NBB, Queen of the Universe, or how our eldest sister saved us from ourselves (c) Nita Walker Boles

I.

Long ago, in a far-off land lived a family, a third family made from two others, in which older children were banished by cruel circumstances but not forgotten by either their families or by the Goodness of God, who makes all things to turn for good if we will just allow it. As children of that third family, we knew that among our older siblings, in the Hinterlands of Texas, lived an older Sister named Nina, who was, by all rights, Queen of the Universe.

Mary remembered her well, from the time before she went away. When she heard that Nina was getting married, she asked Mother if she could be the Flower Girl. Within minutes, Nina was on the phone, saying she and Donald had just gotten married. Mary was disappointed, but I had no idea what they were talking about. In fact, I was so into picking flowers on the way home from school that it was about the best I could do to find my way home. I was too little to really remember much about my oldest sister before I saw her again, but it seemed that when they did get together, she and our Mother were talking the entire time they were together. 

 

And any time she was expected to visit, there was a cleaning of the house like no other time. Linens were pulled from the shelf, re-washed, organized, and replaced. Everything was removed from the kitchen cabinets, the cabinets washed out, and everything cleaned again and replaced. The usual Saturday cleaning was re-done five times over, and the refrigerator cleaned and the freezer defrosted. 

 

You would think the Queen was coming. And she was! So while we were little kids going to school, she was a grown-up with a complete life that included being Hollywood Pretty while excelling at everything she did, having a Dashingly Handsome Husband, and maintaining a Stylish Home. Even their dog was named after a fairy-tale character, Wolf.

On her visits to our home, she periodically grabbed one of the younger of us and straightened a collar or skirt too far a-kilter for her to tolerate while continuing her grown-up conversation with our Mother. She seemed insistent that anything we do be done right, so a look of satisfaction or a little smile with a nod of approval from her was a great reward.

I remember one potato salad under production in our kitchen in which my job was to peel the skins from the boiled potatoes. I seemed to have trouble getting the skins to slip off, and after a while she quietly took them from me, still conversing with Mother, and magically slipped a manicured nail beneath the brown skins, zipping them off within moments. She could make ordinary tasks look amazing when she performed them with such ease!

One Christmas she came with bags and boxes we eyed with excitement, and on Christmas Eve, eager to get in on the still-proceeding conversation with Mother, I walked into the back bedroom to find them wrapping toys. I spied the Monopoly game.

“Wow! Who gets the Monopoly game?!!” I exclaimed.

 

Nina's hands became the wings of a White Hen, her clucking voice and waving arms shewing me from the room and blocking me from getting a view of the other treasures askew about the room. I sulked back to rearrange the ornaments on the tree, muttering that Mary Beth would probably get the Monopoly game anyway. But on Christmas morning, it was MINE! Nina's little smile of satisfaction was brief, but I caught it when I said enthusiastically, “Thank you!”

II.

When it came to clothing and hair, there was no higher authority (except, on occasion, our Father) than Nina. When there was a doubt about what to wear or whether something fit right, it was whether or not it required her tugging, straightening, arranging, or pulling that determined its' fitness. She was as confident as our Mother in what she wore herself.

Conversely, when she visited one year, her hair long but piled into a sophisticated 1960's bubble on top of her head I heard Daddy musing to Mother about her hair: “Whatever that beauty shop is using on her hair is stripping the color from it!” Like all parents who think their children are perfect just as they are, he hated to see anything change about her natural beauty.

As for us, we were like a bed of unruly weeds with the uncontrollable habit of growing, and requiring a complete renewal of wardrobe every fall. When times were lean we were sometimes sent to her house for “outfitting” which might include both trips to the best department stores or finest dry goods places for purchase of the latest patterns and materials. Our school year was certain to go better when Nina had contributed to dressing us.

Although my closet was amply stocked with fine sewing done by our mother, I stood by with envy to watch the front yard photos of my older sister's fall wardrobe being made the year she entered Centennial High School. Mary came home after a visit to Nina's with a new wardrobe selected and sewn in excellent taste.

One summer when Six Flags had opened we went to visit Nina, then at her new home in Arlington. Upon inspection of our cut-offs and tee shirts, Mary and I were taken to Titches where Nina bought us cute little cotton-knit short shorts and tops by Aileen in colors that reminded me of sherbet.

Robert remembers being dressed in Bermuda shorts, a blazer, and a red cap and having the distinct feeling that he might look like a “Sissy” but also knowing it was futile when Nina had spoken to protest. Mary and I knew we looked good, so any noises Robbie made around us were going to be muffled because we revered the judgment of the Queen of the Universe. David must have had a shirt and shorts or pants that passed inspection, because he only remembers that it was hot when we went to Six Flags.

Before the start of my Junior year of High School I was lucky enough to spend a week with Nina. Among the prizes I went home with were two (Titches or Cox's) store-bought mini-dresses that our father would never have allowed me to wear. When I appeared in the the living room wearing one on the first day of school, Daddy said flatly, “You are not wearing that.” I looked straight at him and said, “Nina got it for me.” He blinked first. My poker face and bravado bought me the use of the dress until my sweaty friend borrowed it and I could never get her B.O. out of it again. The other of the two was worn again and again until it was too pilled to be nice enough.

III.

High school was a not a finishing point. It was well-rehearsed to us by our mother that while our father had finished high school, she had sorrowed all her life that the school bus had stopped coming near enough to her father's farm for her to complete her final year of public school. It was a foregone conclusion that we would not only finish high school, but make good enough grades to qualify for some sort of scholarship help to deliver us a college education.

Nina was the shining example for us, returning to school at TCU to complete her Bachelors' degree in Nursing. As teenagers we were acquainted with her college buddies, all nice girls, smart and savvy. They were, for us, a reference point that we could make for the kinds of friends one could choose for oneself.

 

She later proved to us that you aren't finished till you feel finished by completing her Master's Degree in Nursing at TWU. She taught, lead in her field, and finished her career working for the State of Texas certifying  and  investigating hospitals and home health agencies among other health care providers. 

Watching the few years it took for her to complete her degree and then advance in a stellar career made us certain this was what we could and should expect to do for ourselves. Less than a college education would forever have been unacceptable to us, and we never felt finished with our education until we finished our education. So the four of us all went to college, some finishing with Bachelor's degrees and others with Masters, while some with lesser degrees but achieving success in our fields.

Some of us have served our country in the military. Some have owned and managed their own successful corporations. Some have worked in high level management positions, and some have addressed Congress and have spoken to Admirals, and international authorities as advocates for life-saving measures.

IV.

As a young girl, I watched as my older sister and her adoring husband bantered and played, always showing genuine and open affection for one another. They were the model of true love for one another. Good humor and tandem effort toward their individual and mutual goals showed us what was possible in a great marriage. If Nina was the Queen of the Universe, then Donald, the King, was the unassuming example of loyalty and hard work.

Good books, music, the arts, history, all a continuation of the home we were raised in were woven into the lives of our older sister and her husband. The love and acknowledgment of God was an undertone but never a lecturing point in their conduct. Their examples of grace as friends to others and as ever-present family members for us gave us the reference point we have for belonging to and helping others to belong. Nina often spoke about the value of having and “putting down roots.” How different our lives would have been without them to show us the way.

V.

It is now many years since the first visit to Six Flags over Texas. Our sister, Nina, still reigns Queen. The home that she and Kind King Donald have made has been the gathering place for our family now for three generations. 

Donald serves up grilled hamburgers and sage advice seasoned by wry observations with generosity to his nieces and nephews. He dons an apron to bake in the winter, cookies and breads, cakes and other delicacies to give to friends and families as they share the blessings life has brought them.

 

Nina's hands are never still. She embroiders and sews the fabric of our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren. No baby is born without something made beautifully for the day of their blessing. Heirloom stitchery is tucked away in tissues for generations to come.

