a branch of the Smithsonian that doesn’t deal with monster bones and spaceships.

But Mom and the Wizard of Oz and these trips is a theme. Through all the years we made a few trips to see Cindy and Rich that required extensive driving. During one of the trips, most likely this one, in an era without electronics we can run in the car, Mom decided to read while we raced down i-80. In between Park City and Iowa and beyond, Mom chose to read The Wizard of Oz.

It makes sense to chose that book and want to see those shoes though. The Wizard of Oz was sort of the Star Wars for an earlier generation. It was the big movie that changed things for a lot of kids and it just so happened that it came out around the same time Mom was born. So like my childhood early on had a lot of Star Wars, I feel she probably had a lot of Dorothy and Toto. Probably helped that her big sister was a Dorothy too.

So that was a big-time killer on this trip. She would just read and read as we went down the road, with one little hiccup. Mom decided one day that Dad was getting to punchy driving down the road and demanded he pull over so she could drive. In our family this is a valid concern, a few years prior, my brother Steve, ignoring his body’s messages had continued driving home fatigued, feel asleep behind the wheel and luckily was only punished by losing a couple front teeth.

Mom would then never stand for fatigued driving and even into my forties before she died was willing to get on the phone and help a tired driver stay awake on a late night drive home. And that day Dad did need a break. On these trips he would drive almost uninterrupted for twelve hours. He did sort of love it, but other than gas fill-ups and sometimes a McDonalds break he would just drive and drive. On this day he was so tired that by the time he got in the passenger seat he had somehow procured my Garfield stuffed animal that was on the trip with us, and with a large grass stock he had plucked off the side of the road was amusing himself by tickling the cat’s nose and making it sneeze.

He needed a rest, probably because the day before our perfect twelve hour trip to Park City had been interrupted by a flat tire just off the salt flats in Utah near Saltair, which is a pretty low population area of the country outside of Salt Lake City. That got us in late and I think got Dad maybe a little too punchy the next day and in need of a nap.

I just remember Mom laughing at the sneezing and of course how loud the interstate was while we were waiting to get someone to help us with the tire. I also feel I should mention Saltair, which is an interesting landmark coming into populated Utah and was always captivating to see off in the distance while traveling. As a kid I just always thought it looked cool out there on the Salt Lake without really knowing a lick of its history.

Figure 2 Saltair in a couple diffrent states of its being.

Big Detour there. Mom’s group in D.C. then had to go by and see Dorothy’s shoes which was Mom’s main goal. It was a long day of Marching around. And splitting up seems so normal these days, that the idea of splitting up a family for sightseeing coverage doesn’t seem that hard with cell phones and all, but this is 1988, we had to keep making sure we got to meeting places to check back in at certain times, It was a huge day of walking and one couldn’t linger as to not get behind schedule.

It was during this trip that I think Mom and Dad did some House family genealogy on the way home, along with the Little America stay being on this leg, which meant we came back a different way then we came, in other words our first adventure off the great interstate 80. This detour led us into Arkansas where we met some distant cousins of Dad’s. Our something like that, it was an interesting thing there. We got to Arkansas and started exploring graveyards for headstones of distant relatives my Mom had been researching.

That’s not terribly exciting for a ten-year-old. Instead, I was busy in complete shock of the dense foliage. I had never been somewhere this swampy before and it seemed like another planet almost. Then there was the supermarket we stopped off at to resupply. Piggly Wiggly? I was used to names like Safeway and Albertson’s, Piggly Wiggly seems like something a kid in my class might come up with as a name and be told to take the assignment more seriously.

It was during this that somehow, possibly by going through a phone book at the store itself, Mom and Dad called a house they believed was owned by some relatives of Dads. And before I knew what was going on we were back in the car and we visited them for a couple hours. Strange days when a California family calls you up on a summer afternoon says they are Lavern’s little boy and they say come on over.

I don’t think we ever talked or say them again, but for a little bit we were their family. Then we paraded through more graveyards looking for headstones of long gone and forgotten relatives. It was during one of these treks that they found the headstone they were looking for. I cannot recall the name, but Mom wrote a small paper on him for the family eventually, and I remember his middle name being Cincinnatus. Well look here, while typing this I realized I had the book at my desk.

