A new school. That’s not what I expected or wanted to happen at age seven. Moving? There’s no good way to articulate it. It sucks. Plain and simple. Moving bites. But if you are a kid and your parents tell you, “Guess what, kiddo? We’re moving 800 miles away from Washington.” Whohoo!

800 miles? It might as well be thousands! I’ll never see my friends or school again. Wait. You can’t be serious, can you? And in a few seconds, you experience every emotion known to mankind. Sad. Happy. Disgusted. Angry. Fear. Bad. Surprised. Then it settles on you like a dark cloud hovering over your existence. Nothing makes you happy, and you cry at the drop of a hat.

               Not that it was like that for me. But I know other people who’ve dealt with these things. For me, the worst part would be missing my friends Mark and Chris. I didn’t know anything about California. I didn’t know that it didn’t snow there. I didn’t realize there were two seasons, not four, like Washington. In Washington, we got snow. In California, we got rain and sunshine. That was it. And the temperatures were moderate – not freezing, but still cold. And the wet didn’t last. There were more sunny days than in Washington, but I wouldn’t learn that until later.

               I think the thing I would miss the most was my friends. Making those connections in Washington was pretty easy because everyone who lived in our neighborhood was in a similar boat, financially speaking, that is. We wore the same kinds of clothes, second-hand or from discount stores. And our parents passed clothes around from family to family. Handmedowns, as they were affectionately known. In our California school, almost every kid wore top-end styles or something close to it. As for our family? We were lucky to attend the school. The only reason we could was we got a discount on the tuition. Yes. It was a private Christian school.

               I didn’t want to be the new kid. Everyone stared at you because your clothes weren’t as stylish as everyone else’s. I thought I could be myself and everyone would love me because that’s what it was like in Washington. I didn’t realize culture was a thing for kids as much as it was for adults. And this culture wasn’t just foreign to me – I didn’t know how to speak the language. Levis wasn’t a part of my vocabulary. Neither was Polo. Or Izod. These things meant nothing to me.

               I also didn’t know the school rules or that certain teachers would go out of their way to make my life miserable. And when I tried to explain this to my parents, did they listen? Not until my younger brother had the same abusive teacher, the one that I started my elementary school years in California with. She definitely had a lot of issues and in today’s world. She’d be dismissed from the school for abuse. Physical abuse that is. Yeah. Seriously. And for an 8-year-old? That’s not fair.

               I decided to try to make friends right away. Talk about failing right from the beginning! Within the first three days of being in a new classroom, I managed to get two days of detention. And why? Why did I get this kind of attention? Two reasons. First, I liked to say whatever was on my mind (extrovert), even if that meant I did it out of turn in the classroom. That is not the way to start out the year. And second, I didn’t know that you couldn’t do that. In my previous classroom, a split 2^nd-3^rd grade class, I was one of eight 2nd graders because I could conceptually grasp concepts faster than my classmates. That didn’t mean I was smarter, although it did appear that way. I think the other reason is that there weren’t enough 2^nd graders to make a third 2^nd-grade class. The ‘middle-kid’ of generations, GenXers. Go figure! Not enough kids. Huh. If only we could have that problem today!

               So here I am in this class with kids I don’t know, who speak ‘upper middle class’ better than me, and I’m doing my best to fit in. Yeah, it sucked.