Understanding Who We Were Helps to Understand Who We Are

This picture was taken on my first day of first grade. We lived on Calle Dened at that time in the city of Tucson, Arizona.  Miss Fox was my teacher.  She got married that year, but I do not remember her married name. Our school was just a couple of blocks from our house and we walked to and from school every day. Sometime after these pictures were taken,  my sister broke her finger. On one particular day, my mother had to take my sister to the doctor for a checkup to make sure it was healed. She left me at home with my lunchbox, and told me to walk to the school when the alarm clock went off. I wasn't the greatest at telling time back then. Digital clocks weren't invented yet so the clock my mother set was the old fashioned hands on the face alarm clock. Being the inquisitive kid that I was, I got bored and messed around with the clock sitting on the side table. Needless to say, the alarm never went off. I waited and waited and waited, but the alarm didn't do what it was supposed to do. Somewhere around mid morning, I opened my lunchbox and ate my Hostess Snowball, and later my sandwich, but still the alarm didn't go off. My mother was an Avon Lady so after dropping my sister off at school, she went on her route.  I was home alone for hours. Around noon I walked to the neighbors and Marian (my friend, Rachel's mother) met me at the door. She told me that Rachel just got home for lunch and wasn't ready to go back to school yet. I started crying and told her that I had been home all morning. That was the first time that my nerves made me physically sick. For reasons I still don't understand, Marian took me back to my house and put me in bed. Later that afternoon, my mother came home. Marian met her in the driveway and told her what had happened. That was the last time I stayed by myself for a very long time. I honestly don't think I stayed alone until I was in high school. Even after I got married, that feeling never left me.  It's funny how things from our youth affect us for years to come. I always thought it was so ironic that I married someone whose job took him away from the house at night, and I was alone most of the time. I overcame it because I had no choice. It took me years to overcome those feelings, and even today, when I'm not looking, it sneaks up on me.

I don't remember much about the first day of school, but I do remember these paperdolls in the picture above and the Kissie dolls in the picture below. We wore Oxfords in those days, and I remember how we had to polish them with white shoe polish every Saturday so they would look nice for church the next day.  I hated oxfords for years and years after that, but now the thought of them make me smile. It was a simpler time back then when kids could be kids. We were free to ride our bikes in the street because there wasn't much traffic on our street, and when there was, the cars drove slowly because drivers expected kids to be out in their yards and the street playing, not holed up in a house playing video games. 

My dad built us a playhouse in our backyard.  We thought that playhouse was the coolest thing ever! It's funny, but I don't remember the heat, and it must have been hot in that playhouse at times, but I don't remember that. The picture below was taken at my sister's birthday party in 1962. She was 9 years old and I was 5 1/2.We were playing some kind of game like "Red Light Green Light" OR "Mother May I?".