Junior High School is the armpit of life.
GRACE’S DIARY
It’s been said that parents should give their children roots and wings. That was a perfect description of my parents. Even in a wheelchair, my father was a dreamer with his head in the clouds and my mother was the roots with both feet planted firmly on terra quaking firma. My mother was always afraid. Afraid we didn’t have enough money, afraid her health would give out, afraid something might happen to one of us. Pretty much afraid of life. When my father got sick I think it was for her vindication that the gods really were out to get us.
Shortly after our arrival in Utah, my mother got a day job working as a cashier at Warshaw’s Food and Drug. Her job didn’t pay much, but she brought home damaged canned goods and day-olds from the bakery, which helped with the grocery bills. For years I thought that all soup cans came with dents in them.
For most of her life my mother had struggled with depression, and our situation didn’t help much. People didn’t talk as much about depression in those days; in some religions it was still regarded as a sin. Science made people less sinful with the wonder drug Librium.
My mother worked all day, then came home at night, physically and emotionally spent. My father just kind of moped around the house, dreaming up get-rich-quick schemes while he slowly regained the use of his limbs. Joel and I learned that if we spent much time in the house, Dad would think of errands for us, so mostly we just hid out in the clubhouse. Then summer ended.
Life at Granite Junior High School was dog-eat-dog. Even though I was a ninth grader, and higher up the food chain, it was still miserable. I wasn’t big like the jocks or especially smart like the geeks. I had acne and a bad haircut, which, when my dad got partial use of his hands back, was once again administered with his Ronco electric hair trimmer. The hoods, who gathered outside the north doors after school to smoke, took notice of me and made my life even more miserable. They tripped me, knocked books out of my hands, and generally harassed and humiliated me. And I worked at a burger place that paid sixty cents an hour and made you wear a paper cap. That time in my life nothing was worth remembering. That is, up until the day I found Grace in a Dumpster.