Love, Life, and Lucille by Judy Gaman

Author:Judy Gaman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The Sky’s the Limit

After our trip to Memphis, I couldn’t get that image of Lucille and the little girl out of my mind. I know Lucille had made an impression on her, and the entire experience made me think about the people who made impressions on me at about that same tender age. My family’s move to the small town of Cleburne, Texas from Michigan when I was a kid meant new schools and new friends for both Jennifer and me. I was in the fifth grade and she was in the ninth.

Fifth grade is already an awkward time. The summer after fourth grade, the girls start liking boys, and the boys start liking sports, cars, and anything fast. The boys either like girls or they don’t, but the girls know which ones have come to their senses and which ones still haven’t. In my case, the awkwardness of fifth grade was coupled with a case of total culture shock.

Everything about my new classroom was different. The kids dressed differently, in old jeans and worn shoes. There was little color, and no dresses on the girls. The posters on the classroom walls were maps instead of inspirational sayings, and the windows were wide open. I never did learn whether they didn’t have air conditioning in that old school or if the principal was just cheap.

I once overheard Mom on the phone saying that people from Michigan had thick blood, which was great for cold winters up north, but wasn’t well-suited for hot Texas summers. I felt like I didn’t have the right blood to sit in that classroom, because just doing so made me feel hot, sticky and sick.

I also learned that people from the North were not exactly welcome in the South, a lesson my new teacher taught me on the first day of school. She was old, probably around seventy-something. Her hair was white, and she wore those old-lady glasses, the kind with the pointy black frames. She was overweight and liked to wear what I referred to as “grandma clothes.” Her crumpled toes overlapped each other inside her thick-strapped dress shoes that looked like they were made of fake leather or some kind of soft plastic. She had a pair of those shoes in every color, and apparently nobody had ever told her that open-toed shoes did not go with pantyhose, especially the kind with a reinforced toe.

On that first day, my new teacher looked over the class and then said, with her big Texas accent, “Judy and Virgil, come up to the front.” I figured her red face and sour expression were just due to the heat. “Hurry it up, let’s go. I don’t reckon’ I have all day,” she insisted as she motioned for us to move faster.

Virgil was taller than me. Of course, everyone was taller than me, but he was tall and lean with very dark skin. He looked over at me with his big brown eyes and long black eyelashes. He

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