I remember

I remember the apartment, 2-bedroom apartment that my family lived in for a year in Bakersfield. Beth was still very young, maybe a year old and Anne (still Ann or Annie then) was in 4th or 5th grade. I’m 2 1/2 years older than her, so I started at Thompson Jr. High in 7th grade two days after we drove to Bakersfield in August in our classic orange and white VW bus on an incredibly hot day, when our legs in my Ocean Pacific corduroy short shorts sweated and stuck to the vinyl seats. The driver – my mother in this case – really had to work to get a speeding ticket and keep it on the road in a high wind. At least that’s how it felt as a 13-year old who watched every single car on I-99 zoom past us. We were handicapped by the boxes we packed in the car that morning, the first wave of our move from Merced, 3 hours north of Bakersfield. I was starting school the next day at Thompson and was that strange combination of cocky, nervous, and self-conscious that the young and inexperience often are. Different for girls of my age? Probably, maybe, I don’t know.

Given that Bakersfield has a well-deserved reputation for brutally hot summers, we had packed nothing for me except my short shorts and t-shirts. Still, I was sweating wildly when we pulled into our apartment complex’s parking lot.

Anne and I slept in one room and mom slept in the other room with Beth in a crib in my parent’s walk-in closet. We teased Beth about that for years, hope she didn’t resent it.

I forget who told me on the first day of school that my shorts were against the rules. Shorts couldn’t be any shorter than 2 inches above the knee.My OP’s, which I thought were pretty cool (literally too) and everybody who was cool in Merced were wearing them. I remember laughing at the kids I saw in Bakersfield as we drove into town who were wearing these-old-man shorts that were comically long, some reaching all the way to their knees. I think Ann and I both laughed at them. But I was the one embarrassed when I had to go to the principals office and he explained the dress code to me. He told me I’d have to go home that day and put on a longer pair before I could come back to school. I nearly broke down thinking about the many offending pairs of shorts I had and zero pairs of the sill, long ones. Of course, why would I have any of those ridiculous things?

Fortunately, my parents knew one family in Bakersfield with kids Ann and my ages. My mom didn’t have anything more than food and gas money, so until dad arrived with the rest of our stuff, including my pants and more money, I had to borrow a pair of my de facto best friend’s pants. He wasn’t as, ahem, stocky as I was, so I felt like a sausage when I finally squeezed into them, but at least I didn’t have to wear those silly shorts. I had to suppress my laughter every time I saw them. At least for the first week. As the temperatures hovered in the low 100′s all week, my resistance melted, along with the rest of me.