With the coming and going of so many people, two dogs quiver for attention, afraid the parade of guests might take away the affection normally lavished on them when the King and Queen would be theirs alone to enjoy.

When we go from the Castle on Stagecoach Drive, we leave happily to return to our own homes, satisfied that we have at last met the Queen's approval, glad that our children and their children have had an audience and enjoyed a banquet of goodness within those walls.

Epilogue

Once upon a time there were two different families that became a third. Perhaps it was because among the children of the first two, there was at least one young Queen who chose to make a world for herself in which the children of the third family could also grow strong and happy, that the story ends Happily Ever After.

God on my Shoulder Part 2: Leaving Colorado Behind (c) Nita Walker Boles

There are ways taught with nuances and without direct intention. Not that my parents would not have intended to teach me about God, because they did. But there were hundreds of lessons to learn in every day life, with reverence for life and all that was good in it. The scene that met us every day after school was the one of our father, who seemed never to be far from us, reading from the Scriptures. It was long into adulthood that I learned from my youngest brother that  he had actually arranged life that way.

"No, no," Rob heard  him talking on the phone. "I really can't meet at that time.  I have kids that get in from school, and I need to be there." Oh, so it was no accident. "I can meet with you in the evening," he suggested.
Most of his appointments were  made during the day while we were at school or during the evening when we were settled in and working on our homework. Mother was home from work by that time, so she took over from there as Daddy went out the door to meet some steel worker or ditch digger who wanted to be sure he could at least pay one day for his own burial. It was a burial policy, one that provided for the cost of a funeral, that my father sold. Poor men who worked hard did not want to become a burden, even in death, on their families.

Mother orchestrated everything to do with our extra curricular activities, including attendance at church and Girl Scouts. My sister and I walked a couple of miles to be at a choir practice when we lived in  Colorado Springs to find they  had cancelled and word had not reached us. Fortunately for us a nice brother from the ministry happened to   be there and took us back home in his car, astonished that we would go to such trouble to be there. We were learning a beautiful  hymn, "I Am Satisfied with Jesus" which included the American Sign Language version. I remember most of that song in sign language today, and sometimes think on the words, " I am satisfied with Jesus. He has done so much for me.  He has suffered to  redeem me. He has died to set me free.  I am satisfied. I am satisfied. I am satisfied with Jesus. But the question comes to me as I think of Calvary, is my Master satisfied with me?"

So you see, not all that we learned at church was full of condemnation, but raised questions of  how we might improve ourselves to be fit for Divine company. There were many, many good people and good clergymen within the church. Our time there was full of memorization of key scripture passages and of stories that likened us to people in the Bible.  In reading the Old Testament stories of children and young people who interacted directly with God the Father, it did not seem impossible for one in our place and time to experience similar things.  Yet, obedient to scripture, we did not seek "for signs".   We did, however, snuggle into the comfortable arm of the Lord, expecting each new day to bring another wonder or miracle in plain site, because, that is really how we saw it. Life was joy.

In Girl's Auxillary we memorized still more scriptures, receiving small mementos as recognition for our efforts.We continued to sing in the choir, stayed active in the youth group. It was a good life, always framed in Biblical context, with the understanding that our lives lay before us with the Lord at the helm.

We would not happily nor willingly get on the ship that took us to the deserts of New Mexico, though. We had lessons in comparison and contrast regularly in the trips we took at least twice a year there. We could endure the holiday away from home just so we got to go  home, but New Mexico, did not feel like home for us.

Our older brother, Jack had scarcely beaten cancer in the previous year, our father having spent more than we had to travel in his worry over his son, and the economy failing. Our eldest brother, Son, and our father's cousin were convinced Daddy could return to farming and support us well enough. Daddy was a hard worker and a willing and experienced farmer, but the terms would be simply sharecropping. He would be bringing his wife and family of four children ranging from 4 to 17 to support, and  had not a dime to invest. We had lost the house in Pueblo, and we would be starting over. 

So the day came when the household was packed, the beloved piano still standing in the living room for want of space on the truck.  I don't remember any of it, but I know we loaded the truck, carrying boxes we had packed with our dishes wrapped in dishtowels and other linens. Whatever furniture we had for bedrooms went, the beautiful oak dining set, our kitchen table and chairs. As we drove away I tried to look at every tree and house  for the last time. Soon my gaze fell on the river and the mountain range.

In the truck ahead of us, our father was telling our brother, David about a dream he had the previous night. That day was June 7, 1965. A few drops of rain had started to fall, and he told how he had dreamed of a flood that overspilled the banks of the Arkansas river into the downtown area of Pueblo. Remarkably, when we later unloaded our truck and set up the television, the national news carried pictures of the flood in Pueblo our father had dreamed about the previous night. Perhaps his premonition of  that disaster was an affirmation for us that rough times would not  have been avoided had we managed to stay in Colorado. For we children were openly heartbroken. 

Where we were going was not an unknown to us. We had been to the plains of New Mexico visiting our complicatedly random family for what seemed like a thousand Thanksgivings and Christmases. But then we had always had the luxury of leaving the starkness of the cactus covered sand behind.

But by the time I was 13 and able to form my own opinions about preferable vacation spots,  it was not especially enchanting to visit the Land of Enchantment.  The desert was the tumbleweed  home to countless sulfuric oil wells that provided paying jobs for younger men than our father. Doubtless they would otherwise be tilling the soil for cotton or maize, the other cash crop. There were  a few cattle, but the brittle land would not support herds in numbers to compare to those in  less arid areas across the border, in Texas. 

After the 12  hour drive from Denver, we found ourselves parked in front of a small two bedroom frame house in the middle of a field of maize outside Lovington, New Mexico.  A windmill creaked on the tower behind the  house Within a few hours we had unloaded our furniture, put away the dishes and pans, and set up beds.

Our mother, one of the most resourceful women I have ever known, declared one end of the living room a Master bedroom. By standing one dresser on top of another she created a buffer zone that separated their room from the living area. Mother used the same curtain that had partitioned my bedroom from the den area of our basement in Colorado. Strung  on a clothesline across the back end of the living room it allowed a bit of  privacy.  The two boys were in one bedroom and we girls in the other. We were comfortable enough if our parents were consigned to the least desirable space. I was 13 that summer as we arrived and would turn 14 before the year was up. My brother, David was 11. My sister, Mary, was 17. And Rob, the youngest, was 4.

We almost immediately began the planting of a garden, from which we canned every single thing not required to feed us immediately. David went to work with Daddy every day. It was not child's  play. He rode on the back of combines, dangerous work for a little boy. Anything the men did he also did to the best of his ability becoming muscled, tanned, and weary.

He later told how he witnessed the look of worried care growing on our father's face. The economics of raising a family were unknown to my brother, but he recognized the edge in our father's voice when he told his cousin that he was "sick to his stomach with worry" over how we would make it.

To buffer us from the trials around us, Mother made sure we had the chance to go to Bible School for the week when they held it.  So David had a reprieve from farm work for that time. It was a relief for us to hear familiar music and have scripture read that we recognized.

"I was glad when they said unto me 'Let us go into the House of the Lord'." We memorized more verses: "The Lord is my light and my salvation:  Whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life.Of whom shall I be afraid?"

"Make a  joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.  Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord  He is God.  It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep in His pasture.  Enter into  his courts with singing and into his gates with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth to all generations."

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not to thine own understanding."

These verses, though seemingly simple, would become the place we could go in our hearts. when things seemed hopeless and depressing.

That fall some of the winter clothes I had from the previous year still fit. Although Mother was the best with a sewing machine, she did not have many resources to provide us with anything new as the new school year began. David was on free lunches at school.  I continued to ask Daddy every day for lunch money. He would dig in  his pockets and come up with a little change for me and I would thank him. Unbeknown to me, my sister did not ask and was not offered money to eat on. Why David was getting free lunches and we were not I will never know. Our mother must have assumed if she had filled out some paperwork that it applied to us all. Nevertheless, Mary went to school each day with no money in her pocket.  Two very nice girls befriended her and made sure she ate every day by going back for seconds at lunch time.

