I participated in my first academic competition, winning a city-wide geography contest for 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-graders. My 4th-grade teacher told my parents I either needed to skip a grade or transfer to a more-challenging school, but they suspected that she was trying to make her life easier by getting rid of me, so they resisted. In the fall my 5th-grade teacher repeated the recommendation. My parents liked her, so they listened. I began attending a school on the other side of town, so I had a two-mile bike commute each morning and afternoon.
Trying to make good use of the time, I learned how to ride my bike while reading a book. I paid more attention to traffic in the morning, but by remembering where the parked cars were, I could concentrate more fully on my book in the afternoon. Except one day a mobile garbage bin had been delivered during the school day. I ran right into the side of it, chipping one of my bottom teeth (interested readers can leave a comment and I'll e-mail you a close-up present-day picture of said tooth).
I had been secretary of my previous school, so I ran for secretary of my new school. A girl in my class combed through the election bylaws to discover that I hadn't been a student at the school long enough to qualify.
The presidential election was the first I remember noticing. (I remember watching a Reagan/Mondale debate in 1984, but not much more than that.) I like Michael Dukakis because he was Greek and so was I. My dad said, "Maybe you should find out what he'd do as president before you decide if he should be president." I read some newspapers and watched some TV news broadcasts (the only way of getting information back then) and retracted my support. I was a George H.W. Bush fan before it was necessary to use the H and W.
My brother had been a stand-out runner in junior high, so somehow the junior-high track coach and my parents arranged it so I could leave my school for races and participate on the junior high cross country team. That stopped when I started riding across town to school and was too far away from the junior high.
I began my job as a paperboy. The route for my neighborhood wasn't available, and neither was the neighboring route, so I had to serve an area two neighborhoods away. Every day I had to deliver the regular newspapers to my customers and once each week I had to deliver sample newspapers to the non-subscribers. That required me to do my route, come home to reload, and do my route again, this time for free. I quickly realized I could dump the free papers and no one would know. The first time I did it, I just dropped them all in our recycling can on the side of the house. After I left for school, my mom went out to recycle something and discovered the papers, thought I'd dumped the actual papers I was contractually-obligated to deliver, and became quite angry. (Most of my childhood can be summarized as "something happened and my mother became quite angry." But this time it seemed warranted.) When I got home from school and explained what had happened, she would not agree to me doing the same thing in the future. So on Thursdays I would run my normal route, come home for the free papers, ride away on my bike, and recycle them in some random recycling can I passed on the street.
via oneofthebest
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