thoughts, words, deeds

twenty-eight years ago--I feel ancient now

Prompt: Write about an eighth grade memory.

When I was in eighth grade, we moved twice. The first move came because Dad was laid off his job. This was back in 1990-91 when defense contracting was going away and so a lot of engineers (specifically computer engineers) were out of work. I was thirteen and had three sisters and a brother at the time (the youngest was born when I was sixteen). The youngest sister was four—five by the time we left. My brother had just been held back at the end of first grade, so he repeated first grade in the new house while I was in eighth. Mom had started back to school, getting her Masters in Linguistics the previous year.

When Dad was laid off, the first thing he did was look for work. There wasn’t anything where we were living (he was at the end of a long series of defense contracting layoffs in the area) but Mom wanted to finish her degree, so when he got a job down in Maryland, we (Mom and five kids) stayed in New York, but moved an hour west to be closer to the university. That meant new schools for all of us, a new church, new friends.

Dad’s job was as a contractor, which meant he got some perks, which included flying up from Maryland to upstate New York every other weekend. He drove up on the odd weekends, so we saw a lot of him, but it was difficult. The house was small and crowded. One weekend, probably around spring break, we all drove down to visit him and stayed in the one bedroom basement apartment that he was renting and ate ramen with him cooked in the microwave (he didn’t have a stove). Crowded with the seven of us.

I had one of the attic rooms, with a ceiling that came down in a slant over my bed. It was warm in the summer, but I had a room to myself, and I was glad of that. Mama kept a bag of candy in her dresser. I stole some of it, and then felt guilty and replaced the bag. I wonder if she knew it was me?

Not much happened that year. I enjoyed the school, which challenged me more than most schools I went to. I was in choir, which was also fun, and spent a lot of time reading. That was the year (it was winter time, so I had just turned fourteen) that I got pneumonia. I don’t remember a lot about that. What happened was that I was ill and it was snowing, but I had to go to school that Friday because I had a test. I think I passed, but I took a turn for the worse, and ended up losing school anyway.

I remember talking to Mama on the way to the doctor to get my chest x-rayed. I don’t know what we said. I remember feeling as though I were empty, hollowed out, like there wasn’t anything left of me except being sick. At the doctor, I was cold. My temperature was 95 F (equivalent to 35 C). I don’t remember, but sometime during the time when I was so ill, the police brought back my brother and sister (we’re talking the five year old sister and my only brother was seven) because they’d gone down five blocks or so to the corner store. By themselves. I was the responsible one, home sick in bed—we’re just lucky that they didn’t cite Mama for neglect or something. But they didn’t do that back then.

That was the year of the first Bush’s Gulf War. My sister (the ten year old) came home frightened one day in January because Dad flew into the airport every other week, and apparently her teacher had been saying something that indicated to Rachel that airports might be a target in case of war. Mama soothed her fears, but didn’t tell her that when Dad flew out of BWI or Dulles near DC (which he did just as often as he flew into our little airport), those airports were bigger potential targets. Then she went to school and gave the teacher a piece of her mind for scaring the kids like that.

The more I write about this, the more memories come. That little house that we rented for a year was home, until we moved down to Maryland because Dad got a job there (the contracting became permanent). But sometimes I miss it. The house was blue, and there was a tree in the backyard just perfect for sitting and reading or just thinking.