Childhood dreams is a prompt from Studio 30 plus.

Because the 3WW prompt went I added it!

I stop talking and concentrate on putting fireflies into a bottle.  It’s going to be dark soon and the trapped fireflies will light up the skies.  We’re between ten and six years old and none of us have to be in until the adults unplug the TV’s from the extension cords hanging from the garden apartments in the courts to TV tables.  Some of the men smoke cigars.   They drink Coke and lemon soda, spilling the soda so that bees and flys flock around the tables and TV’s.  I stay far away from the TV tables.  There’s nothing dainty about them.  Plus I’m scared soda will spill into the extension cords and there will be a huge explosion.

It’s summer before my little sister and I go to camp for six weeks soon after my birthday.  Our parents encourage us to stay out late and play so we’ll be tired and sleep a bit later in the morning. Though I try to get up at six every morning of the year to read the encyclopedia.  I’m a word nerd that the other kids like because they can’t remember not knowing me.  My best friend, Ava Altman, is at a hotel for the summer.  My family goes to hotels but most of the families spend two to four weeks in bungalow colonies.

I don’t tell the kids that my family spent summers in bungalow colonies when we lived in Sunnyside.  Maybe my parents laugh at memories of the bungalow colonies when we stay at hotels near Monticello to visit parts of my father’s family.  His sister and her family live in Miami.  Poor me. Doomed to vacations in the Catskills, Miami Beach, and “educational places” such as The Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

We study the region for months before we go. I can’t wait for our first vacation to DC where we’ll see the FBI building which is about the most exciting building in the world to me.  The day we’re going to go we stop at my father’s client’s supermarket first and I throw up all over the entrance way to the store.  We go back to the court instead where I get over the measles in two days.

I like going on vacation. I especially like Florida because I get to spend the morning in the pool and the afternoon in the ocean.  My parents get two rooms and our cousins come and stay with us. We all get along.  My sister and I can still recite our father’s refrain: “relax, we’re going to be here for two weeks.  You don’t need to do everything today.”  Yes. We. Do.  We run through the hotel lobbies and downstairs store arcade.  If we’re in the 40′s at Collins Avenue we run to some houseboats that are on TV.  We’re going to meet some TV stars.  My sister who is two years younger doesn’t really care but she knows I only like the coolest of things.  That we never meet a TV star doesn’t phase me.  There’s always tomorrow.  Or next year.

I like being in the court. I like camp. I’m an indiscriminate life liker. I can’t wait to be a teenager and have a real boyfriend but I spend much time dreaming.  Ava and I have our whole lives plotted out.  Ava looks like a child movie star.  She has long dark wavy perfect hair, and is the prettiest girl I know.

Ava thinks I’m so lucky to be my mother’s daughter.  Unlike Ava’s mother who I secretly think is a witch who will get her coven together for a court haunting, my mother’s friendly and fun.

My mother has dark hair, large eyes, a huge smile, and is I know prettier than most of the other mothers. Before I was adopted my mother owned a fancy dress store in Forest Hills.  Her mother makes our good clothes.  Ava, my sister and I are the best dressed girls in the court.  Ava’s family has a housekeeper.  I take that for granted until I’m older and realize how tiny the garden apartments, built for returning vets are.  Everybody lives in Beech Hills because it’s on top of the largest hill in Queens, cut off from the rest of the borough, and has a lot of outdoor space for kids to play in.

There are 40 mothers in the court alone.  I’m vaguely aware that my mother’s older because I was adopted but I know this is something that can never ever be discussed.  Most parents and kids think she’s younger.  Everybody looks up to my parents.  My father’s a professional who always has time to talk to the other parents and answer any questions.  He began the first credit union for coop apartments.  I know that’s a big deal only because parents stop me and tell me how great my father is.

I don’t try to memorize summers in the court.  The TV’s, the rock & roll I love that the older kids play; the games we kids play.  It’s boys against girls, run to the trees.  One two three ring a leveo.  I’m not very good at the games but it doesn’t matter and I laugh so hard when I get to the trees.  I’m tantalized by the garden apartments.  The court is a perfect place to live.

Years later Ava and I will find our memories haunting.  No childhood could possibly live up to it.  We tantalize kids with our stories.

Then I never stop to think how good life is.  Why should I?  It’s all I know.  But I will always remember how beautiful the fireflies were when they lit up the sky like fireworks.  Then I opened the bottle and let them fly away into the night.  The other kids didn’t like that.  They liked the fireflies living for a few days in the glass jars with air holes on the jar cap.  But I liked to think of them flying to their true love.