To say that we hated being there would be an understatement. The culture was something we could not  understand. It was as different as Country music and Rock and Roll.  We were thinking about the Beatles, and few of our contemporaries there knew who they were.  We treasured the few friends we made who also listened to Simon & Garfunkle.  We were out of place. We wrote letters to our old pen pals in France and England and added our old friends from Colorado.  Anxious for word from "home", the reports of life in a place that was becoming increasingly irrelevant were meaningless and empty for both my sister and I.

Gradually the connections to Colorado were being shorn away. A youth hayride at church turned out to be in the back of a cotton wagon. There were bales of hay, all right, but the cage around us was covered with cotton burrs and lint. Because it was fall I  had worn my black and white hounds tooth pleated skirt and a  black cable knit sweater. Although they fit comfortably I could not wear them again because I couldn't get the lint out of them.

Our Midwest accents and mannerisms were more foreign to them  than their Southern drawls and boisterous ways were to us. Because we had grown up with those differences within our own family, we were naturally more accepting of the local kids than they were with us. They weren't going to change and it was up to us to adapt. Friendships came slowly.  My closest friend suffered from a birth defect that left her eyelids partially closed. Her father worked the fields and oilfields, and she told me, could not afford the operation needed to raise her eyelids out of the field of obstruction. Consequently she kept her head tilted slightly back to see, but self-conscious, not enough to see well. Her neck must have always been sore.  She had few other friends. Another girl, there from California, was as different from the local kids as I was, and as different from me than them. Being all different, we made a society of three.

Still, every night I prayed for the Lord to package us up and send us back home. When we crossed the highway that lead north, I imagined the straight ribbon as it traveled, gradually ascending to the plateaus and foothills and went  past the Sangre de Christo mountain range. I imagined going back to our home, our friends, our life now gone. I cried enough in the middle of the night that Mother had to have heard me.

To help clothe us, Mother had gone to work at an Anthony's department store on the square and she brought bargains she found on the sale rack now and then to stretch our wardrobes. Although it almost never rained, she brought me a matching lined raincoat and umbrella that must have been marked far below value. The raincoat served more practicably as a light jacket since all I had was a heavy winter coat, seldom needed in the fall on the plains.

One day she brought me a little gold toned necklace that had the Serenity Prayer on it.  While we were completely unfamiliar with Alcoholics Anonymous, the message in the prayer was particularly applicable to me:  'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Amen.'

She offered the necklace to me without explanation. When I read the message, I felt grateful for her compassion, and for the first time stopped blaming my parents for what had seemed like a catastrophe.

That winter was the worst time I ever remember. Sometimes there were no beans to go with the cornbread our mother made.  We  had soup made from a combination of every vegetable we had canned that summer, and made more substantial with macaroni. The slimy canned squash was my favorite to hate. My brother says that to this day, he cannot stand potato soup and will not eat it.  But I loved the potato soup in comparison to the slimy vegetable soup we had to eat. At Christmas a relative brought a ham.

I don't remember much else about Christmas there, but I know that we we were packing for a move by February. Working as a sharecropper was not going to feed  us. My prayers had been answered differently than I expected.  We were moving to Lubbock, where Daddy hoped to find work once again selling insurance,  something he was always to find success with.

I was glad to be going, but it seemed as though our family was always morphing and changing, and someone was always being left behind.  My sister had attended two years of high school in Colorado and a half year in New Mexico. Mother had asked one of the aunts in Lubbock to see whether Mary could transfer her credits and graduate that year, but it seemed that there would be some problem with not having taken Texas History or something like that.

In any case, Mary stayed behind, living with our brother, Jack, and his wife, Mary Ann. Her friends continued to insure that she ate at school. I remember being there when we said goodbye to her at our brother's house. She was silent. My stomach hurt. I asked her if she was going to be OK there and she nodded her head. I never considered switching places with her because there wasn't a reason for it. I felt guilty running out on her, but she stood there, her face a studied mask of self-control,  and we left her there.  There were no tears, just an impossibly large lump in my throat.

I was now the oldest of the three of us that remained at home.  I didn't see Mary again until she came through Lubbock in the summer on her way to  live with our oldest sister, Nina, while she attended TCU in Ft. Worth.  She stoically moved forward, and it would be years before we began to talk about the hardship of that time. But between us it was understood that God was ever there, and would help us navigate through the waters ahead.

Explaining the Big Family that was Rather Small, and the Economics of it All. (c) Nita Walker Boles

When I explain that I came from a family of 10  children, my listeners usually do some kind of gasp or at least register some astonishment. Even for mid-20th Century, 10 was a large number of children. But we did not come all at once.  We seemed, as I grew up, to have a lot of aunts and uncles that fit neither directly into the batch of 9 children my mother came from, nor the 5 that my father came from.

In time we became aware that there were all kinds of layers of family around. We called my father's uncles and aunts, "Uncle" and "Aunt".  We called his brother and sister-in-laws "Uncle" and  "Aunt" as well, and his father-in-law. "Papaw Kidd". even though he was technically not our own grandfather.  We were as apt to see them as to see our mother's or father's family.

Our father's first wife, Modena, had died in her 30's from colon cancer. She left behind their two sons, Son (James Frank) and Jack. Our mother was, as I observed earlier, possibly the first Southern Baptist woman to ever get a divorce, and had two children Nina, and Doyle, to support. It was war time, and she and Daddy met while they both worked at Walker Air Force Base.  They married in Roswell, and built a little house, bringing their four children together. As they married, Son was 14, Jack 9, Nina, 6. and Doyle, 2. 

Their first baby, Alma Jean, was born in 1945 with insufficient lung surfactant. She did not live to come home from the hospital. The war ended, and so did their civilian jobs. For some reason unknown to anyone in the family, they moved to the Ozarks of Missouri.

Following close behind them were our paternal grandparents, and one of Daddy's sisters and brother-in-law. They spent several years in the Ozarks at Exeter, a bucolic piece of Eden where the very fence posts would sprout leaves if not painted to prevent it. I think the kids were all rather happy there. Nina and Doyle were enrolled in school with Walker for their last names, although their birth father would not give them up for adoption.

Mother had another baby in 1947, Betty Ann, who was born with a serious heart defect. Although it was possible to surgically correct the problem it was necessary for her to be bigger and healthier than she was to have survived an attempt at surgery.  She died at 8 months. As an adult, Doyle would be reduced to tears as he remembered that tragedy. He was 6 years older than Betty Ann.

Son was home on leave when she died. That had to have been another shock for him. As we grew up he remained rather distant from us, never really engaging. It was not until I was grown that I understood how tentative relationships must have seemed for him.

Mary Beth was born in the first month of 1949, only 4 months after Betty Ann's death. She failed to thrive, not being able to tolerate any milk or formula until they tried goat's milk. She was so fragile that one of Mother's sisters made and sent a dress to have her buried in. She was healthy and beautiful in a short time.

I was born about 3 years later. We were still on the farm when I came, and a drought had  plagued the area for a few years. To tie the farm over, our father bought a number of piglets from an individual who may have known they all had Hog Cholera. They were all dead within a short while, and Daddy lost the farm. At the same time  his sister and her family sold out, moving back to  Texas.

Mother's ex-spouse proposed she allow him to take the two children to live with him in Ft. Worth, where he had a " good job with  General Dynamics. " . Through mother's family he reported that they would have a "better life" than they could hope for under the dire circumstances they now faced. Unknown to her, that life reportedly would include caring for an invalid grandmother and some rough treatment from an unkind father. Mother must have felt defeated. Certainly when she and I had the conversation that gave me this information she expressed that she had no other choice at the time. She allowed them to go, only to have to face a judge later in a failed attempt to regain custody.

