My Apologies For This Lapse….

Yeah, it’s been a couple of months since I wrote anything…my bad.  At first, there was some personal stuff I had to deal with, then the move and a crazy October snowstorm (what is it with this year and the screwed-up weather.  And let’s not forget the power outages!  If this earthquake/hurricane/snowstorm stuff hadn’t happened to the whole PA/NJ region, I’d say I was cursed….).  And then I started school.  No wonder everyone thinks tweens and teens are neurotic.  Just attend a week of the school/jail we have to put up with 5 days a week.  And the “homework” that’s “necessary”!  I learned more on my own, when I was homeschooled for three hours a day, than I do now in the zoo that I’m spending seven hours a day in.  I’ve been more stressed and confused at D.S. Whitsone Middle School than I have ever been in my life.  So something had to give, and that was my blog writing.  If anyone has actually been reading this, I’m sorry.  “Mea culpa” --or whatever it is you’re supposed to say when you screw up.

I guess the best way to do this is to go back to where I left off, so let me try to play “catch-up”.  It’s now the week off from school that most kids call “Christmas Break” but the officials call “Winter Vacation” or “Winter Holiday” so as not to insult the atheists.  Like all the lights, stars, Christmas trees in stores and such, and manger scenes on the lawns of churches, civilians and even certain “rebel” municipalities (NOT White Cedars, if you care) don’t clue you in as to what’s being celebrated here….Anyway, I’ve got my three reports that are due on January 3rd written, so I have some time now.  Yay me.

So, let me try to start with what may be the toughest thing to write about – Aunt Lina.  About a week before we moved, she sat down with me to have a “talk’.  It started like some Judy Bloom moment.  We were talking about me getting to the age where I’d begin getting my period, and what I was supposed to expect.  I figured I knew what was coming – a talk about pads & plugs, strange feelings, being a woman, yadda yadda. 

Boy was I wrong!  Aunt Lina began to tell me a little bit more, about what this meant for shifters like us, and how I might be overwhelmed by cougar urges to actually mate (EWW!!).  She told me that some shifters become teenage pregnancy statistics because they give in to their inner animal.  That was a long and embarrassing few minutes.  She then said that my shifting abilities might change, too.  We were sitting in my bedroom at the farm, both of us on the bed, eating popcorn.  That was Aunt Lina’s attempt to make this all seem a little “normal”. 

But it wasn’t.  She mumbled and fumbled, trying to explain, and then she decided to show me. And I almost freaked when she did.  You see, Aunt Lina’s a LOT older than she looks, or rather, appears.  She showed me her “true age” face.  She’s like ancient.  Wrinkles, grey hair, saggy neck old.  She just likes the look of her Aunt Lina self, a woman in her late thirties/early forties, so that’s the “skin” she chooses to walk in.  She told me that for her, the “great war” was the one of her childhood years, and that the uniforms were grey and blue, and it was fought right here, on this continent.  Yeah, I’m talkin’ Civil War.  Looking at her old faced self, I believed her.  You would, too if you saw her wrinkled, wise-woman face.  She quickly shifted back to the face I knew and loved, mumbling something about vanity.

She said that shifters kinda get a bonus of a long life, if you manage not to get killed by something stupid.  Like war, or getting run over by a bus, or driving carelessly wouldn’t stop me from dying, but if I lived a peaceful life, I had the chance of seeing another century pass.  I also tended to heal quickly, but I already knew that.  Then she said that there was even more to my becoming a teenager.

And that’s when things began to take a turn for the weirder. 

Yeah, I suppose that if you can shift your body into the form of an animal you should be able to believe in anything.  But to me, that’s just a different part of “normal” for me.  Aunt Lina said that now I had to open myself up to a new definition of “normal”.  And that it was going to be more complex than ever.

You see, there’s this place that exists called the spiritworld.  Except Aunt Lina says it as if it should be capitalized, like a country or something.  Spiritworld.  And it’s not just one someplace else, but a whole bunch of layers of somewhere else, and that it’s a place I should be able to find after I start my monthly bleeding.  It’s not just a place for shifters, but for powerful spirits, mischievous beings, and certain blessed humans.  Time can be tricky in the spirit realms, and “reality” can be a slippery concept.  She said that if I start to see things out of the corner of my eye, or hear things, or even smell things that didn’t seem to really be there, to call her immediately.  She even gave me my own cell phone. 

I must have had a look on my face that showed my skepticism, because Aunt Lina just sighed and shook her head after her little lecture.

“You don’t believe me.  You can believe that information exists when you hit a key on a board with wires attached to an LCD screen, and you don’t think of that as impossible, but this you think is impossible. OK, then maybe you need to see.”