Hope you enjoy this. I wanted to try something different.  Something that shows how great my life has been.

I know it seems contradictory to the posts I have written before about NLD on PT But as I said “NLD plays by no rules.”

If I was never called disabled or treated as if I were disabled does that mean I am?

I thank the readers who have stuck with me as I lost many when I became immersed in this world.  No it doesn’t feel great but…..I know I’m a decent or better writer.  Writing has been a major focus of my life forever.  It’s funny but a lot of my facebook friends don’t realize this. I find that cute for some reason.

Part One

About seven years before I met my birth mother I went to a meeting of one of the adoption groups that were big in the city then.  A young woman walked up to the podium with her very obviously  challenged brother:

Hi, I’m Casey.  This is my brother, Michael. I found him after I found my birth mother who lives in a mental hospital.  She had seven children by seven men.  It doesn’t matter.  I never felt part of my family.  Now my life is complete.”

Standing ovation except from me and a few other laggards. Read more…

I met my birth mother in the 80′s.  I have many great things to say about that decade.  Meeting her isn’t one of them.  It took me years, until I wrote a newspaper article about the experience to remember what she called me the entire weekend.  I was “my mistake.”  “Why hi.  How nice to meet you.  Just call me her mistake.”

The word guilt was invented specifically for me yet I felt no, OK very little guilt when I stopped corresponding with my birth mother.  She had told me how sorry she was she didn’t marry my birth father (I wasn’t as I wouldn’t have had my family) yet she would write me letters listing cities where I could meet Jewish men.

Hello.  I lived in Manhattan.  It was a bit hard not to meet Jewish men but I was looking, half-heartedly, for love and religion played no part in that.  Actually I was in the midst of a two year, get together for sex and fun–friends with benefits, before the name, with an Italian-American character actor.  But I had no desire to talk about it.

We had met at the Iggy Pop concert where I was carried in a rave, and somehow got my friend a job with Iggy who I had never met before the after party.  Being friends with doormen, managers and/or club owners all over downtown had certain advantages.

I’m not proud of a lot of things I did but I’m not ashamed either.  I didn’t expect my birth mother to approve of everything I did nor did I feel the need to tell her.  As I didn’t tell my parents everything.  I was a self-supporting adult who didn’t need a new mother.  Mine, adoptive, was everything I wanted in a mother.

So I let the relationship die a natural death.  I’ve googled her maybe a total of four times in the entire time I have had access to the Internet.   I was shocked to see a picture of her still alive and sharp looking.  She looked very different than she had 22 years ago.  Old but better.  Nothing at all like me–we have totally different noses, eyes, and mouths.  But the face shape, yes.  When I saw her she had a round face.  Mine hasn’t been round since teen years.

If I met her now I would handle the reunion very differently.  But I don’t know how.  It’s something I think you’re never prepared for no matter how “prepared” you go.

The picture stirred up feelings in me.

Feelings of needing family.  Feelings of being somebody’s child.  Unfortunately I can never be her child.  I had two of the best parents, and this year I know I will think of them often.  My Mom’s tenth anniversary and my Dad’s 20th.  Bookends I called them and they were.

I have incredible family and friends.  But I don’t think you ever stop wanting to be somebody’s child.  Even when they’re old, frail and maybe dependent, they diapered you.  They love you for the flaws, not in spite of them.  Well, a bit of everything.  It’s their job to love you!  They even pay you for the privilege.  Room, board, toys, clothes, vacations, college if you’re lucky.  And all the things you take so for granted.

This is an article making the FB rounds on quitting blogging.  Seven to ten hours a week on blogging?  At my height when friends mentioned above called me “lost to blogging,” rather melodramatically I might add, I was spending 70-100 hours a week on two or more blogs.  And paid for mine!!!!!!!!

Once in Junior High I was supposed to give a speech.  No words came out.  I spent the rest of Junior High and all of High School waiting to lose my voice again.  Never happened in the literal sense.  But few if any people in Jericho outside of my family really knew me until Senior Year when the class intellectual/hippie girl and I began hanging out basically because we were the only girls we knew who liked to go into the city and be part of the counter-culture. Read more…

I’m trying to make this a coherent story.  It’s difficult putting in excerpts.  Bear with me! This is a continuation of last weeks–the post just above.  Thanks Thom for the words!

