Rambling AutoBiography(using a mentor) #sol22

March 6, 2022

Elisabeth Ellington has been one of my blog mentors during these Marches from the beginning. Full of innovative ideas, one year I continued writing poetry throughout the month of April because I was fascinated by her ideas. This year, she has chosen a theme of using our fellow bloggers as mentors, assimilating their prose theme in her daily writing. As we come to Sunday writing, I am adopting her plan from yesterday, A Rambling Autobiography. You can read her carefully crafted version here. If don’t follow her yet, I highly recommend it. Having a couple of decades on her at least, I was hesitant to jump in, but the first line came right away.

Barbie and I were born in the same year. I had the first Barbie until along with my French Provencial Canopy bed, I was encouraged to give all of my Barbies to my younger girl cousin never to be reunited. I only had hair long enough for a pony or pigtails in first grade. The rest of my life has been relegated to some version of pixie hair. I had a paper doll party for my sixth birthday which I thought was amazing and the party goers thought was lame. In junior high I had a tangerine colored bed room. My favorite parts were a yellow gutter book holder and the garden spider that built a web outside my window year after year. Her markings match that yellow perfectly. My room was crowded but the closet size was amazing. I took lessons in nearly everything as a child: horticulture, cooking, sewing, ballet, gymnastics, tap, flute, voice. I was one in a earthquake at the Missouri Botanic Garden during one of the horticulture lessons. We had to stand in the doorway. I wanted a dog that looked like Toto in the Wizard of Oz, but somehow ended up with a Yorkshire Terrier that was really more my Mama’s dog and slept in her sewing basket in her closet. In keeping with my myriad of lessons, I joined nearly every club in junior high and high school, though I don’t have much of a talent for anything. I have played piano, flute, and ukelele, not well. I can marginally knit. I have piles of books everywhere. I remember spending summers in Tulsa where I would read and read and read my cousins books. My birthday cake was always a Strawberry Sparkle Cake, an amazing concoction of Angel Food, strawberry jello, strawberries, and whipped cream. The cake was hollowed out and the jello and strawberries were in the center with cake pieces. When I turned sixteen my mom made a pita party with all of these fillings and that cake. It was a big hit. In high school, I was in an all girls choir, played powerpuff football, and was an exchange student to Argentina. I changed my major my junior year in college by reading all of the undergraduate programs (163) and choosing one that I thought would make the world a better place. (Child Development). I never planned on being a teacher. But here I am in my dream job.

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