That itself is a story, since my copy was in possession of an ex-girlfriend who unknowingly had it for a couple of decades. So his full name was Thomas Quintiu Cincinnatus House, I just remember the Cincinnati part, cause that struck me as being silly like the Piggly Wiggly. The Headstone itself was the highlight though. It was decorated with marbles in the crevasse made by each letter in the headstone. I swear Mother took a picture of it, but even in my mom’s Descendants of Thomas House Sr. book there is no picture of it.

The highlight though for me, really of the whole trip, but definitely on the way home was being able to go to Dinosaur National Monument and earn my junior Paleontologist Degree at the museum on site. I was big into Dinosaurs, and Dinosaur National Park is a hugely famous site. Some ancient tragedy happened along riverbed or some other major water source and managed to kill and trap a plethora of Dinosaurs in the mud, thus leading to them being trapped for millions of years in just the right situation to be preserved.

So the park has this amazing wall which is a side of a hill/mountain that just has tons of exposed fossils of ancient behemoths sticking out of it. One species tragedy is another children’s dream adventure. And the silly junior Paleontologist tour was just spot on. They would take all the kids that signed up into the back of the museum which at least at the time had active work going on, so we got to see all sorts of neat bones and possibly a video explaining what was going on there, although I was such a nerd with that I might have seen that on TV proper.

That was summer vacation proper.

Summer Camp wasn’t a vacation it was an activity that fell in the summer vacation category, I guess. I waited until here to tackle summer camp, just because 87, 88 and 89 were the biggest summer camp years too, but I didn’t want to break up the stories so I just put it in the middle.

Most of this will be on a summer Camp called Camp Putah, which took place in town on the shores of the lovely Putah creek. If you find algae lovely. But I will roll a little further back and go over other items first.

Mom in her endeavors as a piano teacher also did some early childhood music. When I was really little in the summer she would have little week long “camps” in the house. She had with a friend come up with their own curriculum and I would not only attend sometimes but, more memorably I would help with the preparation.

This may sound weird, but there was a story about a mouse and a lion that needed visual aids, which I loved and then there were puppets. My mother sewed a lot. She would buy patterns for stuffed animals, cut them out, stuff them and sew them up for Melania and I. She quilted blankets for every new baby, in second grade she made me a Return of the Jedi backpack, and though the mid to late 80’s Mom made me a lot of shorts. We called them jams, and they were in that loud style that was such a thing then.

The main point, a lot of stuff got hand made, and these puppets were one of them. I loved them. There were pre-existing ones that seemingly had been there my whole life. But with every new camp and my growing knowledge when I was little of animals, which I loved, Mom and I would sit down before hand and sometimes make new characters to teach music. I am pretty sure my influence got a panda made for one example. Mom would sow them up and I would help cut out and glue things like eyes in place.

Because she was doing this Mom would find employment with some of the private pre-school and Montessori schools in the area. One school, which in todays city is completely surrounded by civilization was not back in the early 80s. This country Montessori school had it’s own camps and one of Mom’s benefits was that I got to do the other camps that were available out there.

Guess what I picked. Dinosaur camp. This was my first non-Mom run summer camp classes and I loved them. I cared and learned about the dinosaurs. Of course everything we learned in these camps would eventually become archaic knowledge later on, but wow for a little bit I was such the little dinosaur geek, and if one of the National Geographic’s showed up with a new find or information, I would eat that up.

But as I got older I started hearing stories about summer camps that were less like extra school and more like romper room. About second grade I heard some of the boys in class talk about Camp Putah. Camp Putah was a day camp (and one night a week) in town during the summer. This I have covered, but it also had garnered a reputation for being the cool camp to go to. There was another day camp in town called Rainbow Summer, that was were nerds went.

One of the big reasons behind this was that you had to be old enough and good enough with riding a bike to make the trip out to camp each day. Instead of the other day camp which was held in the community park, as I stated, Putah was on the shores of the creek, and part of the adventure was that your parents dropped you off on the university campus and then the counselors biked all the kids out to the riparian reserve the camp was held at.

So I wanted to go but had to get proficient at biking first. I remember that being a big deal, at the same time I am seven. To that point, I grew up with Melanie, and then had a friend that lived right behind us that I played with most often and never did a lot of biking in Kindergarten and first grade, so this camp became a motivating factor to get the training over with. Oddly I think it was Steve that just sort of pushed me away on the little BMX bike day had brough home from the Thrift store that got me moving with it.

