My parents were both raised back east, which created a wonderful conflict when we tried to travel back to the grandparents for the holidays. It was even more interesting because my mom’s family was Jewish while my dad’s celebrated the traditional Christian holidays. We would leave a few days before Christmas, spend Christmas morning with my dad’s family in Beckley, West Virginia, and then drive to Baltimore, Maryland to spend Hanukkah with my mom’s parents. We would pile into the minivan to complete our 26-hour cross-country trip to visit people I barely knew. I never bonded with my grandparents because of the distance. My parents both moved down to Houston to work for NASA, where they met, fell madly in love, got married, and 20 months later had a beautiful baby girl. The first house they bought was the one I spent the first 10 years of my life in. My dad was apparently going through a “farmer” phase. It’s really funny if you think about it. My dad is the straight white-collar worker, always clean cut, always knows what’s going on. He sits in front of a computer all day so he doesn’t exactly have good people skills, or agriculture ones for that matter. But for some reason he wanted to try to own a farm. The house took a lot of work and when we finally left it, no one was disappointed. My mom was mostly along for the ride. She was terrified of the fact that our house was surrounded by woods. When I was a baby she used to push me down the road in the stroller saying, “Carri, don’t ever go in the woods. Bad people live in the woods.” She did NOT enjoy the house, but she saw that it made my dad happy. She was originally intending on going back to work after me, but she just couldn’t bear to leave me with a sitter. She then became transformed into the role of a housewife. She would cook, clean, and even sew a bit. She always let me help with the projects. We would bond over a batch of chocolate cookies, or the weekly trips to the Kroger down the road. My dad and I bonded over our monthly trips to Dairy Queen. That was my reward for a good report card. From the time I was in kindergarten, it was our “father-daughter date.”
Our first house was big, ugly and brown, situated in the middle of nowhere. Our family often jokes about it being in the middle of a cow ranch. Once during a hot summer morning when the fog was so thick that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, my mom heard some strange noises. A few hours later a scary, straggly looking man knocks on our door and asks my mom if she’s seen his cows. It was hilarious. Now of course my mom hadn’t seen them but she told the man that she had heard them that morning. There were only four houses on the street and I had to traverse quite a distance to get to the nearest house where a girl my age (Christy) lived. The road I traveled down was filled with giant potholes and surrounded by woods-quite the scary place for a little girl. When I was in fifth grade we moved. It was only across town, but I was thrilled. I was getting away from the evils of the woods and moving into a real neighborhood, where I would have actual neighbors. No longer would I have to go to ride home with my friends, I would be able to walk to their houses. I would be able to roller-blade and ride my bike on my road with out fear of engulfing potholes. Because I was going to a private school, I didn’t even have to bother with switching schools, it was just like transporting all of my things to another dwelling. Unfortunately I didn’t realize how hard moving 3 miles up the freeway would become. I didn’t leave many friends behind, but suddenly I was pushed into a new, much busier world right next to I-45. As luck would have it, my house on 1333 Coleman Boylan Junior Drive was smack dab in the middle of the busiest street in my small little world. It was the main entrance to the neighborhood so while I was playing street hockey, with the countless number of boys on the block, I would often have to dodge the speeding traffic.
My mom wanted me to get involved in neighborhood activities to introduce me to more girls and to keep me from becoming a couch potato. She enrolled me in a Bible Club in our neighborhood. It was mainly for younger children, so they often needed a bit of crowd control=ME. I have worked with little ones since I was 8 years old. My mother says it’s a gift I have. I can hold a crying child for hours with out getting frustrated and screaming back at them. At one of the meetings a few weeks into the program, some commotion occurred. The first rule was that you come in on time, or not at all. Yet there was a girl who looked to be almost my age, who came in late. She was hugging her family like she hadn’t seen them in ages. I was confused. I sat there thinking
here it is only 3 o’clock. Let’s say she went to school today, she hasn’t seen her family in ohhh 8 hours, and she’s hugging them like she hasn’t seen them in years. Either they’re a reallyreally close family or she’s “special.”
I know I’m judgmental, especially for a 12 year old, but that’s just how I am. I notice people a lot. It’s interesting just to sit back and watch them.
After Bible club ended, my mom came to pick me up and wanted to introduce me to “a girl just your age.” She had been doing this for weeks now, wanting me to develop a close relationship with someone in the neighborhood. She was afraid that if left to my own timing I would never make friends and she thought that the only way I would be happy was to find a good friend. I was tired of this constantly meeting new people, but the girl turned out to be the one I had been watching at Bible Club. Apparently her family moved in 3 weeks before the school semester was out and wanted her to stay at her school to make the transition easier. So she stayed in Victoria, Texas with a family friend. Jessica was just coming back up to Houston, so she hadn’t seen her family in a long time. The meeting went ok I guess, nothing really came of it. None of us could have imagined the impact that meeting would have on my life.