1975 – 1976

May is here and it’s once again my birthday. I got an AM radio shaped like Scooby Doo’s face! It’s so cool. I definitely will not be going to listen to baseball on it. Mostly I like the classical music station because it annoys my mom. She says that music makes her nervous. Sometimes I hide under the bed or the couch and when she sits down I’ll turn the radio on full blast to the classical station. I love playing pranks on my mom. My dad has no sense of humor about it. Like when we put cigarette loads in his cigarettes, and they blew up, he pulled the car over and told us to never do that again or he’d beat the shit out of us. So yeah.

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June — lots of gardening. My mom pays me to pull weeds in her vegetable patch. I like working with the soil, seeing the earthworms in the ground. It’s unearthly hot in the back yard. The weeping willow tree my dad planted just a couple of years ago has grown up over the house. It’s a great tree for climbing. I can climb up to the top of it, so high it touches the power lines. I actually grabbed the power line and nothing happened. Everyone said I’d get electrocuted but how come birds can sit on the line without getting electrocuted?

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July — we’re in Georgia for my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary. Everything is gold themed — which is not a great look especially when it’s painted on plaster and plastic. But I guess they like all this stuff? My grandmother has a ton of gladiolas decorating her house now from the banquet they held at her creepy church. It’s a baptist church and the inside of it looks like a boat — modern and out of place in this very un-modern farming village. I do like hanging out with this grown up named Jack. He’s a friend of the family. He owns the bank in town. He left when he was a teenager and moved to Paris and then Los Angeles — but now he’s back because his mom wants him to run the family business. He’s so funny! He can do these perfect impersonations of Bea Arthur from Maude and he draws really well. When I grow up I hope I’m like Jack (except for the living in Georgia part).

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Dad’s mom died. We went to her funeral and it was really weird. Mom and dad kept explaining that Grandma would not ever be coming back — like I didn’t understand the concept of death. I totally understand it. It’s not like there isn’t constant death on TV. Yes, she’s the first person I’ve ever known who died — and it’s also the first time I’ve seen my dad cry. We were all in a hotel room in Norman Oklahoma and after he thought Susan and I were asleep I heard him sobbing. I felt bad for him. The weird thing to me is, I liked Grandma Anna but I’m not that sad. I know I should be sad but she was really old and had lived a long time. Her life seemed kind of terrible. Her husband, my grandfather who I never met, was blown up in an oil refinery accident when my dad was just 12. She lived through the Great Depression and the Oklahoma dust bowl. She was okay financially but her life seemed, limited. Not by choice but by circumstances.

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September is here and I am starting first grade! There’s this boy in my class, Keith, and I totally have a crush on him. He wears white t-shirts and tough skin jeans. He reminds me of Keith Partridge except his hair is shorter. Anyhow, I told my mom I had a crush on him and she said, “boys don’t get crushes on other boys.” Now this is just flat out not true because I know I have a crush on him — to which I said, “well I did.” We left it at that. She didn’t seem interested in knowing more about it and I had some left over Otter Pops in the freezer I wanted to get to before Susan came home from Softball practice and hogged them all to herself.

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Guess who has to wear glasses? ME! Oh this is the worst. My mom picked out the dorkiest frames she could find for me and on top of it all I have to wear an eye patch to try and correct my weak eye. What a drag. I’m outside playing softball with this dumb eye patch on and it’s all itchy and sticky. Plus my baby teeth are starting to fall out and that’s no fun at all. Like when they’re all loose and you accidentally bite down on one of them. Ugh! I’m glad there’s a tooth fairy who will pay me for my teeth but it’s a total horror show in my mouth right now.  For halloween I’m going as a Pirate. The whole eye patch thing works with my costume so… I wanted to get fold over knee high boots but my mom says they cost too much. As if she didn’t have 10 million pairs of shoes. She really is putting a damper on my attempts to be fabulous. Lately she’s started threatening me with ballet lessons if I don’t, “stop acting so affected.” Affected?