But by summer 1986 I was ready to sign up. That first year I think I only went for one week. It was a new thing, we ha our own summer plans and so we just tested the water. And it was what it was. For four days I’d bike back and forth, and while we were out there, we mainly played capture the flag in all the natural “forts” that had popped up along the trail. Then when being forced into structure mainly cannoned and hiked up and down the trails. There was a fabled rope swing near camp, but as much as it was talked about I never saw a single soul use it.

Nope most of it as I said was capture the flag, which required keeping areas like the “bamboo fort” which was a large patch of bamboo that had the inside stocks removed to make a “base” clean and ready for competition and then catching polliwogs along the banks of the green creek. And that was create fun at that age. So much even.

Then there was the sleep over night. The last day at camp was scheduled differently. Instead of going to the reserve, someone who coordinated the event thought it smart to instead take all the kids to one of the public pools and let the go nuts. Then after there was a camp dinner at a local park followed by finally biking back out to the creek and having a full camp sleep over with a night hike and other Hijinx. Pretty crazy when you’re that little.

So, the camp was deemed a success and the next year we signed up for a couple more weeks. Of course we had the big Germany trip, so once again, I could only attend a couple weeks. Trying to match what weeks I could go with friends in class was the main objective and  to that end was pretty successful. And with only one year removed from the previous camp, these weeks ran pretty similar. Being a little older gave us a little more daring with some of the activities than the year before. But as a human, the lack of change of a good thing, was well a good thing.

Now it does come to mention that after the dinner and before the night activities on the last day, the parents are invited to come out to the reserve and watch a show performed by the campers. This had to have been somewhat dreadful for repeat campers parents because the skits we would perform, were almost always the same week in and week out. We were free to pick whatever we wanted to do for the skits, but while the details escape me, there was really like four skits that different groups would just rehash over and over again. Especially with the younger campers, which at eight and nine I was still part of even though I didn’t think so.

1988, and I was now ten. This sort of graduated me to the older half of the groups. Groups at camp were divided by age, and older campers got more freedoms and sometimes more daring activities. Most of which involved plunging off unsafe areas into the creek. Now we had a big summer trip this year, obviously, but I did try to get in as much Putah as I could.

The interesting thing was as I got older, some of the boys from my school class stopped coming as much, and this year I hadn’t bothered to try and match weeks with them, I just took what weeks we could smash into a hefty summer schedule.

Then being in the older groups meant I was hanging out with some almost sixth and seventh graders. So, I started making new friends. And without the influence of kids from our school class, the boys versus girls paradigm suddenly didn’t matter. While the fun of the camp was still the same it did change some views on things to not just have the same friends as always there. It also led to the sleep over nights being enlightening.

That changed my feelings about the camp a lot too. Now I really liked it more than I had, it was nice having kids that seemed more normal as friends, my school friends, while important also were set in their ways, well most of them, it seemed since Kindergarten and since we were always in the same class because of the Spanish program things never changed. Wait I liked change?

While 88 signaled a big change in the way I viewed the Camp, the distinct memories come a year later. In 1989 I don’t think there were any major vacations planned, so I know we signed up for one week after another. Something always feels sketchy here though, I do know I signed up for like 7 of 8 available weeks, I was ready, but there is a nagging part of my brain that thinks there was another trip to Ohio I am forgetting about. As a lesson it’s always important to have pictures that are labeled because if you do a lot of similar vacations in successive years some of the lines get blurred in the old noggin.

The 89 schedule got me a little chummier with the counselors and the other kids that were regulars at the camp. Wait an important detail, maybe I have skipped during the early years of this camp. The Hermit. The Hermit were Camp Putah’s silly stories of a mysterious hermit that lived along the creek that killed children for no real reason at all other than him being a horror story trope of a character. He was used for campfire stories and other mischievous things at the camp. He was said to have a garden claw instead of one of his hands, and he used that claw to eviscerate his victims.