Then she just disappeared.

Yeah, my aunt was there one moment, gone the next.  I jumped like a live wire had hit me.  My mouth was open—I must have looked like a fish.

I put my hand out, smoothing the covers where she had been sitting, sweeping a few loose pieces of popcorn to the floor --- she was NOT there!

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a movement, and I turned, and there was Aunt Lina, holding hands with someone else.

Except it wasn’t Aunt Lina as I’d ever seen her.  Not the attractive 40-year-old artist I’d lived with ever since I could remember.  Not the large bear that had roamed with me in the woods around our farm.  Not the wrinkly old-faced lady she’d shifted into a few minutes ago.  This was some hybrid of her bear self and her Aunt Lina self.  She had the head and shoulders of an upright bear, but she had human hands (with furry arms!) She was bearish to the waist, but her bottom half wore the silk pajamas she’d left with.  Her companion wore the guise of a fox, and was definitely male.  His pecs would make that guy from that Jersey Shore show jealous.

“Randi, this is Ricky.”

Aunt Lina’s voice came out of the bear’s muzzle, and it was freaky.  The fox-headed Ricky nodded & waved.

“Hi.”

My mouth opened and closed, but nothing came out.  I must have looked like a trout-girl or something.  Ricky just chucked at my confusion.  He hugged Aunt Lina rather affectionately, running his hand down her back in a rather possessive way.  Then he winked at me, tongue lolling as if he was laughing, and he was gone.  And just as suddenly, Aunt Lina was herself once more, wearing both parts of her blue silk pajamas.

She ran a hand through her long black hair and sighed.

“Now do you believe me?”  she asked, settling herself back on my bed and reaching for the bowl of popcorn as if her antics were as normal as getting up to go to the bathroom.  I shook my head as if to re-arrange the marbles that were coming loose.

“Why did you become half-bear-half-human?” I blurted out, when I finally managed to find my voice.

She froze, with a handful of popcorn halfway to her open mouth.  I remember that a few pieces fell on the quilt, and Aunt Lina looked down, blushing.

“You saw that?  And Ricky?  How did he appear?”

“Half-fox, half-man.”

Aunt Lina was quiet for a few moments, and then she smiled, tilting her head to the side.

“Well, Miranda, you’ve always been a surprise and a challenge.  You’ve seen me as I appear in the Spiritworld, as I appear to Ricky.  And yet you’ve never walked that path.  I don’t exactly know what that means, but I take it to mean that once again, you are exceeding the expectations that everyone had for you.  Maybe the spirits are telling me that I’ve been too cautious.  Perhaps you should know exactly why we’re leaving this place.”

Mostly I felt as if things were finally falling into place, as if I was finally going to be treated as an equal, not a child.  But the sarcastic imp in the back of my mind felt like Aunt Lina was the hostess of one of those infomercials, and this was the point where they said “But wait, there’s more!”

That part was right.  Aunt Lina explained that the farm and the forest around it had spots that made it easy to slip back and forth between the Spiritworld and our own.  That had made it a good place to raise me as a child.  But recently some of the wilder spirits had been in touch with Aunt Lina, warning her that with my coming change I was no longer safe, and that there were those who would try to take me from her, to steal or use my abilities for their own purposes.

“Do you remember that cougar in Connecticut that was killed by a car in June?” Aunt Lina asked, seemingly going off-subject.

“The one that was supposedly from Montana?”  I responded around a mouthful of popcorn.

“Actually, they said it had its origins in South Dakota, and had wandered through Wyoming and Minnesota.  It was a young male, looking for a mate.  If a wild cougar would wander that far, how far would a shifter wanting to mate with its “own kind” go?  There are lots of crazies out there, my dear, and a teenage cat-in-heat would be a target for their desires.  Most cougar-men need open space to roam and hunt, and open space with easy access to the Spiritworld is not the place for you to be until you learn how to walk the paths of the Spiritworld  yourself, and until the wildness of your hormones become controlled by your inner strength.   If you are not strong enough, you’ll just be like a beacon, or lure, calling out to the men who would use you like—”

Aunt Lina saw from my expression that I didn’t want to hear any more.  She reached across the bed and gathered me into one of her fierce bear-hugs; that was her way of saying a whole lot without using words.  I hugged her back, knowing that she had always been there to protect me.  It was weird, realizing that the woman who was raising me had been around since Lincoln had died.  She’d seen technology develop that would have been considered magic in her childhood.  And here she was, an extraordinary woman living an ordinary life, after more than a century of life, worrying about me.   If there was something here at the farm that made her concerned, then who was I to doubt that suburban NJ would be a safer place for me? 