I wasn’t a neat person.  I couldn’t make my bed perfectly.  There was always a bulge somewhere.  My clothes weren’t arranged by color or in any order.  I had too many clothes, from Loehmann’s, from my parents stores, from Paraphernalia the coolest store in the world or New York, from my family visit to London the previous spring.  We had gone to Carnaby Street and I even had a brown velvet smoking jacket with a white lace collar and sleeves.
Most of my clothes ended on the floor of the closet.  My bureaus weren’t organized.  I didn’t have an underpants drawer for my too many pairs of underpants or a socks draw or anything resembling order.  I had no idea how to order anything.  My side of the room was a mess.
This is where you think that my parents failed at raising me.  No, they did everything possible to teach me organization.  My mother had begun working part time a few years earlier.  We had a cleaning woman, three days a week,  who wasn’t allowed in my room unless it was already clean and the bed was made.  No matter how much I tried I couldn’t order or clean things.
My Dad was a CPA.  He lived for precision.  But he loved me more than he loved order and that was almost smothering.  My Mom tried to balance him.  But you can’t stop a force of nature.
Our fights were fast, fierce and furious.  My sister and I had always related to Danny Williams (Danny Thomas) in Make Room for Daddy because he had dark hair, a big nose,a great sense of humor, and an obvious career that he went to at odd hours.  Mostly he yelled at his kids, Linda and Rusty.  It might have felt that he yelled more than he did because it was so good to see an imperfect father who would walk the plank if he had to for his kids.
My father had told me the summer before I began college that he was glad I was rebelling against him.  For if I didn’t I would rebel against the world.  Take the fun out of it, Max, why didn’t you?  But Freshman year was going to test our boundaries and relationship even more than Senior Year at High School had.
And my mother had found an ounce of pot in my room a week or so after I graduated high school.  I could have lied and said it was oregano but the thought never occurred to me.  She didn’t usually look in my closet but the night before my friend and I had gone in a “strange man’s” car and came home too soon.  This was very suspicious behavior.  Roofers were putting in a new roof.  My mother thought that if the roofers began a fire and the Jericho Volunteer Fire Department had to come, they would go into the house through my room and hammer my closet down–it being so neat and all.
My mother was a very intelligent, rational woman.  Even I knew this wasn’t intelligent rational thinking.  My high school boyfriend had been a 27 year old hippie East Village living, Mack truck driver.  They had let me date him so I wouldn’t sneak out or hate them when I was 30.
My mother uttered many words as she gave me bus fare to my aunt and uncle’s house in Connecticut.  My Aunt was a hippie artist who was to become a Buddhist. My Uncle was a former radio announcer now businessman.  In the 40′s, they had been friends with The Weavers and other folk singers.  My mother felt that I would be safe with them as she told my father what she had found.
After I arrived at my Aunt’s she asked if it was sex or drugs that had brought me to her house.  I looked at her.  “Honestly?”  I said as I played with my hair for a second or two too long.  “It could be either.  I had an older boyfriend I just broke up with.  His friend raped me.”
What can I say?  It was the summer of 1968.  I was a strange girl saved from total oddness by looks and something in my personality that attracted many people.  And repelled others.  By the time I got to college I was used to this weird dichotomy that was me.  I was fearful.  I only spoke to people who spoke to me first.  Fortunately many people spoke to me first.
I certainly repelled my college roommate Melanie and the Resident Assistant, Lois.  As I went about my life meeting more and more boys, they hatched a plan to bust me.
Now, I wasn’t a big drug user.  I dabbled.  But I had a spaced out look that made me seem as if I were a heavy user.
I wasn’t neat.  Melanie and Lois didn’t understand that this was a problem in me.  That inside me was a girl who wanted to be the neatest girl in the world but I couldn’t be.  I didn’t know how.  They couldn’t understand how a girl who had such nice and nice looking parents could be so sloppy.
My mother wore mini dresses.  She had great legs, and had always taught me to show off my assets so she showed off hers.  I made fun of her in that daughterly way, or maybe I was envious because in 1968, breasts and waists didn’t count.  It was legs, only legs that mattered.
I was too young, too self absorbed to understand that legs were what mattered to girls.  Boys they liked legs and other things.  I had the other things.
Every day boys would give me little presents like sparklers, incense, candles.  I thought many boys who all had long neat dark hair, large dark eyes, big nice noses, long tall bodies clad in cords and tees were giving me presents.
We never really talked.  I went around with JohnnyB who had come up to me and began talking the first day of college.  We made arrangements to go to the first dance of the year together.  It was called The End of the World Dance and the group that was playing was, I swear, called God.
One day a boy gave me a present and I realized that Noah was the only boy to have been giving me presents.  We began talking.  It turned out that he had been kicked out school the year before.  Supposedly for hanging out with drug users and I guess dealing.  Even his parents believed the school. In reality he had convinced many people to the 67 Moratorium.  I was impressed as he wasn’t the usual anti war nerd but a genuinely good looking funny boy who made me laugh.  But I wouldn’t date him because he wasn’t a college student.  Aside from that he was everything I had ever dreamed of in a boy.

