VERTIGO CHAPTER TWO

Three days of vertigo.  Three days in bed. One day of nausea.  Slowly improving with Epley Maneuver.  I thought I was going to be dizzy the rest of my life.

My father lived in Idaho Falls during the week leaving mom with three little kids.  She put a lot of pressure on him to get a house in IF, which he did, without having her look at it first.  She said she didn't particularly like it but it was our home for 2 decades.  I walked to second grade along the huge and swift Idaho Canal.  In fact our Church was on the other side of the canal and then down a road. we took a shortcut on a skinny little catwalk over the canal.  Lucky me I never even got a drop of Idaho Canal on me.  Ever.  Even when we were throwing rocks and playing around on the bank.  Other kids weren't so lucky and drowned, maybe one a year.  I crossed the canal on the car bridge four times a day as I walked to school, home for lunch, back to school, then home again after school.  Alone.  My second grade teacher, Mrs. Hart, was the best teacher in my entire education.  She was so kind and noticed I was huddling in a corner during recess.  After recess she would remind the class that they needed to look around for lonely people on the playground and include them in our activities.  That didn't work but how nice of her.  Mrs. Hart had her second graders memorize three things, rules of phonetics word for word, the Hallellujah chorus and the Gettysburg address.  Can you think of any more important things than those? 

We sat in alphabetical order so all during elementary school I sat in front of Deidra McMillan, a very popular girl.  She acted like she liked me and laughed at my jokes.  She was so important to me, an insecure girl.  We were even friends all through high school and she was as close to popular as I ever got.  I was too immature and silly.

All I remember about third grade is being the last person in the the class to finish a math paper.  When you finished you were to go stand by the wall so the whole class was standing around watching me be stressed and humiliated.  They cheered when I finished which was no solace.  Also I remember that Pam Davis went up to the teacher's desk and projectile vomited all over her.

Fourth grade our teacher quit in the middle of the year, which was devastating.  Our new teacher was a young guy with acne who taught us Polynesian songs and dances.  One day when I went home for lunch, I brought back a whole box of kittens that my cat had just delivered, without asking him.  He was upset about it and told me to take them straight back home.  Maybe he didn't like kittens.  Meany.

Fifth grade was the art year.  Our teacher, Mrs. Hogg was middle aged with white hair, and loved, loved, loved art.  She had a good nature and didn't fit her name at all.  So it was a good year.  It was also the year I fell in love with Chip Hobson and we traded dog tags.

Sixth grade was also kind of a disaster.  Mr. Sherwood showed me how to grow bacteria on petri dishes.  I exposed the dishes to various things, put them in a bag and placed them in a dark cupboard.  When it was time to display our science projects, I opened the cupboard and it was full of blue, green and brown bacteria on steroids. and it had a matching smell.   It had expanded to fill the closet and was gross.  I was still "with" Chip.