I had to put my trust in Aunt Lina; she’s survived so much more than I could ever imagine.  How could I not trust her wisdom?

Until my next post…

Randi

A Concert & A Mental Test – Part 2: The Test

            It’s been a while since I wrote about the Cranberry Fest and sooooo much has gone on since then, and I’ve been unable to post, what with the actual move, an October snowstorm power outages and Aunt Lina not allowing me computer access….

Although life goes on, I’m going to try to keep things going from the point I left off.  So let me tell you about the Monday I took the “psych profile” that was really a mental test.  I have my doubts that these things serve any purpose but to allow the person administering the test or asking for the results to use the “data” to support a conclusion that was already in place before the test.  In my case, the school system wanted to “prove” that I needed to be placed in a certain grade because of my so-called “social deficiencies”, instead of saying their placement happened because it suits the school’s or town’s agenda.

Lizzie and Kara got me to the White Cedars Board of Ed building, which was a former school building that was converted for office use.  It used to be “School 16” – that’s what it said on the front of the building.  The school was so last-century – there was a double doorway in the center, a main entrance, and, and two smaller doorways to the left and right, marked “Girls’ Entrance” and “Boys’ Entrance”.  How archaic.

We went in the center doors.

After going from the “Main Office” to the “District Office” on the first floor, Lizzie and Kara were asked to wait while this thin blonde with short hair and glasses, dressed in a skirt, t-shirt and jacket would take me up to the second floor where “Miss Prichard” the “Middle School Social Worker” would  administer the necessary tests.  Lizzie shook her head and said to me “Meet us at that park we passed a few blocks back when they get done with you, kiddo.”  This made my blonde escort sputter and bluster about the need for my guardian’s permission to leave unescorted.   Kara looked the woman straight in the eye and said, “I’m nineteen, and Lina Blackpaw, Dee’s guardian, sent her here with me.”

“But…but I’m sure she didn’t expect you to walk away from your responsibility…” My blond escort seemed at a loss for words.  Kara was shorter than the woman was, but for just a second she seemed to loom over blondie-in-the skirt.  She inhaled slowly, as if she was going to shout, but when she spoke, it was low tone like a stage-whisper.

“Lina Blackpaw trusts me, and more important, she raised Dee to know how to handle herself in all sorts of environments.  I know that Dee’s responsible enough to find a park that’s two streets away.  The kid’s walked miles through woods that have bears and copperheads.  She’s walked around Soho and the Village when Lina’s taken her to gallery openings.  She’s not some over-protected suburbanite, like you’re used to.”  Kara turned away from the woman, as if dismissing her.  She handed me her cellphone, winked, and rolled her eyes. 

“Call us.  We’ll come back to pick you up.  I have a feeling this may take a while.”  She grabbed Lizzies hand and they walked out of the office.  A few moments later I heard the front doors slam.

“Well!”  was all the woman could say. “Let me take you to Miss Pritchard”

We went to an office on the second floor. It had an old wooden door, and had once been a classroom that was now subdivided by cubicles. The first two cubicles were empty, but the third had a tall, thin, middle aged lady with brown hair and a neck like crepe paper. She wore bright red jeans and a print blouse with red leaves on it.  She smiled, like a scientist receiving a new specimen.

“Hello Miranda.  I hope you’re not nervous.”

Suddenly, I was.  Why would anyone bring something like that up, unless there was a reason to be nervous?

I shook the woman’s hand when she offered me hers, and she led me over to a portion of the room that had two orange vinyl square couches that looked like 70’s hippie leftovers.  She indicated that I should sit, and then asked if I minded if she asked me some questions.

“That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” I answered.  Her eyebrows rose up. She sat on the couch across from me, and picked up a clipboard off the low table next to us.  Told me to answer the questions she would ask with a “yes” or “no”. 

“Easy enough” I said. 

But it wasn’t.

The questions were OK at first, asking if I “mapped out strategies” for problems, if I considered myself “bashful,”  if I have trouble expressing my opinions when in a group, do I get “fidgety” if I have to wait, if I preferred activities that were “thrilling’ or “daring”.  Then she gave me adjectives and asked me to answer “yes” or “no” if they described me.  The problem was, my answers were “sometimes.”  Sometimes I’m sad, or clever, or energetic, or lethargic, or uneasy, or tense, or excited or ecstatic or contrite or angry or disappointed.  I’m not any of them ALL the time.  I’m a pre-teen – we’re prone to be emotional!