Jack was with us for a few months when we first moved to Denver from Missouri, but not long. He went on to New Mexico to finish school, living with his mother's sister and her husband, who was my father's cousin.
He was happy to be there, and once done with school, joined the Army. He was stationed at Ft. Carson, in Colorado Springs when  he began to experience medical problems that foreshadowed the ultimate battle that lay ahead for him. Despite the medical history of his mother, the Army did not focus on the possibility he could have cancer.

So, although by way of explanation I have digressed, we left the farm about 1953,  before I was old enough to have more than one or two impressions of ever living there, with just we two girls and Jack, who soon was in New Mexico. Son was in the Military, Nina and Doyle in Ft. Worth.

There was not a job waiting in Denver. Daddy had an aunt and uncle there who must have helped him get on his feet. The job as an airplane mechanic he had hoped for at Stapleton Airport went to an ex-GI, of course. Mother and Daddy both became door-to-door salesmen, selling Filter Queen vacuum cleaners, and Tupperware.  David was born in early 1954, and now our family looked like 3 small children.  After a while, I could not remember I had an older sister until I saw her at a family gathering when I was 4.

Doyle could not bear his father's house, and left, hitch-hiking to Denver. At 13 he looked quite a bit older than he was, already nearly 6 feet tall. He had mailed a letter to Mother telling her he was coming, and she was truly happy to have him home.  He played and "roughhoused' with us, but we seldom saw him because within a very short time he was working as a bell hop at a nearby hotel. We lived just blocks from the Capital. So Doyle went to school during the day, came home for a meal and then on to the hotel til late at night.

He later told us that Mother and Daddy scarcely could make a  living when we first moved to Denver. It is true that they did not prosper until the few years we lived in Pueblo, and that did not last long because of the closing of the steel mill. Their plight might have been much like that of others of their generation. The war had brought a number of people off the farm and out to work as civilians  on the bases. The majority of them had only a high school education, and were not prepared to do any certain thing in the cities. But with the advent of the G I bill and FHA for housing, vets everywhere were climbing the economic ladder to a growing middle class, and it is true that encyclopedias, vacuums, spices, and any number of other household goods would be sold door to door. But Daddy's salvation was selling life insurance.

Mother and Daddy took in a boarder, our beloved Azhar, to help us make ends meet. Doyle stayed with us until he married, rather young, about 1959. He was the last of the "big kids" to live at home. 

My first memory is of the green bead board shelf or cabinet top by the back porch water pump in Missouri.  The next is of living briefly in a basement apartment before my parents found the house on Cherokee, in  Denver. I  remember Jack, a  tall older brother just briefly living with us on Cherokee, and then he is gone. From that time I  have a steady trickle of memories, Mother coming home from the hospital with David, (I am then 25 months old then), watching David's face as he plays, his brow furrowed with deep concentration on his objective. Mary is always beautiful, her dark chestnut hair shining and curly, her beautiful smile dimpled. I think she is prettier than Shirley Temple. Then Doyle comes to live with  us sometime following our move to East 12th  Avenue.  Finally, a young, beautifully dressed woman comes and speaks  with my mother, calling her mother. I am astonished.  After she leaves, I ask,  "Mother, why did she call you Mother?"

Although I had been  standing right there when Mary Beth had that conversation with Mother about being a flower girl at Nina's wedding, I could not summon who she was from my short memory. I loved to look at the faces of my siblings. What I had processed on Mary's face as she was trying to understand that Nina had already married, and that she could not be her flower girl was something I can now recognize as resigned disappointment.

I knew about Son and Jack, because we had seen them at our grandparents in Missouri at Christmas. But Nina was now married and living with her husband, Donald in Ft. Worth and we saw her less often because it was another 12 hour drive from New Mexico on to Ft.  Worth. In years to come, if we were home at Christmas, it would be a difficult time for our mother if Nina was not able to come. The only time I ever saw her cry was when Nina could not be home for Christmas.

So, as you see, we were from a family of 10. There were not any half brothers or sisters in that family. We all belonged to each other, even the ones we couldn't see often. Neither of my parents ever referred to the children brought to the marriage by the other spouse as "step-children" . Not ever. Nina said that after they left the farm in Missouri, they were heartbroken to have the last name they were born with once again. In Missouri it had worked, but when they moved in with their natural father it was not the same.

Both Nina and Doyle called our father "Daddy".  Doyle did see his natural father occasionally in years to come. Nina did not. But Son and Jack called our mother, "Ann". Of course that would have been natural as well.

For both sets of kids, there were periods of happiness and delight, followed by sometimes shattering disappointment. In the end, we collected one another up and made sure each  other were OK and forged on.

Having God on my Shoulder (c) Nita Walker Boles

That I had a personality, a thought-producing id that accounted for who I was from the earliest time I have memory is a truth.  The question of where I came from seemed obvious, since my mother took us to church where we were instructed about all things to do with God.  However, the fact of His existence seemed independent of any teaching and evident in everything in the world surrounding me.

Every Sunday we were dressed in lovely clothing made by our mother and our hair curled neatly and bangs cut in a crisp little line well above the eyebrows.  We were ushered into the big sanctuary of the church we attended in Denver, where singing an preaching filled an hour or so, and then we retired to our classes for Sunday School.

Mr. and Mrs Sommers were the first Sunday School teachers I ever had, and the only ones whose names I specifically remember. The rest were a blur of nice, smiling faces, eager to tell us a Bible story and sometimes give us a little booklet to take  home with illustrations and the story of our character from the Bible in it..

From Mr. & Mrs Sommers I learned to sing "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" and "Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam".  We were little Sunbeams, no one older than 3 in that class.  I don't remember the specific stories they told, but I remember knowing because of what they had told me, and what I felt in my heart as I heard it, that Jesus really did love me, and God loved me as well.  God seemed far above Jesus, who was far above us, and the Son of God. He died, they said, for us, but was raised from the dead to save us. One Sunday as we lined up to follow our teachers back to the classroom I stood in the light from a golden stained-glass window and felt as though Heaven was smiling down on me. I knew that Heavenly Father and Jesus loved me.

If it hadn't been true, I would have known it.  I always knew what was true.  When I didn't know whether or not something was true, I just let it percolate and studied it a while before coming to a conclusion. That we studied stories of children, like us, helped us understand that you didn't have to wait until you were a grown up to be important to God and Jesus.  When my Sunday School teacher told us the story of Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors, I then went home to read the real story from the Bible. Then I had to find out who Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were and why their stories were important to  us. To me it was obvious. We were the same as them to God. We could walk and talk with Him and were instructed to do so.

I learned to read as early as I could so I could read the Bible and learn from it. Although I never knew my great grandmother, a Quaker, I suspect she is the reason my father seldom missed a day without studying from the Bible. Since it was important to him, I knew it must be to me, so I too read nearly every day.  For that reason, my language has nearly always been on the upper end of above average.  I don't remember any other Bible available to us than the one my brother now has, the Family Bible, bought from  the Door to Door Salesman.  I vaguely remember our father anxious to get it quickly, and once it was in his hands his smile of satisfaction was a sermon delivered.  There was certainly another Bible in the house, because the older children remember him as we, the younger half of the family do, looking up at them over the Bible as they came home from school every day. He did not attend church unless company came  (his father-in-law, the preacher).

Our Mother took us to church but her quiet dignity was her sermon to us. It was understood you knew and kept the commandments, and that you followed Jesus.  Her father, our grandfather, delivered sermons straight from the Bible. He did not vary from its' message. On  his wall was a little plaque that read,  "Lord fill my mouth with worthwhile stuff and nudge me when I've said enough."  He seemed willing to abide by that admonition. I never remember a hell-fire and damnation sermon during the summers I spent at Grandma and Grandaddy's when in my early teens. However, I don't specifically remember any of  his sermons, although I can tell you I was listening intently.They were generally instructions on how we ought to live our lives to be like the Savior.

