Counting by 7s(5)

It has been my experience that rewarding and heartbreaking often go hand in hand.



In grade school, at Rose Elementary, I had one true companion.

Her name was Margaret Z. Buckle.

She made up the Z because she didn’t have a middle name, and she had strong feelings about being seen as an individual.

But Margaret (don’t ever call her Peggy) moved away the summer after fifth grade. Her mother is a petroleum engineer, and she got transferred to Canada.

Despite the distance, I thought that Margaret and I would stay really close.

And in the beginning it was like that.

But I guess people are a lot more open in Canada, because in Bakersfield it was just Margaret and me against the world.

Up there she has all kinds of friends.

Now, on the rare times when we correspond, she brings up things like a new sweater she got. Or a band she likes.

She doesn’t want to talk about chiropterophily, which is the pollination of plants by bats.

She’s moved on.

Who can blame her?



With Margaret in Canada, I was hoping that Sequoia Middle School would open up new avenues for friendship.

It hasn’t worked out that way.

I’m small for my age, but I had a lot of anticipation about becoming a “Sequoia Giant.”

Just the fact that the place had a tree as a mascot seemed so promising.

The school was on the other side of town and it was supposed to give me a fresh start, since the kids from my elementary all went on to Emerson.

My parents got special permission from the district to move me there.

Mom and Dad believed that I’d never found a teacher who truly understood me. I think it was more accurate to say that I’d never understood any of my teachers.

There’s a difference.

Right before school began in the fall, the anticipation I felt was like waiting for my Amorphophallus paeoniifolius to bloom.

I went through a period of obsessively cultivating rare corpse flowers.

My initial attraction was to their strange-looking blossom.

The deep purplish red petals resemble sheets of velvet fabric that could line a casket. And the long, aggressive, yellowy stigma jutting from the center is like a jaundiced old man’s finger.

But the plant’s reputation comes from its smell. Because when the bloom opens, it’s like having a dead body pop up from the soil.

The stink is simply indescribably disgusting. I mean, it really takes some adjustment.

No animal wants to get close, much less munch on the reeking, exotic, wine-colored blossom.

It’s a reverse perfume.

I believed that going to middle school would be life-changing. I saw myself as the rare plant, prepared to unfurl hidden layers.

But I truly hoped that I wouldn’t stink up the place.



I tried to fit in.

I researched teenagers, which was interesting because I was close to becoming one.

I read about teenage driving, teenage runaways, and teenage dropout rates. And it was a shocker.

But none of the research provided much enlightenment on my number one area of real interest: Teenage friendship.

If the media is to be believed, teenagers are too busy breaking laws and trying to kill themselves and the people around them to form any bonds of attachment.

Unless, of course, those bonds produce a teenage pregnancy.

The literature had a lot of information on that.



Right before I started middle school, I had a physical.

The exam went much, much, much better than expected because for the first time I had an actual medical issue.

I had been waiting for twelve long years for this to happen.

I needed glasses.

Yes, the level of correction was slight.

And yes, it could have been brought on in part by eyestrain (apparently I focus too long on something right in front of me, like a book or a computer screen, and I don’t look away into the distance and refocus enough).

So I congratulated myself on this achievement because I had been hoping for some form of myopia, and now I had it.

After the exam we went to the ophthalmologist and I picked out my eyeglasses. I was drawn to frames that looked like what Gandhi wore.

They were round, wire-rimmed, and very “old-school,” according to the woman who deals with that part of the process.

They were perfect because I was going forward in the brave new world in peace.



A week before the first day of classes, I made another big decision.

We were having breakfast, and I swallowed a large bite of my Healthy-Start meal, which consists of beet greens topped with flax seeds (both homegrown), and then I said: “I have figured out what I’m going to wear for my first day at Sequoia.”

My father was at the sink, sneaking a bite of a doughnut. I did my best to keep junk food away from these people, but they covered up a lot of their eating habits.

My dad quickly swallowed a piece of his fudge puppy and asked:

“And what will that be?”

I was pleased.

“I’ll be wearing my gardening outfit.”

Dad must have taken too large of a bite, because it sounded like the fudge doughnut was caught in his throat. He managed to say: “Are you sure about that?”

Of course I was sure. But I stayed low-key.

“Yes. But I won’t put binoculars around my neck—if that’s what you’re concerned about.”