Allow me to re-introduce myself. I've been running for a long while, much of it in place, but fate has conspired to drag me back in close proximity to one of the greater sources of anxiety I've ever known.
All this time, I've treated Houston, where I lived for twelve years, as a slice of autobiography, a sliver of the past best left in the past. Which isn't to say it was all bad; in fact, the final two years of my time in the city were great, for the most part. Fact is, I was a child, under my parents' care, and they made the big decisions at the time. The one that had the biggest effect on me was where to send me to school. I understand now they were stuck between a rock and a hard place: Houston public schools weren't the greatest, and my family wanted me to get a Jewish education, so I was sent to fertile ground for some of the nastiest grade school cliques and bullies I've ever known.
I met with a friend of mine recently, one of the few friends I had from those days, and she asked me who I thought was the worst. "Boys or girls?" I asked. It didn't matter who. Whether they were guys or gals, they were both pretty damned bad.
It didn't help that I was a sensitive kid who got upset with the slightest teasing, then lashed out in anger at whomever was doing the insulting. Most of the time, the punishments came down on me. Honor roll was based on behavior, not grades, so in seven years at this school, I only made it twice.
In fifth grade, I walked out of school intending to run away and never come back to the hell I was living. I got as far as the railroad tracks a block or two down the main road. I then turned around and went back to school, walked into the offices, and complained that I was being abused by nearly everyone. I was sent to a psychologist. The other kids found out and made fun of me for it. I went to an appointment with the psychologist after a particularly bad day of being teased and bullied about it and said some things that ensured I never went back to the psych again, ensuring that I have a conflicted relationship with therapy to this day.
So, Houston was hellish that way.
I found an escape route, though, an unexpected one. And I'm looking forward to indulging it again once we move, actually.
A neighbor girl lived on her ten-speed bicycle and encouraged me to ditch the training wheels on the Schwinn I was on (peer pressure, terrible in some ways, can be beneficial in other ways). Once I was on a ten-speed of my own, I flew. I biked all over. Mom thought I was six years too late in learning (she taught herself how to do it at five), but she and Dad let me go wherever I liked. I fished out enough spare change from the powdered chocolate tin on the kitchen counter, biked to a stereo shop a ways down one of the main roads, and fished through their bargain tape bins for albums. I biked to libraries and bookstores and movie theaters. I biked through my middle school years, pretty much.
The neighbor girl and I once biked to downtown Houston and back on the bayou trails, a round trip distance of at least twenty-plus miles. We thought our parents would freak out when we got home, because we were racing against the setting sun and losing, but I arrived home, in the dark, to my mother's great news that I got into the arts high school I really wanted to attend. It kicked off my deep love for the visual arts that lingers to this day. My dad still thinks I went into glassworking in part because of the times he and my mom would take me to the Houston Festival, but I always loved visiting the art museums, especially the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, and the Contemporary Arts Museum. One of my favorite art tales concerns a Mel Chin sculpture that was in front of the CAM. My high school years proved that things could get better if one kept going through hell.
And then we moved. To small-town central Pennsylvania, my first instance of culture shock, and the first inkling that not all moves are good moves.
Jury's out on whether this move to just outside northwest Houston will be a good one or not. But we've got a house out there now and we're coming. Physical and mental baggage and all.
P.S.: No, my son will NOT be going to the same school I went to, but I will be worrying for him just the same. I'm a mom. It's in my job description.
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