I used to be skinny when I was in high school. I remembered the other girls in sororities. The ones who dated the boys on the basketball team and the football team. They had figures. They were popular girls. They seemed to have it all.
In high school, I attended the so-called “accelerated” classes. The same classes my now three gifted children were put in at elementary grade level. Only now they are called “gifted.” Funny how you envision what is really important in life. And things seem to come around anyway.
My oldest graduated Temple with his Masters. Princeton wanted him also with a Fellowship. He chose Temple though. He likes living in the center of the city. He’s happy there. During the summers he worked on the environment for Temple traveling to Canada and to Alaska taking water samples and feather samples for the Valdez clean-up. He now works in a management program for the city of Philadelphia.
My second graduated cum laude from John Jay in the city. She works for the state. She is fluent in four languages. She wrote a note to a doctor of mine that frankly looked like scribbling to me. I asked him to read it. He read it back, then asked if she was an interpreter … I said no. He told me it was perfect Arabic. She is well qualified in the criminal area.
My third is a computer maniac. He loves programming. He loves gaming. He loves a lot of things with deep meanings. Enough said. He is of that generation. I have no doubt he will be a success in whatever he chooses. A success unto himself.
Back to being skinny. And never bringing a book home. And the angst of high school. And being called a surfboard back then. Oh how it hurt at age sixteen. Imagine thinking of yourself as turning sideways, seeing nothing but a fin. Well, that fin being your nose, I guess. Pretty horrible image compared to the Barbie doll that we were supposed to grow up and become.
My daughter looks at pictures of me back then and says I looked “gangly.” I say, gangly? A colt is gangly. A giraffe is gangly. A young basketball player is gangly. But certainly not a high school junior girl. And she giggles. My daughter is not gangly. She inherited the other genes in the family that resemble a woman at an early age. The ones that make a boy’s hormones race. The ones I didn’t get. At least not until I had my first child. Or so my ob/gyn told me.