 

 

Of course, now hermits probably do live along the creek, but back then we didn’t have the homeless issue that the modern corrected world seems to have. So a vagrant living on the water’s edge was scary, especially to the smaller campers. Older campers I the know would always claim to have had sightings while doing long canoe trips down the creek adding validity to younger campers fears that there was something evil out there in the overgrowth.

With our counselors being college students, so really young adults, some probably in their teens technically, this made the night hike particularly interesting, especially as an older camper because you got to be in on the spooks. From time to time some of the more fun counselors would allow for a staged hermit even while stopped long the night hike. Usually one of the counselors not on the hike would be setup and disguised somewhere to be the old hermit, and an older camper would play the victim.

This seems harmless in a fun way, but this was the 1980s so I remember a couple times the setup being extravagant and probably going what would be deemed too far. I can remember that one of the abductions was of a older camper who wasn’t going to be able to stay over that night due to some obligation in the morning. So he played the victim of some hijinks, the key being that when the other campers returned, he hadn’t somehow successfully escaped, he was just gone with the overnight threat real to those that believed in the legend.

Then there were tamer ones that were still pretty crazy. Notably a kid being willing to let the hermit drag him off the banks and into the creek to raise the drama of it all. But this wasn’t the norm, and sometimes we just had to settle for spooky stories and stern warnings of wandering off at night, to me the staged events were way cooler. My guess is that as the years moved on, not only the physical stunts but the story itself got retired.

It was in 1989 that another common weekly camper, Scott, and I got in enough trouble with the counselors that we got sent home on the night of the fabled sleepover. Obviously, I remember being very upset over the whole thing, some of the night activities were the highlights of camp. And the sad part is I don’t remember what we did to get in some much hot water. Sure, I was always pushing limits since the start of last school year. But once again with something that happened during my elementary school years, I only remember the punishment not the crime. Since the crimes never really matched whatever, it was that I was doing, don’t make adults angry was the lesson. My limit pushing was usually verbal, so I think that adds to it, I wasn’t really destroying people’s things or committing crimes, just being silly and getting under authority’s skin.

This all happened on possibly the last week too. Scott and I made plans to just have our own sleepover instead. But I was always left guessing his parents weren’t as forgiving as mine were, so although we prepared for him that night at the L street house, we didn’t hear from him. And since coming out of the summer of 89 life was about to make a big change, that was one of the last times I ever saw that kid.             

1990 would be such a busy summer that if I did go to camp, it was honestly made one week. But I don’t think I did. I think the cut off age was technically 12, although I remember one girl being 13, so it’s more than likely that bad taste left from getting sent home was my last ever summer camp memory, what a crazy way to end what had been such a high for so long on such an unforeseen low note.

Figure 3 me sporting my Camp Putah shirt in Munich, Germany in 1987 and the only old picture I could find labeled as Camp Putah on the internet of the kids lined up on their bikes.

Now we go back to 1988 and the fifth grade though. This school year was the peak of defiance against the school authorities, working from the previous year’s model. For one my speaking out of turn, as it was called, was generating a positive reinforcement from my peers in class, and in fifth grade some of the competitiveness in schoolwork had drastically faded. I think at this point my class, which had been together since kindergarten, had already made up its mind on who was who. We filled our niches and the idea of us versus them was more accepted than the old us versus us. Now truly, yeah there were still the kids that thought they were better than all the others, but this idea that it was funny to mess with adults would supersede a lot of that a great amount of the time. Even in as much that the old boys versus girls walls started to break down, because us versus old people was the real war.

So rolled on an entire school year that was mainly just a fight with the teacher, Humphries. Wow decades later that still sounds like the enemy’s name. It doesn’t matter that in the 80s we had Humphrey the Humpback whale to give that name a ring of a hero whale that got stuck in the river. Nope it’s tainted with the one teacher I probably took to war in my little kid head.

I didn’t agree with a lot of things in class, my opinions weren’t valid, so we danced. The funny thing this is still elementary school so it’s not like grades are bad, or classes are being missed, this is honestly just kids not meshing with their adult, who happens to be assigned to them all year. It wasn’t just my struggle that year either beyond the basic us v them stuff. If you have a teacher that is the wrong fit with the class, they are just stuck with each other.  As an adult I honestly think of it as one of the bad effects of elementary school. And unlike the years before, I don’t remember a lot of what we went over in class that year. I can remember a couple isolated projects and then, bam that’s it just clashing heads.

