School Daze
1977-1983

It takes a lot of guts to dig deep into one's treasure trove of photographs and pull out the school photos for all to see. Generally, we all look like dorks in our school pictures. I think I somehow managed to come out looking dorkier than the other kids in the yearbooks. But it's also interesting to look through and see how much you grew from year to year, how the current styles affected what sort of trappings you plodded to class in.

And so, here they are, a chronical of my growth from seed to weed starting with grade K:

1977-1978, Ms. Harris's Kindergarten class at Adobe Acres Elementary. Kindergarten essentially set the pace of the rest of my 12 years in school. I learned a few things about myself during Kindergarten, aside from how to scrawl my name and that I was right-handed. First, that I was incredibly shy and pathetic around people that I didn't know. Second, that I had significantly better bladder control than some of my classmates, and third, that I hated the way my mother cut my bangs.

I remember playing catch and kiss with a boy I thought was cute named Ruben -- I used to chase him around the schoolyard yelling "Rooobbbiieee baby!!!". Hmmmm... maybe I wasn't that shy after all...

This was the year I had a baby sister drop into the family and take my bedroom, confining me to share a room with my older sister.

1978-1979, Ms. Parris's first grade class at Adobe Acres Elementary. Gotta luv those groovy superimposed photo effects, so you can get both a straight shot and a profile in one photo. I don't remember much about this year, except that I got really sick one day and had some wild hallucinations about eyeballs breathing in our fake wood paneling. I also got to sleep on my sister's bed in the bottom bunk while I was sick. Otherwise, first grade was not very memorable.

1979-1980, Mrs. Sami's Second Grade class at Adobe Acres elementary. You can see those awful bangs coming back to haunt me. Mrs. Sami was actually the second grade teacher of myself, my older sister, and eventually my little sister. How's that for a tradition? The only memorable thing I really remember about Mrs. Sami's class is that I barfed on the kid in front of me's Weekly Reader publication one day in class.

1980-1981, Third grade at Santa Rosa's elementary school. I can't remember the teacher's name, but he always used to bring pecans to class, and always gave some to me. I think he felt guilty because on the first day of class, he called me "Maloney" so all the kids started calling me "maloney baloney". I was the new kid in school, as my familia had just moved to a small village outside of Santa Rosa NM. It took me 2 hours each day to get to school by bus (Yes, i had to catch the bus at 6am), and where we lived had no telephone, no tv, and no radio. The house next door was an abandoned adobe house from the turn-of-the-century. It was a real interesting place to live, but I don't think I'd want to live there again.

It was about this time that I discovered music, however. My sister and I found an old tin full of my mother's records and began to play them non-stop on our Mickey Mouse record player. My parents bought me a tape recorder (with K-TEL's Certified Gold double cassette) and I'd take that thing with me whenever we went into the city and record songs off the radio.

I remember being really proud of that football player stick pin I'm wearing in that photo, although for the life of me, I don't know why.

1981-1982, Fourth grade in Mrs. Healsley's class at Zimmerly elementary. This is one of my favorite school pix, bangs aside. We had moved away from the village in the middle of nowhere to a small town called Socorro, where my grandmother lived, and things were considerably better. I remember riding my bicycle EVERYWHERE. I was also very big into smurfs and He-Man. My sister and I discovered videos and used to stay up all weekend long watching Friday Night Videos and Night Tracks. We didn't have MTV.

1982-1983, Mrs. Lambkin's fifth grade class. I actually had friends at school for the first time in my life here in Socorro, and I think I was pretty happy. I was even play-dating a tall blonde boy named Darryl Houston, and before him, the English foreign exchange student whose name I can't remember. I had just started discovering Duran Duran, which rapidly became my favorite band and obsession for years to come. My sister started discovering heavy metal.

I also started writing stories in fifth grade. I have tablets and tablets of stories beginning from here on up thru high school.

Then we left Socorro, and moved to Albuquerque for middle school... the dark years...