Back at  home, by the time I was five I was plenty scared of Hell, that is h-e-double toothpick HELL. We were reminded of the devil and hell on a regular basis, and the fear of going there was more of a concern than it should have been. When the invitation to come forward for profession of faith, at 5 I was determined never to go to hell. The assistant pastor was quite rattled when I told him I was ready to be baptized. He knelt down and said, kindly, "Do  you know the 23d Psalm?" I answered no.  He told me that when I could repeat it to him I could be baptized.  He didn't know me well at all. I could read, and I could memorize, and about 6 weeks later he had to baptize me. They should have been ashamed of themselves! I  hope they had a meeting about baptizing little children who are far too young to even understand sin, and especially about topics for sermons other than scaring the be-Jesus out of everyone there.  I refer you to the sidebar for a taste of preaching from   "Cold Comfort Farm".   I am not sure my father knew anything about my being baptized. He would have put a stop to it if he had known. Now, my sister, at 8 was probably old enough, and may have been baptized around the same time, I just don't remember.

In any case, my father's no-nonsense teaching in our everyday lives was more influential in my understanding of God than  any preacher.  When I was appalled at about age 6 at the teaching that those who died without Christ, never having heard the gospel would be damned, I asked my father whether God was really that mean.  He tenderly denounced the idea. He quoted the Savior saying, "Ye shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free."  He said God was blamed for a lot of things He never did. I can remember the light of day coming through our living room windows, and the sound of his words, and the certainty that he was right.  From that moment forward I knew I was free to know for myself what was true.

So with all the riches of life around me I set out in life with the certainty that God was right over my shoulder, ready and willing to give me direction as needed.  With beautiful mountains surrounding us, where rocks and streams testified of His goodness, with museums and zoos cataloging all His creations, and with books from the library spilling over with knowledge we could apply, what was there not to love about life? Our half of the family was together, for a time,  in a Land of Milk and Honey. 

I Wash Dishes the Way I Do Because I Was A Girl Scout (c) Nita Walker Boles

Starting with the trip to Supreme Bakers in Denver, Colorado, I knew my life was going to be more enchanted because of the Girl Scouts of America.  Remember that special moment when the tube that dispensed the creme filling for wafer bars was plugged, and the operator who was trying to get it going again got a face full? That was when I knew that fun and serendipity would always grace my path if I stuck close to the Girl Scouts of America.

As a Brownie, nothing could compare with dressing in the uniform that made all small girls look like, well, Brownies. The cap that topped our heads made us look like little acorns. We were irresistible sellers of Girl Scout Cookies, and we had been to the bakery where they were made, so could testify that they were the best of the best.  Living on Capital Hill made selling the delicious treats both daunting and successful. The blocks surrounding our home were made up of a variety of cottages and bungalows.

But at least one of my class mates arranged for us to visit his grandparent's nearby home, the Hull Mansion to see their private collection of American Indian artifacts. In that area lived people whose mansions took up whole city blocks. Passing the classic Victorian iron fencing and approaching the open gates where hitching posts still stood, a very small Brownie would have to work up the courage to walk the pathway toward the gigantic home, climb the large steps, and use the door knocker that sometimes looked like a gargoyle, or, if lucky, push the doorbell to hear a sort of song rung out in chimes.

Invariably a butler or maid would come to the door, and occasionally they would usher a stooped, smiling grandmotherly lady to the door upon our asking, "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?"  The answer was always yes. And the quantity was nearly always just one.  Now, ponder the number of Brownies and Girl Scouts that attended at the elementary school just 3 blocks away, and imagine how many either worked up courage, or were cleaver enough to realize that gated homes housed wealthy people. Further, imagine all the hired help going home with boxes of Girl Scout cookies once they were delivered, and the cups of coffee and tea  served with Sugar Cookies and Thin Mints from polished silver platters.

From courage to enter uncharted territory to salesmanship and dressing for the occasion, the lessons taught while earning Brownie Stars and Merit Badges were so very valuable. So waiting to get bigger and  older was exciting as we contemplated the day we would be true Girl Scouts. Then we would wear the green uniforms our big sisters wore to their meetings and would be able to attend Girl Scout Camp.

Soon after  moving to Pueblo I was a Girl Scout. The first thing I leaned was how to tie a square knot, necessary to properly apply the neckerchief we all wore. Left over right and right over left. The Beanie was traded for a Barret, and we were smartly uniformed young ladies.  Girls whose fathers worked in the steel mills were dressed just the same as girls whose fathers worked in the bank. The leaders who ensured we were all welcome tapped the resources found in the careers and experiences of  Post-War working mothers. In the tight economy of the early 1960's nearly everyone's mother did some part time work.

My mother sold china and silver from an off-shoot of Sara Coventry Jewelry, The Nobility Club. Under her tutelage we learned to set a perfect table, naming each piece of silver service and its use. Maria Cosar's mother was a nurse, and from her we learned to make a perfect bed, using squared corners and properly placing pillows within their cases, the ends folded in. The merit badges increased in numbers on our sashes as our self-confidence grew. We sold our lots of Girl Scout Cookies, experienced in our trade, and with all of respected society standing behind us.  So we were ready and able to go to Girl Scout Camp, our cookies having paved the way so that no girl was left behind.

As close as we lived to the Sangre de Christo Mountain Range, our various families had all made the rivers and streams a part of life. But many of us had not camped in the mountains. The Girl Scout Camp was several days, if not a full week long. We slept either in cabins or in the tents built over wooden floors and frames, depending on the years of experience we had.  Every day a new skill was demonstrated so we could practice and learn ourselves how to do such things as starting a fire or properly using a pocket knife.

During one such exercise one of  my favorite friends, Sally,  was standing beside me with a stick she had carefully whittled to a sharp point. We were at the railing outside the lodge overlooking the sweeping mountain view and she leaned over, the stick in her  mouth, point end in. To my horror, she slipped forward and the stick became lodged in her palate. She had to be transported to the hospital an hour or more away. Girl Scout Camp was a nice place to be that year, but our hearts were heavy as we thought of Sally, who couldn't share our experiences. We asked about her often. Late in the week we were grateful to have the official word she would be just fine.

When we weren't learning new skills, we were taking turns with kitchen duty. It was there that I leaned the proper way to wash dishes. Dishes were gathered, organized, and scraped clean of garbage. Before they could be washed they were first rinsed free of debris, and then glasses, plates, and silverware were washed in that order. If the dishwater became cold or murky looking it was drained and changed for fresh soapy water. The dishes were rinsed in clear hot water with a certain measurement of bleach, and allowed to drain  before putting away after a light wipe with a clean towel to ensure they were dry.

At home we followed the same procedure, and thought everyone else did as well.  As my circles of friendship widened it became apparent that not everyone used the same method, and what seemed very dirty to me was quite acceptable to others.  The great work of comparing what is "done" and deciding what you would keep as a good habit began with those days.  Friendships were formed that are still fondly remembered.

Eventually Junior High School overtook us and after the first year most of us were so busy with school activities that we left our uniforms and sashes behind for other uniforms like Pep Club and Band. We were prepared in so many ways for a happy, can-do attitude in life, thanks to Girl Scouts. For me, I kept those ways, those experiences, and used them all m life.

Being 13, Part II

The walk to school each morning began with a stop at the corner to greet my newer friend whose father was a professor at the college. She and her dad lived around the corner and her mother, who was from England, lived a neighborhood away, but close enough for walking, about a mile. Kathy and I would sometimes stay the night with her mom, drinking cranberry juice and ginger ale, while listening to  our Beatles records.

