Category: nostalgia
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Warm Fuzzies
When I was in 4th grade, my class went through a careful, deliberate, rigidly enforced process of loving each other. Such was the climate in the mid-1970s, an era when feeling groovy was a cultural mandate. At some point during 4th grade, our teacher, Mrs. Ring, talked to us about the notion that “sharing is love.” In…
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Wherein My English Teacher Rightly Hangs Me Out to Dry
During sophomore year of high school, my English teacher was named Mrs. Rice. We can’t accuse Mrs. Rice of being overly fond of the redhead in the second row. As I review the work I did in her class, it is apparent that Mrs. Rice was a seasoned teacher. I wasn’t the first “Look at me,…
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Dear God, I Love You
One of my first friendships was with a neighbor girl, Susan. When we were two years old, our mothers decided we should be friends. So we were. As we were coming up, we loved each other hard, yet we had terrible battles. A kid who was innately a people-pleaser, averse to conflict, I was always caught…
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It Would Be a Few More Years Before I Learned About Parallelism
I’ve been sifting through boxes of memories — the accumulated papers from my youth. As I grab each handful of faded pages, drunken journal entries, glowing fourth grade report cards, conflicting judges’ sheets from speech meets, crude first grade drawings, crazily folded letters, I am pulling more than paper onto my lap. Each handful takes…
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Ain’t We Lucky We Got ‘Em
During the 1980’s, I attended junior high, high school, and college. To recap that, for those of you Distractites who are reading this with one eye locked onto The Housewives of East St. Louis, I was an adolescent of the ’80s. Thus, all of my worst hormonal moments of wracked self-esteem were accompanied by…