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We’re having Thanksgiving with the Fetters this year. Lori and Brad — you remember — the New Year’s strobe light dance party with the slenderizer? Brad’s pretty cool. His family is moving to Ghana. His dad works for Phillips with my dad and a lot of the families are being sent overseas to do exploration. Dad says we might get to go somewhere too. Right now they’re talking about London and Los Angeles. Either one would be cool with me. I do like it in Bartelsville — it’s a fine little world, but I wouldn’t mind going somewhere else.

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Merry Christmas! I finally got the magic kit I’ve been asking for. It’s so great! They didn’t get me the cape and top hat that I wanted — my mom and dad both said they didn’t want me “prancing around the house in a cape.” Why not? That sounds like fun. I get the sense they want me to be different? Like why are they still both trying to get me to play football? They only agreed to the magic kit if I would agree to sign up for Flag Football in the summer. I’ll sign up but I won’t like it. My mom made roast beef and this thing called “Yorkshire pudding” for Christmas dinner. I thought it would be sweet but it’s like a really delicious type of bread? She’s such a good cook.

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Happy 1976 Oh hey, there’re giant icicles hanging outside my window. I’m bundled up in a yellow and blue puffer jacket trimmed with brown fur. I was telling my mom that I would be fine with ballet lessons since she keeps bringing it up like a threat. My school went to see “The Nutcracker” and I thought it was really beautiful. This freaked her out. She took me to the priest at our church which was so not fair — it wasn’t even Sunday! He was pretty upset with me for some reason. He asked me a bunch of questions about Keith in my class and if I’d ever tried to kiss him. Uh, no. Plus it turns out Keith is kind of dull — he gets all excited about kick ball and is not even a little bit interested in Magic tricks. Officially, adults are weird.

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For Valentines Day I had considered making a valentine for Keith but then everyone’s so worked up about it I decided to just give out boxes of M&M’s to everyone. I made my mom a valentine day card, that’s okay right? It’s like there’s this holiday all around telling people you have crushes on someone but then I’m not supposed to tell for some reason? So confusing. Basically what I’ve learned from all this is even though I really like my mom, she’s not someone who needs to know what I’m thinking and feeling. I’m better off keeping things private from her. I knew this was true with dad — like when I told him I wanted to go to Y-Indian Guides instead of Cub Scouts and he got all annoyed with me. He said Y-Indian Guides wasn’t right and that I had to do cub scouts or nothing. So nothing, fine with me.

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Easter is here. I’m glad it’s warming up. We did an egg hunt in Sooner Park and I found the solid gold egg. There’s a lot of talk about the bi-centenial. I’m into it. Already I like Fourth of July — but this year we’re getting a special quarter that celebrates the US Moon Landing. As you may recall, I was one month old when we landed on the moon — so it’s kind of my thing. My scented markers have dried up. I’m hoping to get another set for my birthday. I got in trouble because I was using the markers to draw on make up. When I’m over at Sherry’s house we use markers on her Barbie Make Me Pretty head so I thought I could just do the same on my face. I’m in trouble all the time for stuff that I didn’t even know was against the rules. No drawing on your own face, got it.

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April – Okay, so I got in BIG trouble recently and it was my fault. My dad bought my mom a Waterford Crystal sugar bowl when he was in London last time and they filled it up with this amazing ‘crystalized sugar.’ It’s this kind of sugar that’s really big pieces and they’re all different colors — I mean basically it’s the coolest thing ever. So this morning I was trying to get to the crystalized sugar but they keep the bowl way up in the highest cabinet in the kitchen. Standing on the counter I could just reach the bowl and had managed to get a couple of scoops of the sugar when I accidentally pulled the bowl off the shelf and it broke on the floor. The bowl was expensive, that much I knew. I freaked out and ran and hid in the garage. Even when I was hiding I was thinking, “you’re not going to get away with this — you can’t stay in the garage forever.” My dad found me and he said, “I’m not going to spank you because I’m scared that if I did I wouldn’t stop before I killed you.” Wow. Pretty much the most terrifying thing anyone has ever said to me. I get it, if I screw up in front of him bad enough he’ll kill me.