{Chortle!} I was gonna title this post “Memories of the Ridiculous and the Weird.” 😀
Idly daydreaming, I happened to cast what remains of my mind back to the time when my mother and I moved from San Francisco (where I went to junior high school) to Long Beach, California (where a change of jobs meant a change of seaports for my father).
My goodness. What a weird time.
When we got back from Arabia, I was in the sixth grade — and literally years ahead of my new San Francisco classmates, who themselves were in a pretty tony, pretty high-octane school.
At Ras Tanura’s American school, there were only about 15 kids in my grade — give or take a couple. Stuck on the shore of the Persian Gulf, we didn’t have a lot to distract us from our studies, and even if we did…the studies were pretty darned basic.
After my mother persuaded my father to let her and me go home (the excuse being that I was too sickly to stay out there any longer in Hell By The Seaside) (sickly: yes, that was pure, handsomely engineered bullshit), we settled in San Francisco, within walking distance of a California State University campus. This university prided itself on its college of education, and in connection with that august institution, it ran a K-6 school in Parkmerced, the apartment development where we settled.
What incredible luck!
The school was well in advance of most American public schools — at least, of those in California — and not only did I have the head start of spending six years in the high-test grade school in Ras Tanura, I also got several years of private, one-on-one tutoring on the theory that I was too sickly (heh!) to continue going to class with the little beasts that inhabited the company school.
By the time we got back to the States, I was far ahead of my contemporaries in the Parkmerced school (who were far ahead of their own stateside contemporaries), so I happily loafed my way through the last vestiges of grade school and then bounded into a more-than-half-way-decent San Francisco junior high school.
It was there that I got it into my pea-brained little head that I must grow up to be an astronomer.
* Nevvermind that girls did not go into science in the 1950s.
* Nevvermind that math was not my thing.
* Nevvermind that language and writing absolutely, obviously, spectacularly were my thing.
No one cared, because girls didn’t need any of those things to cook Jell-O, raise kids, and sew shirts. So I proceeded toward my destiny.
Nevertheless, I did insist in taking what was then called “five solids”: five courses with actual substance, rather than a combination of things like dance, P.E., sewing, cooking, and whatnot with the non-negotiable required courses in math, foreign languages, and English.
*****
After a couple years, my father changes jobs, and now he’s sailing out of Southern California. My mother and I move to Long Beach (don’t ask!) so as to be closer to where he came in to home port.
Turns out the public schools in San Francisco were superior to those in Long Beach by HUGE orders of magnitude.
Suddenly, I hit the National Honor Society without bestirring my little brain. My grades were in the stratosphere. AND…and I was fluent in French, the language I’d chosen as part of my high-school requirements.
Fluent, that is, compared to the teacher in the new high school.
No kidding. The poor woman was trying to teach French, but she didn’t speak French!
heeeeeee!
Before long, she figured out that I did…and before long after that, she had me teaching the class!
No kidding. At the age of about 14, I’m teaching sophomore-level French to my astonishingly ignorant little contemporaries in a Southern California high school!
Ahhh, the state of American education.
What a place!
This went on for two or three years, until my father had a brilliant idea: he could use my cleverness (and six years of REAL basic education in Saudi Arabia) to get himself out of his hated job and into retirement in low-rent Arizona, where he figured he and my mother could afford to live even if he retired early.
So they break out the typewriter and shoot off a letter to the University of Arizona (no, they didn’t know where that was, other than that it was in the state where their coveted destination of Sun City existed), suggesting that the UofA should accept their brilliant child a year before she finished high school.
To their astonishment, forthwith came a reply: Why shore! Send her right along!
Sheee-ut!
Sooo, it was off to Tucson, wherein resided the University of Arizona…without ever having dipped a toe in a calculus class or in whatever California taught in fourth-year high-school math and science classes or in a final year of French or…godlmighty.
Next forthwith: a Phi Beta Kappa key. (eyeroll) Ohhhh well. WhatEVER.
Meanwhile, my mother’s lifetime best friend, a lumbering 300-pound woman named Anna (no kidding: Anna’s real weight was unknown because no scale would measure that high) resided in Long Beach, overseeing the rearing of her semi-delinquent grand-daughter. This — the overseeing — because her own daughter, Ingrid, was not at all up to raising kids.
Ingrid was…well…stupid. Yes: that’s the only word for her. I think, in retrospect, she was probably mentally retarded, to coin an offensive old-fashioned term. She was, however you want to put it, non compos mentis.
Her daughter grew up batsh!t crazy, probably because Ingrid had no clue how to bring up a child. Why? I cannot imagine…other than that poor Ing was none too bright.
Her daughter — Roberta — was quite bright, though. Bright and mightily deprived of the advantages that somehow I contrived to get. So…as she surfed into adolescence, she ran amok!
You can imagine the opportunities for smug gloating this predicament afforded my mother. 😀 Gawd help us.
***
Anna: she was no mere ordinary woman. She was a wonderful woman.
A trapped woman. As working-class women were, in that generation.
What possessed America to waste SO much human potential?