(I have been doing a word exercise–750 words.  As always thanks Thom for the words.  All the 3WW’s below this are fragments or outline type chapters from Space Chick) This is my article on Non Verbal Learning Disorder (NLD) that sort of inspired my memoir.

¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
It was summer orientation before my freshman year at that bucolic campus on the North Shore of Long Island.  Post wasn’t known for its academics.  if it had been I wouldn’t have gotten in.
Five curvy miles from my parents house, almost in the same public school district, they let me have a dorm room so I could have the “full college experience.”  My cousin had graduated the year before and he had talked my parents into letting me live in the dorms.
I had been corresponding with the girl who was to be my roommate.  She was a cheerleader.  I was a hippie freak.  She had long dark brown hair she ironed every night.  I had longish chestnut hair that frizzed everywhere it seemed.  Still people, to my constant amazement, loved my hair.
I knew because hordes of men in the city, construction workers and average guys would scream things out about my hair, face, clothes, body.  In 1968, you didn’t have to wonder if you were pretty or not.  Guys would just tell you.  I hated it yet couldn’t imagine being one of the girls nobody said anything to.
I’m sure Melanie was shouted out to.  If she ever went to the city without the protective arms of her quarterback boyfriend.
I’m sure I was the last person Melanie wanted for a roommate.  We had bought matching blue bedspreads, curtains and other things for the room.  The bathrooms were large and communal.
Freshman girls had a 10:30 curfew on weekdays and a 1:00AM curfew on weekends.  It was supposed to be for our safety.  At orientation they explained the rules.  There was a Resident Assistant (RA) on each floor.  She and she alone would determine if we were doing everything right.
There was a demerit system.  You could get demerits for not making your bed by 9AM, for not wearing shoes in your room, for not wearing a skirt to dinner, for being sloppy, and it would turn out just for being me.
She was judge, jury and it turned out, wannabe executioner.  Lois the RA was German.
She took an immediate like to Melanie.  Everything about Melanie screamed “affluent, good girl, fun, easy.”  Everything about me screamed “rule breaker, bad, maybe stupid, possibly poor but those clothes she wears….”  I wanted to be like Melanie, god did I want to be.
Orientation was more fun than I expected it to be.  When I was buying my books an older boy, much older stared then smiled at me.  I was scared to smile back but I did.
Melanie and I made some sort of truce during orientation.  I wanted her to like me and did everything in my power to make myself likable.
But the truth was most girls didn’t like me.  I had a few girlfriends but most people who talked to me were boys.
We went home for the rest of the summer.  It was the summer of the Chicago Convention.  Vile.  Horrible.  My parents had practically locked me in the house so I wouldn’t go with friends I had made earlier that summer.  It was for my own safety my parents assured me.  I was angry at them but secretly glad I wasn’t there.  Yet I should have been.  It was so conflicting.  For the rest of her life, my mother a non-crier, would cry whenever she saw anything about the Chicago Convention.  “You could have been killed.  Or worse.”  Worse meaning brain damage.  If they had only known how damaged my seemingly good brain really was.
I don’t know how to talk about non verbal learning disorder in this memoir. I can only show what I was like and maybe at the end of the book put in a chapter that explains how my behavior, in each chapter,  was infuenced by NLD.  I don’t know.
The rest of the summer was spent getting ready for school.  My mother and I went to Floyd’s a discount store near our house and spent $40 on health and beauty aids as they were just beginning to be called.  It seemed like a fortune to me then.  We filled up two giant shopping bags.
We went to Loehmanns and bought clothes my mother liked.  Fortunately my mother had good taste, and was proud of my figure.  I knew most girls I would like would basically wear bell bottoms with cotton peasant blouses.  I could get the bell bottoms from my parents store along with an endless variety of tee shirts.  But I was into dressing up.  I wasn’t the bell bottom kind of hippie but the Indian print dress type.  I managed to make all the clothes my mother bought at Loehmann’s into some sort of hippie atire by pairing dresses with pants and/or putting a Mexican rope belt on.
I managed to make myself stand out.
Finally school began.  My parents drove me and I couldn’t wait until they left. They stayed and stayed.  Finally just before nightfall they left.  I kissed them good bye.  Walked out of the room and began to make myself a life.