During the week, though, Kathy and I were walking pals. Kathy was adept at making new friends, and older friends. So often we left early to stop by the home of her 9th grade friend, Christine, who was dating an even older boy in the 10th grade, at Centennial. The art of becoming a teenager is largely observant. By understanding how one does one's  hair, applies makeup, puts together an outfit, one assimilates into the culture.  So we both sat on either side of her in reverence as she coated her lashes with several layers of mascara (to which neither of us had regular access at home) and ratted her hair into what became a perfectly shaped football accented by completely straight bangs cut just above her penciled eyebrows.

Christine's toilette was fascinating, but not inspiring. Neither of us wanted to have hair that looked like a football once  lacquered with hairspray. But her teen angst was worthy of note, and when she met us at the door, eyes swollen with tears to tell us of her breakup with the boyfriend it was clear that the songs about losing the one you love were all true. How perilous love must be, we thought. Unfortunately Christine felt a little older after the breakup and didn't see much of us since she needed to confide in others more experienced in such matters.

Different routes would mean different company as we walked. Sometimes we didn't join company but just observed from a distance.  One popular redhead could be observed with her circular skirt swinging from side to side, her sweater draped over her shoulders with the arms tied around the Peter-Pan collar of her blouse.I had been too puzzled by how she happened to attain that sense of motion to think why she would want to until my  friend cracked, "I wish I had a swing like that in my back yard!"

Some mornings Kathy had to be earlier or later than me and I walked alone. I preferred Elizabeth Street for the beautiful yards and homes along the walk. I had grown out of an old set of clothes between spring and fall, and my mother had rewarded me with the very latest in Mod fashion. It was nice to look so well dressed without having to worry someone else was going to walk in wearing an identical outfit.

My hair always bleached blonder in the summer sun, which seemed to draw the attention of both friend and foe.  And on  one particular day, a convertible Mustang belonging to my neighbor pulled up full of Red and white letter-jacketed boys.  "Hi, Sherry!" one of them shouted.

I glanced nervously around the street. There were no other people walking within 2 blocks on Elizabeth Street that day.I pulled my hair down over one eye and ducked my head. Surely my neighbor, Sam Ratcliff, knew who I was. He had to see me nearly every day. Sometimes he came over with his friend on a Vespa to play basketball in our front yard. I would climb up in the tree from which the net hung to visit with them as they played. That is how I got asked to Prom in the 8th grade when one of his cute friends was taken with me. (My sister was not amused, my mother was adamant that I was entirely too young, and I was disappointed because the asker was pretty cute. My father promptly took down the basketball net and remarked that the boys were killing the grass.)

If Sam knew who I was he was playing along with his buddies that day, and the teasing went on for nearly a block. Still calling me Sherry the boys asked whether I thought someone named Robbie was home. I was mortified. They thought I was walking by some boy's house. Obviously one of those houses was some boy named Robbie's house and they thought I was Sherry-who-liked-Robbie!

Still no one on the street. Two blocks up to the turn where they had to go one way and me the other. I walked faster, not responding, both flattered to think I looked old enough to be one of their class mates and embarrassed because I didn't know how to gracefully get out of their line of attention.  

Then to make matters worse, they started singing "442 Glenwood Avenue" a song about a party at that address. Rats. All this great attention, no girlfriends to share the glory with, and no possibility of it becoming an episode on Father Knows Best or Donna Reed.

Finally I reached the turnoff.  What a crummy situation, I thought as I  pivoted on one heal and headed up to Freed Jr. High. I hoped when I got to High School someday that High School Boys still wanted to take  me to the Prom and had something to say to me when I knew who they were and could have an intelligent conversation with them.  Their mouths fell open as they realized the case of mistaken identify.  I snickered to myself.

Not a story I could share, I had learned. It was becoming clear that being liked by boys made one a target of hatred by girls less able to easily develop friendships with them.The girls in your own crowd could and would share the names of their secret crushes. They always had a first and last name, like Rusty Samford, or Jimmy Bascom. If the crush was shared your, it could net a letter jacket for a few weeks with the understanding it had to be returned for certain occasions. But only the High School kids had cars to take you to the Tastee Freeze or the roller rink, and precious few of them were allowed to drive on weekends.

Besides, our parents were never going to let us date before we turned 16.  So we all had a lot of time to observe, practice, and dream about being date-able girls. On Saturday mornings we cleaned and did our chores fervently so we would be done in time to watch American Bandstand.There we were schooled in the current dance favorites: The Hand Jive, The Twist, The Stroll. Overnight stays were for sharing records and looking through Beatle cards, and dream about Prom.

My tall, chestnut-haired sister with the perfect dimple and the demeanor of a gracious Princess was going to the Prom with the best looking older boy at church. He was really nice, from a really nice family. He went to a different high school so it made for great gossip for my sister and her friends.  Mother was making her  a tailored Prom dress that could have come from the pages of Seventeen Magazine. Mary  was beautiful as always, but more so.

How could I compete with that? I thought. It would be a few more years before I could go to Prom, I supposed. It was hard being just 13.

Barbara* , the Bain of all New Girls, or How I Was Responsible for a Marriage

The names of everyone mentioned from school in this piece are fictitious,  including the teachers, but the deeds are all too familiar. 

I was still seven when my mother gave me what was to be the last permanent she would ever give me. Mother meticulously sewed, dressed, and groomed us, with whatever means she had, and that included well-set hair. My hair was so white  when I was about 3 that a lady waiting with us for a traffic light to change could not resist  reaching down to finger it, remarking to my mother's horror, "My, her hair bleaches nicely." 


But by the time I was seven, although still a blonde, just one area of my head was white and the rest ash colored. Thick and unruly, it never behaved well, so mother bought a Tonette and set to work with the rollers. The problem was, although the baby color was gone, the texture was and always would be the same: fine. It was fine as a delicate spider's web and the effect of the chemicals on those almost microscopic strands of hair was quite stunning.

As mother combed through it after the last rinse, tears welled up in my eyes. "I look like a French Poodle!" I choked.

Mother looked like she might cry, too.."It will wash out in a while," she offered, but her face betrayed her own doubt. I can only imagine how badly she wished she could have known to use bigger rollers.  But it had been some time since my last perm and her expertise dated back as far as the first commercial perms went. I was her third girl, not to mention at least 3 of her sisters, and her own hair that she had seen after since she was old enough. My hair wasn't burnt, just tightly curled.

To make matters worse, on a trip to the mountains I had hit my front tooth when releasing a well pump handle. The tooth was broken off a quarter of the way up, and I avoided smiling and guarded how I held my upper lip to keep the snaggle-tooth from showing. I hoped to avoid calling attention to myself so much that people probably couldn't keep their eyes off me  for trying to understand why I was so odd. 

So on my very first day in  the 4th at grade at Thatcher Elementary, I presented with insanely curly hair.  The teacher,  sweet little Mrs. Andrews,  announced my addition to the class with my exotic first name, Juanita. It was the only first name I had, and I never considered using the middle name, Ruth, because I just didn't know any Ruths to judge whether it would work as well as Tammy or Linda might have for a better first name.  The large freckles strewn across my nose must have made the mop on my head even  more bizarre as my face turned crimson.

As we exited for the playground at recess I walked past a girl with shiny, smooth brown hair who was surrounded by a group of well-dressed friends. "She doesn't  look Mexican," she said as though I was invisible while clearly, since all eyes were on me, they could at least see through me.  I was later to learn from one of the other, less popular girls, that this was Barbara. She and her personality-free Secret Service agents were known widely as The Clique. 

Within a week it was clear that I would have precious few friends among my classmates if she had anything to say about it. What I could not understand was why, if she didn't want to be friends, was it necessary so far as she was concerned,  to be enemies. What I did that made her so determined to ruin my life would always escape me. But for 4 long school years, Barbara made it her objective every single day to have something unkind to say within my earshot.  She seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time on me for someone who so disliked me so much. In doing so, she acquired free rent in my head, where for years after we left Pueblo, into my life as a young adult if I felt socially inept or like I didn't belong she would visit my dreams with her hangers-on.