Miss Pritchard was not thrilled with my answers, or how long it was taking me to answer her.  I kept saying “sometimes”, and suddenly she was all emo, getting tense, excited, exasperated, angry and all of those adjectives she was throwing out at me.  I was tempted top  point that out to her, but I knew that would really make me fail this stupid test of hers.

Then she switched to the bizarre questions.  My favorite was “Has anyone ever hoodwinked you so completely that you had to acknowledge the job was well done?” 

What the heck does that even mean?  If you say yes, you’re an idiot who loves to get fooled by clever people.  If you say “no,” and you’ve ever been to a magic show, or a circus, you are a liar.  Either answer makes you look stupid.

Other questions that were weird like that included “When a person is friendly or nice to you, do you try and determine his motives?”  HUH? “Does playing games at a party disturb you, even if everyone is participating?”  “When you were a child, did anyone accuse you of taking something that wasn’t yours?”  “Do you dislike someone so much that you rejoice when they suffer misfortune?”

            When Miss Pritchard asked one of the weird questions, (which were slipped in among more normal questions like “Do you  like to save all or part of your allowance?”) I just told her I thought the question was idiotic.  She said I had to give her an answer, yes-or-no.  She was getting angry.  I When she asked me that “hoodwinked” question, I told her that I’d seen Penn and Teller a few years ago, and I applauded at their magic, so I guess the answer is yes, if that’s what she meant, but if she meant normal people, then the answer was no, because the people I knew weren’t the “hoodwinking” type.  Then I asked her how she would answer that question, and she nearly popped a vein on her forehead.  This was not going well.  But I just wanted to understand the “why” behind these stupid questions.  What was it all supposed to mean?

            I swear, there must have been over three hundred questions this woman expected me to answer.  If not, it seemed like it.  Finally, it was over & I called Lizzie with Kara’s cellphone and they came to get me. On the ride home I wrote down all of the questions I could remember, just so that I could put it in this blog.  I guess if I applaud at a magic show, White Cedars doesn’t think I’m good enough to attend school with the children of their town.  I wonder what they’d think if they knew I could shift my body into the form of a cougar.  Good thing that question never came up. 

            Aunt Lina was rather upset when I told her about the questions.  Because she wouldn’t have been allowed to sit in on the “interview, which was the terminology she’d been given about the psych testing, she had let Kara & Lizzie take me.  My treatment angered her so much that  Aunt Lina called Miss Pritchard on Tuesday morning to ask what these disturbing questions hoped to prove.  According to my aunt, Miss Pritchard’s answer was as vague as her questions. 

I asked Aunt Lina if she couldn’t just homeschool me in New Jersey, just like she had here in PA.  She said she had a good reason, and when she was ready to, she’d tell me. 

            What is it with the adults in my life?  First I get idiotic questions from Miss Pritchard, and now its cryptic answers from Aunt Lina.  Is it something they’re all drinking?  I wonder if I’ll ever understand  grown-ups.

Until my next post…

Randi

A Concert & A Mental Test – Part 1: Concert

           Even though this happened over a week ago, I’m still so angry about things that every time I tried to write, I end up deleting it.  It seems as if White Cedars dislikes the idea of me moving in as much as I’m disliking this move.  I mean, asking me to take a mental test – oh, excuse me “psychological profile” -- before allowing me to go to school seems a bit much.  I mean, wouldn’t you be angry if you were “asked” to take a mental test? 

So, how do I begin?  Let’s see….I guess it started right after White Cedars got those test results.  I did really well on the tests, and the administrators were a little surprised.  They hadn’t expected me to score as well as their middle schoolers.  The problem was that I scored more like a High School student.  According to Aunt Lina, I’m a dilemma for them.  These educators expected me to be a country bumpkin because I was homeschooled by a relative-- a Native American, to boot. And suddenly these tests say I’m more educated than their precious children are.  They certainly do not want to place me in a classroom based on my knowledge.  So they sent Aunt Lina e-mails about my need for “social skills opportunities” and “psychological assessment.”  Aunt Lina was furious.  As a family, we rarely think about our so-called “minority status.”  It’s not as if our skin color makes anything obvious.  Nor are we “trying to pass” as anything but who we are – people.  Yes, our ancestors were oppressed by the government.  But I was brought up to believe that it’s the content of my character that defines me as a person. 

So now some White Cedars guidance counselor was going to assess me according to some “behavior profile test” in order to justify placing me with my age group.  So Aunt Lina was going to take me to NJ last Monday, but then my cousin Lizzie asked me to go to a free concert at the Cranberry Festival in NJ on Sunday with her friend Kara, which was the day before White Cedars had scheduled the “psychological review”.  Last year, for her birthday, the three of us were supposed to see this band “Care Bears On Fire” in Hoboken.  But I got sick, so she and Kara went without me.  This would make up for the time I missed.  Aunt Lina saw this as an opportunity for a couple of days to herself. 