This is a writing exercise. They have a very different and interesting stat section.  I began doing this yesterday and will rework the stories for the book. I give myself 40 minutes to do the exercise. Turns out to be the perfect time.  So it’s unedited here. Sometimes I wonder why I’m doing this.  Really wonder!

Hi Leslie
Thanks for your incredible letter and gorgeous Christmas card.  It’s a fireplace keeper! I can’t wait until the Blenderbuster reunion Memorial Day Weekend and wish it were next week.
Remember the year we went to Jones Beach, rented four umbrellas because it was windy, and found that was the absolute worst thing to do in the rain?  So we got into Victoria’s car, drove in what became pouring rain, round and round, as we listened to Rod Stewart and smoked way too many joints.  Good times.  Stupid times but somehow we survived.  (Don’t try my life at home kids!)
I think North Myrtle will survive us.  They’ve survived my older Goddaughter’s visits and she’s educated Black too.  Round here that’s not usual.  They wouldn’t know what to do if they knew your family owned both a plantation and a summer house in Sag Harbor.  A summer house I miss much.  I kind of modeled my house here on the house in Azurest.  They’re not used to Jews either.  Sometimes I feel as they would like to see me in a sideshow.  Or I’m in one
Once I was at your house alone.  I was just getting back into writing–sometime in the mid 80′s and would take a beer, a tablet and pen outside and just sit and write.  Victoria was the first person to arrive for the weekend.  She got a new car–a red Saab I think.  I heard her come at least a quarter mile down the road and yelled at her for giving us Whites a bad rep.  But then I went into her car and saw the dashboard lit up.  It looked like Soho at night–then.  Now I would analogize Times Square I guess.  But maybe it had a more funky look.  (To the young uns and people who only think they know New York–Soho was built up and crowded by the early 80′s.  Tribeca was the next frontier and even it had fun bars, clubs, restaurants, and people moving into lofts that not long before had been garment factories.  Tribeca had been a schmatta capital.)
End of digression:
Once when we were staying at the house I was taking a walk.  Lucia had six month old Little Luce in a sling and they were walking the opposite way.  Lucia whispered to me to call Little Luce’s name and I did!  She looked up at me and waved!  It was the first time she recognized herself!  Now she’s a junior in college!
While everybody here seems to think most Hispanics are undocumented Mexicans (including Lucia’s very of Puerto Rican descent sister CLo) CLo, Lucia and Little Luce haven’t been run out of town or anything like that.
I have been watching  The Golden Girls to prepare for our reunion for several reasons.  I like it.  We were so young when it was first on and they seemed so old–Dorothy (Bea Arthur) keeps saying that she’s 60.  I still think they look older than we do now and Rue was only in her 40′s–but the haircut.
Once Victoria and I were staying in a motel in Cutchogue.  Exhausted from a day of swimming in the water between the North and South Forks and eating a $9.99 lobster dinner that was to die for we retired early and watched The Golden Girls.
You know Victoria’s humor?  Dry,  understated?  A wit I want to appropriate for my own.  She was the first person to say:
The Golden Girls date more than I do.
I almost choked it was so funny.  Other people claim to have made that expression up but I was there that night.
I still remember the night I met you and Victoria.  The winter of 78 was famous for its blizzards.  This wasn’t one. But it had been snowing.

Vince Alessi was my date to Lori Bernstein’s party at a loft she rented on the Bowery.  Vince brought his white Caddy and made a big production of seeing if it was still there every fifteen minutes.  It did get covered in mounds of snow at times.  He would run out to shovel it. So you could see the white car in the snow.  Not because it was a good way to get out of the parking spot later.