November of 1988 we need to take a detour here and lay down some history. I of course am the youngest of seven children attributed to my parents. By the time I was born, both of my mother’s parents were gone. All I knew of my Grandpa Johnson was that we had pictures of him with beards made from live bees. Grandma on that side, sadly all I really took from Mom’s explanations was that she had bad arthritis. Judging by how much I would hear mom talk about that I’m guessing it was a major feature of her time at home with her mother, which is kind of sad. My Dad’s father was no longer with us, Ernest House, I don’t even remember him being talked about around the house. Dad’s mother was still alive though, we called her Grandma Dockins, even though she was Dad’s biological mother. She was just remarried to a man they had me call Grandpa Dockins but was none of the boy’s actual grandfather.

So, Grandma Dockins was my only grandparent when I was little. Now mind you, my parents had been grandma and grandpa to a whole slew of kids my age but going to Chico with Dad were the only visits where I was the grandkid and didn’t have to wait to get whatever the prize or treat was. It was nice.

It came to pass then, that either very late October of 1988 or the start of November Dad found out his mother had passed away. I was ten at the time, at this point the closest thing I had to dealing with loss was Muffin being stolen by the graduate students living down the street and recently Dad taking Napoleon to the “night drop off” at the pound, which may have been even after this. The latter of which was devastating to me, we had only had Napoleon for about five years, but in my sense of time that was half my life, losing that dog was sad.

Now I was presented with the loss of the only Grandparent I knew. Oddly I dealt with it as something that made sense. My whole life up to that she was the only Grandparent that was living, and I think my kid brain took that as the anomalous event and thus while Dad was probably really sad, I was probably being way to calm about it as we drove up to Chico for the funeral that first weekend in November. I just assumed not having grandparents was normal, I sat in church, I hung out with Dad and his siblings, but I was feeling pretty normal, in fact I was pretty happy that on Sunday there was no church and we got Taco Bell and to watch the 49er game.

34 years later and my parents who were grandparents my whole life have now passed on too and I can’t fathom a world where they would have grandkids that didn’t know them. However, I feel like maybe the event of it happening came and went so fast that we make it too easy for kids to have no clue who they were. I recognize I was in a weird emotional and physiological slot with my grandmother, but it does feel like now with three more decade of experiences that part of people having a weird grasp on personal history is, that even people in more normal grandkid positions get sheltered and react much the same way I did. As in grandma and grandpa going away is just super normal. Which is weird, I get that my dad probably was unwilling to show his emotions about his own mother, that was his generation, but I will say that at least I know he wasn’t happy about things.

Now back to the regular year, I say I don’t remember much from fifth grade but over time things come back. I do know that right before Christmas break, we had a class trip to the Nutcracker Ballet at the Sacramento Convention Center. December 16th, 1988, they got all of us in that fifth-grade class to dress up and then carpooled us out to Sacramento to watch the performance:

image 75 David H., Ricky G., Jose C., Jim, David G., Me and Josh C. taking our group shot before heading out to see the Nutcracker on the last day of school before Christmas Break. 1988

Other than it being a break from normal class I wasn’t terribly excited. Up until this point in my life Mom and Dad had taken me to the same performance in Sacramento during or around the same time every year. This was actually the break in that norm, which to that point in my life, it had felt like we went to the Nutcracker every year of. Although I think it started around first grade, so 1984, so only four years. Mom really liked the Nutcracker suite, so I feel like it was a big deal to her that we did it every year.

Oddly my take on the Nutcracker was feeling like we were going to church. Mom would try and instill the awe of the set pieces, but oddly since Davis had a children’s production each year that I knew kids were in that I knew personally. I always wondered why we had to get dressed up and go to Sacramento to see something that was just down the street at the Veteran’s Memorial Theater.

So, I think my apathy and school taking charge of making us go this year somehow turned into Mother not ever feeling the need to do the family trek back out to the ballet ever again. I’m sure it was discussed slightly, and I am pretty sure my take would have been asking why we went to see the same thing at the same time ever year. This of course is another thing that in retrospect makes more sense and I will say the music from the ballet does help the memory strands when thinking back to the late 80s. Even more so of course later in the mid-90s with the Jingle cats performing the same music.