Suddenly a Sunday concert was becoming an overnight road trip.  Aunt Lina called an artist friend of hers to see if we could all crash at her apartment.  Once that was settled, Kara, Lizzie, and I were going out for the weekend.

Kara’s a friend of Lizzie’s, not a cousin, but Aunt Lina trusted her.  Kara’s eighteen, a little older than Lizzie is, so she’ll be driving.  They spent Saturday night at the farm with us.

We got up early that Sunday and hit the road at seven.  Aunt Lina had given us some money for gas and food, so we had breakfast at a diner before we hit the Turnpike, and were in Bordentown by 10:30.  There was street parking, like a block away from the festivities. This Cranberry Festival is a yearly thing that’s held in this small NJ town that reminds me of Pennsylvania.  You know, a main street with stores that are NOT national chains, streets with houses that all look different, with big lawns and big yards, maybe an old car out back, and a couple of houses even had chicken coops in the yard.  I felt right at home.

The band list & times

The local music shop had started as a record store almost half a century ago, and was the sponsor for the bands.  There were four bands on the list for the day….”Care Bears On Fire” was second on the bill, and this band that Kara liked, “Spanking Charlene, was up last.  The music started at 12:30, so we walked  around checking out the place.

There was no stage – the musicians would just play in the street, which was blocked off for pedestrians and vendors.  There were booths selling all sorts of stuff – pies, cookies & cakes, jams, jellies, relishes and sauces, clothing, jewelry, antiques, gadgets, wine (we couldn’t try any, but it was there—cranberry wine)…It was like a country fair.  I tried preserves, fudge (yum), teas, and other things, and bought a jar of cranberry relish for Aunt Lina and for Dorothy, whose house we’d be crashing at.

A little before two o’clock, we got back to the stage, where “Care Bears On Fire” were setting up.  The regular bass player, Jena, wasn’t playing today – some guy was taking her place.

Care Bears On Fire's drummer, Izzy

                                                       

The band's lead singer Sophie

She's got a great smile!

           Not too many people were hanging out for the music (I couldn’t believe it, but they just weren’t), so we were right up front.  I managed to get some excellent photos.  They sang “Everybody Else,” “Barbie Eat a Sandwich,” “Super Teen” and “ATM,” as well as some others.  Those are my favorites, so that’s why I remember them.  It’s girl punk, and I loved dancing in the street right in front of the band!  It was so wild.

            We walked around instead of watching the next band.  We were hungry, so we got these grilled cheesy things called “MozzArepas” – it’s like mozzarella on cornbread only there’s real corn in the bread, and it’s fried, kind of like a potato pancake, only not greasy….oh heck, it’s just delicious.  And they were a cheap         lunch at like $4 each.  There was this cool soda vendor that sold a steel mug that was refillable all day. So we got one, and shared the unlimited soda.  There was cream, root beer, grape…all made with real cane sugar (no corn syrup!) and it was all delicious.  Kara got to keep the mug – it was nothing special, just shiny, but she liked it.  We certainly got our money’s worth on that deal – we must have refilled that thing ten or twelve times!

            At four o’clock, the last band came on – Spanking Charlene.  I’d never heard of them, but Kara said that “Little Steven,” who has this radio show on Sunday nights, called “The Underground Garage” liked the band so much that he produced their single. They won a big contest for unsigned bands.  Their sound is great.  

 

Charlene of Spanking Charlene

Charlene's smile

The lead singer, Charlene, has a nice smile, and an unbelievable voice, but she’s not some plastic mass-produced female vocalist that you’d expect to see fronting a band.  She’s a big lady – tall, full bodied, and she looks real, not like she stepped out of a salon or was dressed by a stylist or something.  Charlene looks like she’d be at home tending bar at the Polish Hall, except there she’d be called “Stasha” and be accepted as “one of the guys,” and probably beat half of them at pool or poker.

Her voice makes me think of Janis Joplin or Mamma Cass…people who would NEVER make it as singers in this day of “American Idol” image and video.  The rest of the band was cool and they rocked. 

It’s interesting seeing a band you’ve never heard before.  “Spanking Charlene” is punk rockish, too.  They sang, and Charlene talked about the places she’s played, and things that influenced her songs… Hey, this is my first concert without Aunt Lina, and I feel so cool, wild, and alive.  I think I needed this almost as much as a shift to cougar.  I’m getting a lot of pent-up energy out.