In spite of her constant interference,  I gradually got to know the other less socially important girls, and joined Girl Scouts where The Clique was subordinate to a lot of recited mottoes and stated purposes. The leaders were some of the few adults apparently not charmed  by Barbara's social connections and  talents in crowd control.  They quickly snuffed any takeover attempts in that venue and redirected  the group toward more purposeful and fulfilling activities. Girl Scouts became the great equalizer and testing ground for trying out new things and showing accomplishment without feeling somehow inferior. Anyone could get a badge, anyone could advance rank, and no one was better than the other.

Still the daily grind at school was a tough one. It irritated Barbara that I could finish my work before her and make better grades than her.  Since our family moved in just before Christmas and Mrs. Lacy discovered quickly that I was a talented artist  she had me use the extra time, sometimes half the day, to paint the faces and costumes on a new set of Santa's  Helpers that would adorn the staircase at Thatcher that year. Using a blowup projector she enlarged a paper Santa's Workshop I had brought as an example when she asked for ideas from the class. Strangely no one else was privileged to work on this project, which lasted several days, and took me out of class as soon as my work was done. I could feel Barbara's eyes on my back as I left the classroom with the Art Teacher. 

On one of the few occasions in which Barbara spoke directly to me she stopped me while we happened to be alone in the hall.  "Hey," she said authoritatively with one hand on her hip, "What  kind of health insurance does your family have?"

Wide eyed and afraid not to answer, I swallowed and said, "Blue Cross".

"Good!" she said, busily straightening her cashmere sweater. She needed to be certain my family was contributing to her well-being, I suppose. "My father sells Blue Cross."

As she walked away with her perfect hair bouncing over her shoulders I said to the back of her head,  "Well my father sells life insurance."  Could she possibly respect that our fathers had a shared dependance on the purchase of insurance, I wondered.I had never thought of discussing what my father did with my classmates, and I wondered what conversation in her (much-bigger-than-mine)  house had pushed her to recruit from her school mates. If I could get in the Way-Back machine I would probably find out that the date was the one following the announcement of Colorado Fuel and Iron's Steel  Mill closing. The ripple effect would  take about 3 years to seriously compromise hundreds of families that were dependent either directly or indirectly on CF&I's success.

I crept back to anonymity since our common thread was unknown by anyone else, and I really didn't want to be a part of The Clique anyway. I wasn't shy but most of my friends were, so I was the one who sought them out, and we were mostly members of the Girl Scout Troop.. I  visited one friends' fishing cabin  high in the  Rockies and attended birthday parties at the homes of others. And one popular and talented girl with blonde hair like mine was just as friendly to me as she was to everyone else. It wasn't so bad being Barbara's most hated classmate.

A couple of months after I arrived, a new girl, Esther, was introduced to the class. I watched in amazement as Barbara repeated the same sizing-up she had done with me, evaluating the usefulness of Esther to her group of well-dressed followers and dismissing her initially as unimportant. Esther was the only Jewish girl in our class. She had strongly ethnic features, and gazed straight at you when she spoke with you. I sensed her loneliness very quickly and reached out to her to be sure she had a friend. For a couple of weeks, Esther was my friend alone, but when Barbara learned that Esther's father was a banker I walked into class to find Esther standing right next to Barbara. Both of them looked straight at me, and I took my seat.

She had joined The Clique immediately when invited, but it wasn't long before we were playing together again  after school. Saturdays she had Sabbath School and could not play, and Sundays I went to church. I was pained that Esther had been so quick to abandon me but glad when she returned. Still Esther had a quality that allowed her to maintain friendships with anyone she chose and the amazing ability to move within several circles. She and I were friends, but not best friends, and she joined Girl Scouts as well. 

After forth grade came fifth, and Mrs Steadmond. Mrs Steadmond had hair that was plastered fast against her head in a severe bun. Her mouth was permanently fixed in a thin, grim line beneath a short, snooty nose and two eyes knit together in the middle by the frown of disapproval she wore solely for me. She would never call on me  in class and kept her attention fixed on the shining social stars. She couldn't find fault with my test scores but she would dismiss writing that I knew was above my own grade level as superfluous. After reading an especially deep book I thought I would ask if she had read it. She listened, a look of annoyance on her face as I attempted to explain  the story line of The Ghetto, a recount of the Warsaw Jewish experience. World War II had ended less than 20 years before, and I had seen the numbers printed on Esther's mother's hand.  When she did not respond, I offered, "I write poetry, Mrs. Steadmond."   She looked at me evenly and said "Oh, a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None."  It was a long year. She really preferred to chat during playground time with Barbara and the Barbettes. I began writing more.

In the sixth grade, my mother had long since stopped trying to perm my hair to control it, so it was wavy and unruly. Mr. Melton was a big, jovial man with a good sense of humor. He did give me credit for a brain, but I cannot remember a single thing he ever said other than to ask me in front of the class if  I had combed my hair with an egg-beater.  Whatever I was doing, it wasn't working for me in the hair department. Barbara's favorite hairdo was a little flip with a bouffant pouf pinned in the back. I described it to my mother and she helped me pin the bouffant under.  As I approached the classroom, Barbara's sycophants had already reported my change of hairstyle to her. She leaned against the door frame watching me through half-shaded eyes and said dryly as I entered, "Nice try, Kiddo."

For the first time I looked right back at her and said,"You know, they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."  She left me alone the rest of that year. Mr. Melton seemed contrite after witnessing our conversation but my mother also had taken special interest in his egg beater remark. It is possible she delivered him an ultimatum he couldn't refuse, because he began to ask me questions directly when he could see I knew the answers rather than wait for my hand to come up. He seemed to make a special effort to treat me just as he would the rest of the class.

When we started Junior High School, the addition of new friends from a broader cross-section of our part of town diluted some of  the effects of Barbara's efforts.  There were several equally popular crowds, and of course all of them, including Barbara's had a Cheerleader for its' showpiece. That cheerleaders and football players went hand in hand had never occurred to me. But across from me in my eighth grade math class sat a tall, friendly football and basketball player, Jeff,  who first introduced himself to me, and then for the majority of the year continuously talked and joked with me.

Completely across the room from us sat Barbara, shooting withering glances my way as I tried to keep the banter quiet to avoid getting in trouble with the teacher. I thought it was just Barbara's way of being superior, not causing a ruckus by not sitting somewhere next to somebody who wanted to talk and  joke. But we were assigned seats by the teacher so I was there through no choice of my own.  Jeff took every opportunity to crack jokes, sometimes at my expense, just audible to everyone around us. There was a lot going on in that corner of the room, but we were just friends having a good time, I thought. It never occurred to me that Jeff might have Boyfriend potential. He was fun like my big brother was fun, and I was going to marry Paul McCartney.

Over the year as Jeff's attention persisted, Barbara became more and more frustrated. She spent her one of her CIA agents to determine whether or not I had romantic inclinations toward Jeff. I told her she was ridiculous, and that we were just friends.  But after class one day the teacher asked whether Jeff and I were a "pair".  When I insisted we were only friends he raised an eyebrow in disbelief and nodded his head.

I left wondering whether it was possible people really thought I liked Jeff and that he liked me when we never saw each other nor really spoke outside of class. I thought about sock hops and whether I could ever remember dancing with Jeff, and I really couldn't.  Barbara had admitted to her friends that I was a "good dancer" once at a sock hop where I never lacked for a partner. They were probably trying to figure out why no one asked them to dance when they were so important and popular.  Since I loved to dance it also never occurred to me that in the social scheme  of things, any one of my dance partners was a Potential Boyfriend. Maybe I had danced with Jeff. It was a big school. Sock Hops lasted a couple of hours. You could dance with a  lot of people in that amount of time if each record was 3 minutes long.