Another big trend in that fifth-grade class before Christmas break was glue balls. Maybe it was that we had all been in the same class for six years now, which was the larger half of our lives at this point. But for some reason rolling glue into large balls became a pastime for boy and girl alike at the beginning of that year. Using Elmer’s or a glue stick, eventually we got bored of the trend, but some adults must have wondered where all the glue was going. Fifth grade was just going to be different it seemed.

Later in the year we had to make up inventions and then pitch them in a in-class oral exam. Oddly I remember this project because of how much I got behind my “Disk Combobulators” which were a device you added to an existing floppy disk drive for added power or some such nonsense.

I had made a run of about 5 or 6 boxes to show off the product and was super proud of my designs and name. Unfortunately, fifth grade being the year that it was the item was not met with the same vigor by others. I don’t think the joke resonated with my classmates and I think this late into the year, so the issues with the teacher were too great to overcome with a clever project. Probably thought it was too much of a joke from the funny guy.

Fifth grade would close out with a recording I would make on Dad’s Texas Instrument cassette recorder, which he had bought with the intention to use with the TI/99 computer for programing in Basic. Where he got that idea, I am not sure. Mom had a whole story of having to program punch cards at college in the 80s, but I never took Dad as a programmer. Maybe he talked to my brother Bob, who this was his thing and got convinced this was the future.

As that idea had sort of gone by the wayside over the years I found the player to be a handy portable cassette recorder. It had a microphone so I could take it around and talk at it to make recordings. Also, it being a computer peripheral, it had the era’s generic hookups so I could plug it into the stereo and record things off the radio. But that’s another story, this year I ended fifth grade with a recording of 10- and 11-year-olds complaining about their teacher. Class of ’89. A recording full of little kids cursing, its like listening to deranged Alvin and the Chipmunks. It’s a good time.

Maybe that helped some of us let off steam from the year of getting in altercations in class. I remember that being such a major focus. In fact, I remember a parent meeting where the issue of why some of the boys were in so much trouble was the focus. It was at our student level a consensus that she was being sexist towards the boys because of her recent divorce. Pretty heavy accusation, but one that could have merit. Hard to say but even some of the girls in class agreed that the punishment v crime distribution seemed off from years prior. Who knows? Who cares? That was a long time ago but the way this year went would cause a major upheaval.

Now as I keep pointing out, sorry, my years get weird because I sort of retell them as school years instead of one hundred percent calendar years. So this next thing is a little screwy, but bear with, I don’t look at Mom’s school years in the same light since I didn’t live them.

She had been going to college now since I felt like I was little. There had been occasions where I had to with her on strange school holidays and such. But those years are all the same to me. Every time we went, I would get excited to see the scale solar system painted on the sidewalk. I would know he got a bad parking spot if we were at Pluto and her class was near the sun.

I know I sat in on an oceanography class, which was a class she was super excited about. But mostly I figured she was going to music classes. She was a music teacher, she talked about lot a couple of classes and a professor she had for those courses. She did a very detailed thesis about muzak, that had us going around stores in Sacramento and doing interviews and paying attention to background noise, er music in real life.

So I was always puzzled that part of her degree either the major or minor was in Psychology. I know music was in the same boat. But this fact is there, and how she juggled the two I don’t really know. When she passed away my sister didn’t seem to know the details of it either. However, when I was in my late teens Mom had contemplated a lot to me in the car the idea of switching from Music to Psychology as a profession. She would talk about wasting a degree, so I have always assumed that she must have majored in it and had plans as early as back then as well.

I bring this up because Mom’s back to school story hit its peak story point in 1988 when she graduated with whatever form of degree I just tried to explain. I vaguely recall the ceremony out at the football field and the party at Aunt Dorothy’s common room in her housing community in town. But since to me she was just graduating from school to do what she already taught I just viewed this all as party fun food time. I sort of missed the point that this was the end of a thirty year on again off again relationship mom had with college, interfered by us kids and wanting to eat.

I wish we had more on this, fortunately Steve had a VHS camcorder and recorded some of the event, Unfortunately when I talked to him about it, well it seems the tapes are lost to time. I am finding more and more as I study my family that a lot of our put away for safekeeping items have disintegrated. It’s kind of sad.