I remember at 12

I remember trying out for every single sport my first year of junior high (which would include all of basketball and volleyball, but at 12 it was a lot) and getting cut from everything. But I wasn’t cut from track. In fact, I was good at track. I ran the 800, the 1600, and anchor for the 1600 medley relay. The track at our school was dirt and that actually gave us an advantage when we ran on real tracks. The coach would have us run the 800 against the 800 relay team for practice. It was fun to wear the same uniform as the team and go on the bus to away meets. It was New Mexico, so most of the meets, even though the track wasn’t dirt (our home meets were at the high school), everything around it was. And it can get real windy.

My mom’s going to make a comment either about the wind or about how the fact that she drove the mountain roads to come to my meet in Los Alamos shows how much she loves me, or both. Those Los Alamos girls had super skinny legs.

That year in band another student and I went back and forth challenging each other for first chair flute. The band director put a time limit on how frequently we could do it. And finally in the second half of the year said enough was enough and that the winner of this last challenge would be first chair for the rest of the year. I won it.

We read The Hobbit that year and I really don’t see the appeal, but for my project related to the book we made a Gollum.

I made a model adobe house for social studies. It was supposed to be in groups, but the other two members wanted to meet at the library to basically make a box with sugar cubes, and that’s just not my style. So my mom and I used plaster of Paris on a cardboard box to imitate adobe and then used miniature furniture, rugs, and trees to decorate it. It looked awesome. And my other two group members got the A too. I still remember that when I’m making group assignments.

We also had to do a family tree for that class. And I never do anything normal. So I made a mixed media (fabric, pipe-cleaners, and matting board) peacock with each layer of feathers another generation. I even had photos of everyone on the peacock.

We went to Disneyland the first time that year. The first and last ride of our trip was the submarine. My sister was so tired one night as we were leaving that she fell asleep and my dad had to throw her over his shoulder and carry her out like a sack of potatoes. I went to the ocean for the first time on that trip.

I got contacts that year. I didn’t get glasses till high school though. I got them shortly before our trip to the Wool Festival in New Mexico. The wool and yarn and sheep were a lot of fun. But I realized that from that moment on I was going to need to wear sunglasses when I was outside or my eyes weren’t going to be too happy.

And I remember a girl who hated me. She spent that school year spreading rumors about me and trying to make my life miserable. However by the end of the year she had no friends and my life was still pretty good. So when I faced almost the exact same situation two years ago, I actually felt sorry for the person this time around because I knew how it would end for them and it wouldn’t be what they were thinking.