Bossy Sisters and Broken Glasses

A summary of my life from birth to High School in 1,000 words. 

Turning 50 causes one to evaluate. Am I where I should be? Did I zig when I should have zagged? Did I learn what I was supposed to learn?

My Dad spent four years in the air force. On September 11, I was born in Spain. Thanks to Osama Bin Laden, I have one of the most famous birthdates in American history.

Mom says I ate meals with them and then crawled over and ate with our Spanish neighbors. Perhaps being born in a different time zone explains why I’m late so much.

Being the oldest child of two oldest children, the oldest of my three siblings, and the oldest cousin on both sides, I have bossed people around my whole life.

We moved often, living in eighteen houses in eighteen years. Through second grade, I lived in Southern California’s Mojave Desert. I remember cactus, Joshua trees, church, our Volkswagen beetle, measles, matching Easter dresses and a one-time freak foot of snow.

At age six in Vacation Bible School, I learned that Jesus loves me and I believed with all my six-year-old heart. Faith is simple enough for a child to understand but complicated enough to spend a lifetime learning about.

At age seven, my grandparents showed up at Christmas with a HUGE rectangle cardboard box with my name on it. Learning to ride their gift, a new shiny green bicycle, proved difficult. I fell over and over again, developing a good case of road rash, until that magical moment when I finally got it.

I soon learned about the laws of gravity and stupidity when my girlfriend and I tied our bikes together. Great fun until she went one way, and I went another. The resulting crash put a tooth through my chin, leaving a faint lifetime scar.

In third grade, we moved ten hours north to Vallejo, California to be close to my Mom’s family.

A flunked school eye test showed I had inherited Dad’s poor vision. Before glasses, trees had a general shape. After glasses, I could see branches and detailed leaves.

I worked in my parents store for 50 cents an hour to pay for a stylish pair of plastic blue gingham cat-eye glasses, which looked impressive when they broke down the middle and Dad joined them together with a piece of wire.

In fourth grade the neighborhood bookmobile provided a portal to the sphere of books, knowledge, and the outside world. With the discovery of chapter books and Nancy Drew, I began a lifelong love affair with the written word.

The fascinating world of books helped offset the reality of my world. A world of having parents who worked hard but never got ahead. Who loved us but fought with each other all the time. Of moving almost every year. Of always being new and making friends and getting used to things, and then moving again.

Grandpa gambled, smoked, and drank. He was a gentle drunk, so when he had too much drink, he’d sleep it off. He loved us and we loved him. He made each of us eight cousins feel special. He called my sisters and me princesses and treated us as such. He teased, told funny jokes, played dominoes, and gave us special nicknames and money for candy. We each spent a week with my grandparents every summer and they spoiled us.

After two years in Vallejo, we moved an hour north to Sonoma County where we lived for the next fifteen years, though we still moved around.

We moved my 8th grade year. A painful experience as classmates teased me about my big nose and dark blue plastic “cat-eye” glasses.

High school was a mine field, and by God’s grace, I made it, for the most part, safely through. I had fun times, but between teenage drama, numerous poor decisions, acute self-consciousness, flunking the driver’s license test twice, and accidentally driving our old Ford Falcon station wagon through the neighbor’s garden, I’m really glad all that is way behind me.

From my Spanish neighbors I learned that things are more fun with friends. In church I learned about faith. Learning to ride a bike taught the value of persistence and being careful who you tie your bike to, because if they go down, you probably will too.

Moving frequently taught me to be flexible, resilient, not to hold tightly to things, to go with the flow, to adapt, and not take things for granted. Movers live optimistically, viewing moving as a new beginning, not another ending.

Unfortunately moving that often makes one cautious, slow to develop attachments, and reluctant to dig in and settle down.

From Grandpa I learned the world is far from perfect and good people do bad things and life is rarely as black and white as we’d like it to be. Not all my alcoholic relatives were gentle drunks and I developed an aversion to alcohol.

I learned that God answers some prayers and doesn’t answer others. That our families shape and form us, and while He fixes some things, some things won’t be fixed until we get to heaven.

God is sovereign and has been there all my life, working things together for His reasons, for His glory, for my best, in His time, and in His own way.

Faith, family, and friends. The Big Three. Was learning. Am Learning. Will always be learning.

One day God will take me home and I won’t ever have to move again. After a lifetime of learning, I’ll enter a portal to a new world. One with a perfect Father who knows and does all things well. A place with no tears, teasing classmates, bad eyes, ugly glasses, poor choices, or broken lives.

Immersed in love so incredible we humans can’t begin to comprehend it, I will finally be where I should be and the learning will have just begun.