There’s a reason this band’s up last – there are more people hanging around to listen now, and while we are still up front to see the band, we’re a little off to the side instead of front & center.  They sang “Dismissed With A Kiss,”  “Canarsie” & “I Hate Girls”.  That last one has a cool little “La-la” lyric that made me laugh.  They closed the concert (and the festival) with a cover of “Runaround Sue” which had the three of us bumping hips and pumping fists and singing along.  What a way to end the day!  We got a last mug of cream soda, then the cops were clearing the street to open it up to cars again. 

We got to Dorothy’s in some town called Garfield by nine, where we had some kielbasa she’d made for us, then we spread out our sleeping bags and fell right to sleep.  Wow, what a day!  Too bad I have to take a mental test tomorrow.

Until my next post…

Randi

Waiting And Testing

         

This week has been crazy. Aunt Lina’s on the phone or the computer all the time, trying to get together funds to make this move happen. She sold one of her favorite pieces to a wealthy New York collector. She told me “I’ve always wanted to take another crack at that,” meaning she’ll be re-working the sculpture with “improvements.” I just hope she’s not disappointed.

She also spent time talking with school administrators from White Cedars. It seems that I have to take some sort of test to measure my “knowledge base.” The officials seem to think they may have to put me one grade below my age level, because I’ve been home schooled. It’s as if they think that what Aunt Lina and I have been doing isn’t going to live up to the lofty expectations of suburban NJ. I hear that parents in suburban NJ push their children into sports, activities, and studies in order ensure acceptance into top colleges. The information that the White Cedars Board of Education sent us was practically a brag-sheet about the number of kids in honors and Advanced Placement classes at their Middle School. Students in the White Cedars Middle School Band supposedly went on to receive music scholarships in college, and there was a separate page devoted to sports at the D.S. Whitsone Middle School of White Cedars.

Now this cracks me up, although some people (especially those from White Cedars) might not find it funny. You see, the town’s school mascot is the Green Knight. So the High School has variations of that as team names. Its football, baseball, and basketball teams are called the Green Knights. Girls’ teams are called the Lady Knights. Junior Varsity teams are called the Junior Knights. The marching band is called the Green Hornets. So that leaves the D.S. Whitsone Middle School teams with slim pickings. Sports teams there are called the Green Pages. Yeah, that’s right. The name’s like some coupon section of a telephone directory. I imagine their mascot dressed like a big book. It’s like the throwaway script line in a John Hughes movie come to life. Insert joke here.

So my local district set up the testing for me. I had to spend two days this week in a room a nearby elementary school, with a teacher monitoring the test. Mrs. Addams, the test monitor, talked with me the day before the test, and advised me to bring a book along to read between parts of the test. She’d looked at some of my prior testing scores and figured I might need something to keep me occupied.

“By law, if a test section is supposed to take twenty minutes, I have to allow you the twenty minutes, even if you finish in five. I don’t know if it’s a test rule or a union rule, but I was told I have to do it that way. So if you hand me your test each time you finish a section, you can spend the remainder of that time reading,” she explained, in a warm, laughing tone. It’s hard to tell by a voice on the phone what someone looks like, but Mrs. Addams was just as I pictured her: a not too tall, not too skinny (but not fat) woman in her mid-forties who genuinely liked being a teacher. She wore a long wine-colored cotton dress with darker contrasting embroidery, and Sandals. She had a twinkle in her bright brown eyes, and wore glasses to read. This Mrs. Addams was no tall, willowy Morticia.

The test was easy enough. The only section I spent a great deal of time on was the Math section, but even then I had time to read afterward. Miss Addams shared some chocolates with me, and she had brought a novel, too. I was re-reading Topper by Thorne Smith. It’s a story about this banker in the 1920’s, and these zany wisecracking alcoholic ghosts. I loved the movie, but the book’s funnier. And a little sadder, too. Miss Addams was reading Water For Elephants which had been a movie out last spring. I hadn’t seen it; she said I should, but that the book was better. She was impressed that I was reading Topper, because most kids my age wouldn’t even see the black-and-white movie based on the book, let alone bother to find the book. She told me to read more of the author’s stuff—he was very funny, but apparently died way too young. She considered him brilliant, and said that he was the first to write about spirits as anything other than scary. If I have to go to school, I’d love to have a teacher like Miss Addams.

After the testing was over, Miss Addams said she wished more of her students could be like me. She taught Fourth Grade – the principal had been teaching her class during my testing. They would have had him administer the test for me, but because I was a girl, they decided on Miss Addams instead. I’m glad.