The next day as I walked toward Math class, I could see  a sort of parade of populars trailing behind the tall head of Jeff, but couldn't see who was next to him until the bottleneck formed at the door. Barbara turned with a little smile and stepped into the classroom with a glance back at me.  Jeff sat down silently across from me, never to tell another joke again.  For the rest of the year, Jeff walked Barbara everywhere to class. I would miss the fun a little, but I had other things to worry about.

We were moving after school was out to be near my older brother, who had cancer.   I had told my close friends, and was trying to wrap my head around the concept of leaving Colorado for the Desert Southwest of New Mexico. The Steel Mill had been closed for a year or more and Daddy's business had virtually stopped as the economy of 1962-1963 plummeted. He was going to farm in New Mexico again after some 15 years of making a living in the city.

Our family moved on to Lubbock, Texas after less than a year, and I met and married my husband after high school there. Like my mother, I loved to sew, so I got a little job in the fabric department of one of the more elegant department stores, Hemphill Wells.  When they opened a new store at the mall, they hired a new girl, Jan, to work in the fabric department with me.  We warmed up right away, but she sometimes stood staring at me.  "I just know we've met before," she said.

We went through church, college, sororities, social clubs, and finally high schools.  I went to Lubbock High School, but she went to Centennial, in Pueblo.  My mouth fell open.  What year? What Junior High?  It was staggering to think she could remember me from so many years before. I hadn't changed, apparently, although my hair was now honey brown and well-behaved.  Who did you know, we asked each other. I ran through the list of Choir friends and Girl Scout Friends.  She knew most of them, and I wondered how we had failed to connect at Freed Jr. High with so much in common.

Then she asked if I knew Barbara. I said, yes, we had gone to grade school together and were in the same Girl Scout Troop.  She said Barbara was her best friend. I couldn't suppress the gasp, but I walked back through the past several months of working with Jan to examine any evidence of unkindness. She was always, always nice, I concluded. "Well, are you still in touch?" I asked. When she affirmed that they still wrote I wondered how long our friendship was going to last now.She ran through who had dated who in those years after we left Pueblo, and who was married to who now. Barbara had married Jeff.

I could hardly believe my ears. We were in the eighth grade. Had she held onto him all four years of high school or did they ever see anyone else?  Had I haunted Barbara as some kind of force to be reckoned with when I  managed to thrive despite her seeming desire to crush me like a bug?  Was marrying Jeff, who came from a poor family like mine, a decision that began with taking away something she thought I had?  I was never going to ask Jan.

Jan was getting married. She and her fiance had finished college, and would be moving to a farm homesteaded by his grandparents. It sounded like a wonderful life, and she held my admiration as future wife of the American Farmer gone Agribusiness. We stayed in touch and wrote for several years we added to our little families and worked out the American Dream. Barbara never came up in conversation again. Jan never cooled in her friendship with me, and I quit having dreams about Barbara on a bad day not long afterwards. So far as I know, she and Jeff, my never-even-considered-it boyfriend, are still married.

Being Thirteen: Part One

"And now," said The Great Stoneface, "for a really, really big sheewww..." It was quite possible that everyone knew Ed Sullivan as the Great Stoneface, but tonight it didn't matter what other people's fathers called him, because the Beatles were on and it was clearly an event for all time. My father eyed me and my sister watching enthusiastically as screaming adolescent girls drowned out the cute mop-headed band members. We had heard them on KDZA just a few times, but we liked them because they were different. And they were from England, we explained to Daddy, who looked at us from under a now-raised eyebrow. He politely waited for a commercial before he explained that he could walk out on the street and find four young men and himself produce a band equal to the Beatles.

"No, Daddy," we shook our heads, which were covered in metal spiked brush rollers for the next day's smooth flips that would bob up and down as we discussed the night's events with our girlfriends. "They are REALLY neat!"

He nodded, his look a little jaded. We knew he didn't understand but he was not a girl, was he?

Over the next months we acquired overseas pen pals, because you really needed a girlfriend in England if you loved the Beatles. You and she could share details about what was exciting in your two respected and admired countries that could then knowingly be told to your un-penpalled friends. And while my sister went on to High School and acted normal, I went to Jr High School and along with all my equally Brit-enchanted friends acquired an English accent to be used while out riding the bus or shopping, or in any other public occasion. Six or more of us on a single bus could command the attention of every wary adult who could neither understand a single thing we said, nor why we would wear the leather caps or knee length boots that had become a sort of uniform.

My mother was so impressed when my friends and I all chattered in our Brit Brogue that she had to tell one of her friends about our call to the radio station asking a record be played that we knew had been released in England but not yet in the US. She was certain we had convinced the station we were VIPs from across the water. She sewed mod outfits enthusiastically for me and my sister. Since she was able to literally reproduce an outfit from a magazine photo we were on the cutting edge at all times.

My friends and I collected Beatle Cards in huge stacks. Mine were taken away by a teacher who found them a distraction and at the end of the year my mother, though still impressed with my linguistic skills did not go sign them back to me, so they were forfeited. Since I couldn't have chewed the gum that they came with at school, it must have landed in the trash can just outside the gymnasium where the sock hops were held every other Friday.

A local DJ would spin our requests and we could wear off calories and boundless energy and enthusiasm for the bands we stayed up late at night to hear. All of us without visible means of support-very few of us got such thing as an allowance-resorted to a 10 cent ice cream sandwich for lunch and saved the rest to buy 45 rpm records at Globe Discount City, the precursor of KMart and WalMart.

On Saturday mornings we would start our trek south toward the bridge on West 4th street and meet each other along the way. Dressed in our Pep Club uniforms with maroon corduroy skirts and matching sweaters declaring our membership in gold letters around a golden mascot Ram we were unavoidably American. The walk gave us ample time to discuss boys, boy friends and boyfriends, and to sing "My Boyfriend's Back" along with The Angels via Linda's transistor radio. At the game, we worked in concert with the cheerleaders. We were a chorus to be reckoned with, and surely insured the success of our outstanding football team whose members all were, of course, cute boys.

The walk home took us past Globe and we could there acquire the prize 45 rpm of the week for less than a dollar. It only required a few days of ice cream bars to provide a library of fab records. And a month of restraint could lead one to own the latest album. Later, in one or the other of our homes we would gather around the stereo and no one really minded at all that 5 or 6 of us were actually singing over the voices of our idols, because that was, after all, what we did-in a kind of trance. We had the words memorized and the tones and inflections duplicated perfectly. We were choir geeks of the first kind, having been chosen  for our superior talents to sing in the Performance Choir.

Later that night after KDZA signed off we would tune into KOMA and Wolfman Jack to stay in touch with the broader USA, who were also enchanted with everything British. So the announcer in the echo chamber that chanted off the names of raceways having big road blasters also listed the bands most of us would never see:  Herman's Hermets, The Searchers, Manfred Mann, The Moody Blues, and of course a mix of American bands all going to cities no where near Pueblo.

We would write a note about the game and our record purchases to our pen pals, and whisper a little longer on the phone trying not to be caught up late. Finally we would go to sleep with the radio still running under our pillows.

There were only a few of us who really did see the Beatles at Red Rocks. I won't forget their names, Mary Jane who loved Ringo,  and Linda, who loved Paul and was the first of my friends to have 3 inch long white shag carpet in her living room. Those lucky girls. Most of my friends saw A Hard Day's Night first run. I could not come up with the money in time even if I skipped the ice cream bar, so I ruefully stared at the marquee from across the street at the park as I waited to meet up with them.

When the movie was out we all got on the bus and put on our British accents before getting off at a little shop downtown to order some hot tea with cream and sugar. My fortunate friends didn't let me sulk at all, but gave me a moment-by-moment detail of the entire movie.  Behind the counter the waitresses whispered  back and forth to each other something that must have been like,"Well, there's some more of those kids acting like they're from England again. They must have just  come out of that ridiculous movie with those long-haired singers. Yep, and since all they can afford is a cup of tea, there's not going to be a tip, either."