I got stoned.  It was easier than caring.  After the party ended I had Vince drive about seven of us to the Kiev for breakfast.  Of all the breakfast places in New York it was my favorite.  Except for maybe The Empire Diner as you never knew who was going to play the piano.
Your and Victoria were supervisors, I a mere coder.  But we started talking….Your boyfriend until he died, Rick, was there.  Everybody we were too hang with constantly for the next decade or so was at Lori’s party.  We should have kept in touch with her to thank her.  But uh she came on to all of us at different times and that was more than a bit uncomfortable.
I thought we were all going to remain a family forever, like The Golden Girls did.  Maybe we needed to reach their ages to truly appreciate one another.  Lucia, bless her, actually looks forward to my too frequent visits.
I’ll probably see you soon as Rafe is recovering from the aneurysms and I need to see him.  Will know when, when I get my new Spirit Mastercard with four free roundtrips and can make reservations.  This is in addition to my ten free trips anywhere in the continental US or five trips out of the motherland.  I see a lot of travel in my future which is good because, Leslie, I need laughter.  I need mental stimulation.  I need to finish the frigging first draft and shop it.  God yes I need that.
Love you much
~pia

Christmas break 1961
Daddy promises to take me to the ice skating rink in Great Neck later. My little sister, Elka,  is at her best friend Debby’s apartment in our 40 family garden apartment court, on top of a hill, at the edge of North East Queens.  The crescent we live in has hundreds of families, and the development has thousands.  All have kids.  On our copy of Madeline, our father wrote the names of our friends on each bed.  Then he made a list of the remaining friends.  I have a first through 12th best friend.  Lynda is my super best friend but I can’t stand not considering all my other friends “best.” Read more…

Think outside the Fox

Not all South Carolinians are DeMinted

Best signs I saw at the rally.  The rally will hold me together for awhile.  I’m not going to discuss how I feel about the results now.  It’s obvious.  On the good side my city will be getting public buses.  I read that only people on welfare who are parasites need public transportation.  Love being categorized so wrongly!!!

Thanks Thom for the words

Memory is funny.  It’s highly selective.  90% perception; 90% pictures and films; 90% discussion with relatives and friends you have always known; 90% discussion with friends and family you make once away from the nuclear family–and these memories get thrown into the shuffle; five percent absolute truth; five percent absolute falsehoods; five percent kernel of truth. Yes I know this is way over 100% but what in life is a 100%?

I was born in the middle of the 20th century and live in 2010.  It feels absolutely incredible to be part of the biggest revolution in telecommunications since?  I’m not really sure.

You in your 20′s now, maybe 30′s and definitely younger will always know where your former classmates and friends are.  You might not speak to somebody who used to be very important to you for years, but one day you’ll IM or Skype or whatever.Then again you might know exactly who you want to keep in your life from the time you graduate college.  I hope you leave room for the unexpected and the wondrous.

I don’t know if this change in communications and the youtubing of everything will allow you to remember with more clarity and precision or your memories will be selective also.  Only time, a zillion studies, and you yourself will be able to answer those questions.

I became an Internet junkie far earlier than most members of my generation.  But I quickly established contact with some people who had been important to my life since my late teens and we had just fallen out of contact for a few years.  Yet this new way of communicating–email, allowed us to be more honest than we had been previously.  Or maybe it was being on the cusp of middle age and being a bit sentimental.  We wanted people to know how much they had meant to us.

Through the years I reestablished contact with many people.  No matter how slow the contact came it always felt a bit abrupt.  By establishing this contact we wield our story to another person.  I learned what people really thought of me at various times and each time was blown away.

Last week something amazing happened.

When I was four I made my first best friend. I don’t remember meeting her. We must have picked each other as there were many girls around our age in the garden apartment we lived in.

We were friends who could spend hours just lying on the grass staring at the sky and telling each other stories.  We made up games.  We read books.  Did she come to the court barbecues where kernels of corn would fall all around me as I was messy?  I think her family was away all summer; not just six weeks for camp as my sister and I were.

She set the bar high for all future friendships.

And I realize that many of my memories aren’t false but aren’t exactly the way things happened.  So much bad happened in my own head, for I was struggling from the time we were nine or so with NLD, that I didn’t see the good around me.

I’m not changing my memoir for it is my perception but I’m adding chapters.  I have been toying for some time with having somebody who knew me during a specific period write an intro or a bit more to a chapter.  Yes I would wield space to them.

It is abrupt; this feeling that I wasn’t as strange as I believed I was.  But I can get used to it.  Lord can I get used to it!