So we are mostly ready to move. Aunt Lina’s a little short tempered that the formalities are making the process of moving take longer than she feels it should, especially because the house in White Cedars had been empty for a few months. So I went next door to see Mrs. Kemper. She was making stuffed cabbage for a church festival. Steamed cabbage leaves lay on an aluminum tray on her counter; she was mixing the ground beef with rice and eggs when I knocked on the back porch door. Within minutes I had on an apron and was learning how to roll the meat into a cabbage leaf to form a dumpling-like packet that would be cooked in a tangy gravy. Mrs. Kemper baked her stuffed cabbage; she said other people cooked theirs on the stovetop. We talked about her family, her garden, the books I’ve been reading, the latest silly video she’d seen on the computer, just spending the afternoon together. Without ever actually agreeing on it, we avoided the subject of my upcoming move. It makes us both so sad.

But at the end of the afternoon, when I was ready to leave, she handed me a shopping bag with a small casserole dish full of stuffed cabbage for Aunt Lina and me to eat for dinner. It wasn’t until I unpacked it back at home that I realized there was more to it than just dinner. In the bag was a white index card with Mrs. Kemper’s neat handwriting on it. I couldn’t believe what she had given me today.

On that card was the recipe for her super-delicious Oatmeal Lace Cookies. And she hadn’t given it to Aunt Lina, as she’d promised. In the top corner of the card, she’d written “For Miranda, from the kitchen of Velma Kemper.”

I hadn’t known her first name until today. Mr. Kemper and Aunt Lina always her Vee. I never knew what it was short for.

So… I’m sure you’re wondering what the ingredients are, and how to make those crispy discs of sugary goodness that are unbelievable when you sandwich chocolate in between them. The recipe is a good one. But keeping in the tradition of my dear friend Velma Kemper, I’ll “have to write it down sometime…”

Until my next post…

Randi

Finally! We Get to NJ

          It’s been a while since I posted, but we had some situations at the farm and power and the DSL line went out.  The ground was so wet that one of the old maples in the yard just toppled over.  Uprooted.  Of course, it took out some lines and we had to wait for the utility guys to come fix things.  Luckily, no one was hurt, and the tree didn’t hit the house.  It did hit the roof of one of the storage barns that Aunt Lina usually stores her artwork in, but we’d moved most of her stuff to the “cabin” already.  But there were insurance guys coming and going, and workmen to repair things, and neighbors who needed help because they’d had to evacuate their home.  We took in a family from down the road.  Their basement had entirely flooded and the first floor took on water, too.  Annie and Charles have a two-year-old and an infant; Aunt Lina and I took care of the kids while the young couple dealt with the clean-up of the mess.  We had extra bedrooms to offer, and a hot meal in the evening for them to come back to.  So there was little time to write or post.  And with guests in the house, no shifting.  Aunt Lina and I both get tense when we can’t shift.  She’s better at handling it than I am, but having little Bess and Tyler to care for kept me in line.  Then Annie said that her Mom from Ohio would come out to take the kids for a week, and Aunt Lina and I could finally go to NJ.

    The water level in the river has have gone down, but as we drove East, a steady rain seemed to follow us.  I am so sick of rain!  After a couple of hours on the road, I got to see the house Aunt Lina had chosen, the school I’d be attending, and the town we’d be living in.  The experience was….how should I put this….interesting?  Eye opening? Refreshing?  Peculiar?  Perhaps it’s all of the above.

The house is—a house.  Duh.  The kitchen is smallish, and the living room is too.  The two bedrooms are large, and the dining room has a round wall that bows out, with cabinets in the two corner ends of the bow.  The wood’s not painted over, and the floors are hardwood.  The enclosed back porch has a wood-burning stove that the business- suit-high-heel- wearing real estate lady sang the praises of as she wrinkled her nose.  That was amusing.  She obviously found the idea of such a stove dirty and distasteful, yet it was a selling point and she was gonna do her damndest to use it to sell.

Aunt Lina tends to be inscrutable to most people.  I knew that she wanted the place, but this woman wasn’t sure.  I asked Aunt Lina if I could look around the town as she and Miss Business-suit discussed particulars.  I took Aunt Lina’s cell phone, and headed to find the Horseneck Nature Sanctuary, the wooded patch I’d seen on Google Earth when I looked. 

I have a pretty good sense of direction.  It’s five blocks away – I have to pass fifteen houses to get there.  I can’t go through yards to get there; not only would that not be neighborly, but there were also several fences around some of the yards, and I could smell about eight dogs that lived in the area.  Several of them set to barking as I passed their houses.  One pup, a German Shepard, out in a fenced-in yard despite the drizzle, began to bark when I was a few houses away.  He got up and began to jump at the fence as I passed, so I stopped and stared him down.  At first the barking got wilder, then I exhaled heavily, and he stopped, midbark.  He made a whiny sound and slunk back behind the house, with his tail between his legs. 

