boarding school memories...

Good morning everyone!  Hope you are all having a fantastic week!  Rob and I had a fabulous time last night celebrating his birthday with our friends, Zach and Carol Ann, at dinner. Well, we always have fun when we go out with them, anyway! It’s funny how you can meet some couples and feel like you’ve known them forever. Z and C are just that sort of couple.

We have a lot in common because both the guys are planners so they speak a common language all their own.  Carol Ann and I are both sappy life lovers so we get along grandly, also. That’s uncommon in couples.  It usually happens that you just tolerate the spouse that comes along with someone you like.  My sides are still hurting from all the laughing I did last night.  The guys don’t talk about work, either. When we get together, it’s a full out witty festival of talk about everything under the sun. We never seem to run out of goofy stuff to talk about. 

Zach and I actually went to private school across the street from each other in El Paso, TX, too! Now, how small is the world, anyway?  You see, when I was in 4^th grade, my mother thought I would just love going to boarding school and she really wanted to travel with her husband at the time who worked for Sony out of Japan so she enrolled me in Radford School for Girls.  It has since gone co-ed and dropped the “for Girls” part.  I was the youngest boarder by several years. It was not a great time in my life.  There were a bunch of girls who were seniors, though, who looked after me and made it a little better.  They were only allowed to date and have dances with the guys who went to the Military Academy across the way.  That’s where Zack went!  We discovered this in one of our first dinners together and that we knew some of the same people!  I mean, who forgets a name like Ronbo Flounder? Well, his name’s Ron, but everyone called him Ronbo.  Gives me chills how many coincidences there are in my life with people I know now!

I still keep in touch with some of the “girls” I went to boarding school with.  Did you know that school has put out some of the finest female minds in America?  Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court Justice, went there.  The school just had its 100^th anniversary celebration this past year in 2011. When I was there, it was a creepy place to me, though.  The Dean, Ms Templeton, had a penchant for World War II memorabilia and it was all over the school. We had mannequins of soldiers and airmen in their uniforms in the great hall. It was really spooky for a 4^th grader, walking around there at night! We also had Pancho Villa’s death mask in a case (complete with hair in it) and the world’s smallest Bible under a microscope.  The school was surrounded in front with anti-aircraft guns Dean Templeton had collected.  As a matter of fact, while I was there, my roomie, Jane, fell off one of the guns and sliced her leg wide open, requiring a lot of stitches.

I credit Radford with a lot of my education, despite the fact that I hated being there.  I was actually bored for the rest of my time in the public education system after that.  I really didn’t learn much else after, it was just a repetition of what I learned there.  That’s probably why I got into so much trouble later in high school.  The classes at Radford were only 5-7 students in my grade so I got completely individualized attention.  Add to that the fact that we completed Algebra, Spanish and French in 4^th grade and you’ll see why I was insufferably bored in public school.  I used to really anger the teachers in high school because I cut more classes than I went to and then I would stroll in and ace their tests on exam day.  I’m not really much smarter than anyone else, I just learned earlier.

When I went to Radford, it was the late 60’s.  I was there in 1967 and 1968, to be exact.  The older girls were my idols! They all took me under their wing while I was there, I think they felt sorry for me. Any time we went outside the school, we had to dress in school uniforms of green jackets and our plaid skirts and white gloves.  Can you imagine that in El Paso, TX now?  Oh and Radford is where I learned to ski!  We went on a big trip to Ruidoso, NM to go skiing and I learned to ski after going up in a big gondola all the way to the top of this huge mountain. I had started taking lessons but my roomie, who was several years older, convinced me lessons were for sissies and talked me into the ride.  I tell you, by the time I got to the bottom, which was about an hour later, I was a pretty darn good skier, out of fear for my life! I ended up being a skier for life after that. 

Radford is also where I learned to be a “lady”. We all ate meals in the grand hall, complete with linens and a million forks and plates and ketchup in bowls.  My roomie had a lot of fun always putting me up to sit at the Dean’s table to watch me squirm.  I am forever grateful, however, for all the etiquette I learned while there. I learned the proper way to walk and carry on polite conversation and what all those forks are for. You can’t intimidate me in a formal setting, that’s for sure.

Wow, I really got off track from dinner last night, didn’t I? Funny how your mind wanders at 4:30 in the morning! Anyway, Zack, Carol Ann , Rob and I always have fun when we get together. Unfortunately, they have teenagers so we don’t get together real often but we try to have dinner together at least twice a month to catch up and we lunch together often.  Just a couple more years and they will be free to join us more often when the kids have gone off to college.

Thistle is doing much better today.  She’s just getting really itchy from her stitches now.  I’ve been spending a lot of time scratching the area around her stitches for her while she has her e-collar on.  I try to think of what it must be like for her and act accordingly.  She seems pretty darn grateful and calms down when I help her out.  She’s back to playing with her toys and running around like nothing’s bothering her much (except those itchy stitches).  I think she’ll be in pretty good shape by the time I get my surgery on Monday.  We’re still trying to figure out how that’s all going to work.  Rob is really busy with subdivision regulations at work and can’t take off to help me after surgery so I may be calling on some girlfriends to come let Thistle out those first few days post-op. I have to call tomorrow to find out what time my surgery is on Monday. I sure hope it’s an early one because I am not a happy camper without my morning coffee!

Well, have a fabulous Thursday, everyone. I hit a milestone here on my blog yesterday! 10,000 people have stopped in to read my silly words from 16 countries!  Who’d a thunk it?  That’s no pressure………….ack!

“Of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls boarding school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything. They are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question ‘Into how little space a human being can be crushed?’ I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move there-wide room. A woman who has been for many years at one of those places carries the mark of the beast on her till she dies” ~Olive Schreiner