I Remember When

Mother's Day is past, and Father's Day is fast approaching. Both of my parents have passed away, but that doesn't mean I don't remember them and the good times we spent together as a family. In fact, I remember more now than I did when they were alive. I think of them more often now to. I wish I had been able to spend even more time with them after my marriage than I was able to. They did travel an awful lot from East Coast to West Coast, so that was kinda hard to do. They did live in my area for a while until Dad felt the wanderlust and they moved away again. Mom always called him a gypsy as he was always on the move. I think he just liked seeing the different places and visiting with all the relatives he could in the different areas of the United States that the family lived in. I had relatives in all the places I remember living as I grew up.

I spent a year or so in the state of Oregon while living at home with my parents. It was good. The weather was different then, cooler and cleaner, I remember. We lived close to the railroad tracks. I remember the house shuddering when the trains went by and they were loud. It was fun for a kid like me though. I also remember my brother's having fun playing gangster in some old cars that were around. They had the imagination and of course "back in the day" stories of the gangster's that were real wasn't that far in the past. Just bits and pieces of memory keep floating to the surface of my mind.

I remember going to school in Oregon. Our neighbors and friends of my parents, had a couple of sons in high school. I remember that one time one of the boys had to have a girls dress to wear for an initiation and they borrowed one of my dresses. He looked kinda silly since he was tall and skinny, but the dress fit him well enough, showing off his legs which he had to bare. He did wear jean shorts underneath the dress though for propriety's sake. I don't remember the outcome of his day at school, but I am sure it was hilarious and he was a good sport about all of it.

I have lived in Oregon, California, Arizona, Mississippi, New York, Indiana, and Kentucky. When living with my parents it was mostly New York, where both my parents and my siblings and myself were born, Arizona, California and the one year in Oregon. After I was married I lived in California, Arizona, Indiana and New York and a short stint in Mississippi. My parents lived in Indiana for a time also until they returned to New York or Arizona. Both my children were born in Arizona, but have never been in that state since they were less than 2 years old. They were in Califonia when ages 4 and 5, but mostly they were raised in Indiana. I got tired of moving back and forth. Had enough of that when living at home with my parents and grew up across the United States.

When I was young traveling was exciting, but when you make friends at school and then within the year move away for a year or two and move back you have to start all over again making new friends. It was hard for me to make friends in the first place so I didn't have very many, but when you have to move away during the school year and begin school in another state and try to make friends it was even harder for me. I never saw those friends again, I had made, after moving away and coming back. And starting school in the middle of the school year was even harder. I have report cards where I was in one school for two quarters in one state and for the same school year another report card where I was in another school for one quarter. Needless to say my grades suffered terribly. I liked learning, but it was hard getting used to the different teachers and the different teaching techniques they used. Arizona was so different from New York, the two states I went to school in. I never finished high school, but got married instead.

I did get my GED late in life and went on to get a degree in accounting and a certificate of completion in secretarial word processing from Indiana Vocational Technical College. I believe now I should have gone for a degree in computers or graphic design. I was learning graphic design on my own. They have websites where you can learn the basics of graphic design to build your own website and it is easier now. But I liked learning how to do the simple things that make a page look good, the html of graphics. I haven't done much of it since I was without the Internet for so long and I need to get back into it. I still get the information by email on how to do some of the things related to html. A friend of mine also taught me how to do some of the things for our websites we are on. Well, enough reminiscing for now. Did I spell that right?