            “I don’t know what you’ve got honey, but you should bottle it and sell it.  I didn’t think anything could shut Chester up!”  An older woman was sitting on the front porch of the house after the dog’s.  She smiled and nodded, and I waved and nodded.  Well, there was one friendly soul in White Cedars.

            I found the entrance to the sanctuary grounds, but there was yellow tape with the words “Caution – do not pass” strung between two trees barring the way.  A sign on a post said “Sanctuary Closed –Wet Ground and Fallen Trees,” so I turned around and walked back to the house with the “For Sale” sign out front.  It’s a cute little place – the front of the ground floor was made of stone, with blue vinyl siding covering the outside of the second floor.  The roof is a greyish color.  The place is OK, I guess, and would probably look better on a sunny day, but I kinda like the farmhouse with its five bedrooms, front and back parlors, porches, and pantry.  This place looked like the place next door (except that it was brick and white instead of stone and blue). And like another across the street, and a few down the block….suburbia.  Ugh.

            Aunt Lina and Miss Business-suit were done with whatever papers needed signing, and the real estate agent was talking about how much I would “love” the small town atmosphere of White Cedars, and how “good the schools were”, yadda yadda… I wanted to scream.  Aunt Lina saw that, and winked.  She cut the chit-chat short by saying that I needed lunch, and then we went to this place on the town’s main drag, Overbrook Pike Road.  We found this sandwich shop, across from the park, called The Knight Brothers Deli, where she had a burger and I had soup and a roast beef and cheddar on rye.  There were some older kids having lunch at a nearby table – apparently they let the students go out to lunch here.  Or maybe these kids were “cutting” class.  But would they be so brazen as to sit in a place not far from City Hall and the police station?

            After lunch we walked the block-and-a-half down Overbrook Pike Road to the “middle school”.  Aunt Lina keeps calling it “junior high” because I suppose that’s what they called them when she went to school. We had to ring a bell and a buzzer rang to unlock the door remotely.  It was like I imagined a prison would be.  We went to the “front office” where Aunt Lina spoke to a gaggle of secretaries, who introduced us to the principal, a Mr. Yevetski, who told us that we’d have to have our school district contact the White Cedars district.  When Aunt Lina told him I was homeschooled, his eyebrows shot up, he wrinkled his nose and began to talk about “comparative test scores”.  I hate being talked about as if I were an object, so I decided to ask a question of him.

            “What kind of World History do 12-year-olds study here?  Are they reading Russian Literature? And how about Chemistry?  Are they doing independent labs here?”

            Mr. Yevetski looked at me as if I’d sprouted an extra head.  Aunt Lina’s eyes were glaring, but her mouth was twitching a little in the left corner.  That meant a laugh was being suppressed.

            Suddenly this loud alarm bell rang, and I jumped.  A dull roar sounded outside the office.  I looked through the glass doors of the office-- a swarm of bodies surged through the hallways like sludge through a drainpipe.  My God!  There were so many of them!

            There was a dull thud as one boy pushed another right into the glass doors.  Mr. Yevetski excused himself (probably relieved that he didn’t have to answer my questions), and went out into the fray.  Aunt Lina was given school contact information from one of the ladies at the front desk, then we slipped out of the office, through the throng of students and out the door.  I breathed in the damp air, relieved to be out of there.  How was I going to handle that, every day?

            We went over to the White Cedars School Administration Office, which was back by the house we’d probably be living in soon.  As Aunt Lina talked to more office ladies, I looked at the trophies, old black-and-white photos and other sports paraphernalia in a glass case in the hallway.  There was a mural of a knight on a white charger, wearing green armor, with a banner proclaiming “Go Green Knights”.  I guess it’s more imaginative than some other High School mascots I’ve seen: animals like mustangs, rams, colts, tigers, wolverines, or even dubious occupations, like the lumberjacks, astronauts, or hillbillies.   Not that I’m the rah-rah sporto type anyway.  Not my thing.  I suppose I’ll have to pretend to like football and baseball in order to fit in.

            What if I don’t fit in?  What if I don’t try to change in order to be “typical”?  I could just be myself, and if these suburban kids don’t like me, then it’s their loss.  I didn’t need them before…why should it matter now?

            I thought about it on the ride back home – I mean back to PA.  I suppose it’s not really “home” anymore.  I wonder if I’ll ever think of NJ as “home,” or if Pennsylvania will always hold that place in my heart.  Only time will tell.

Until my next post…

Randi