Grind at Nine

Riding our pony, Taffy

The October Memoir and Backstory Blog Challenge continues...

Grind at Nine
I start third grade this year and my teacher is Mr. Everett. He's pretty strict and pulls the little hairs on the back of my neck when I don't do my math homework. And believe me, I hate math. The funny thing about Mr. Everett, years later I meet him in a college class and we hang out all the time. He ends up becoming one of my favorite teachers from the past.

I talk my parents into letting me join orchestra since I think the violin is cool. I make friends with another kid named Travis who is playing the viola. I hate to practice and it takes three more years before I give it up. My kids want to do orchestra now and I get a nervous tick.

My Mom and Dad get their first color t.v. and we celebrate by watching the pilot episode for Battlestar Galactica. The show begins with splashes of nebulous color and ominous narration before bursting onto the screen with a killer anthem and flying spaceships. I feel the sci-fi morphine shoot into my system and I'm instantly addicted. The next week, my friend and I argue over who gets to be Starbuck and who has to play Apollo.

Still jazzed for more Star Wars, life begins to drift by. The evening news, which I like to watch, is crazy.

• A preacher kills all his followers with poison Kool-Aid. There are almost a thousand dead and I wonder why he did it. My favorite Kool-Aid flavor is grape, but I don't know how you poison it. I do know, however, how to put twice as much sugar in it and it tastes super-fine.
• A nuclear reactor almost melts down at a place called Three Mile Island. Everyone is pretty scared, but nobody knows what a meltdown means or if the island is really three miles long.
• The orbiting space station known as Skylab begins to fall back to earth. I still remember the old joke, 'The Skylab is falling! The Skylab is falling!' My kids don't even know who Chicken Little is...