I have these memories of my childhood that come up from time to time, some are great and make me laugh and some are painful and make me cry. This particular one came to me while I was lying in my bed surrounded by my Egyptian cotton sheets, and comfy down pillow that I just bought that afternoon from Target. I remember as a child wondering if I was going to make it out of the trailer parks and into a real house. I have a great dad and always have, it’s just that my parents were divorced and I lived with my mom and sister Jesse. Jesse was my best friend (and still is for that matter). She is older than me and went through everything first, naturally. We moved A LOT!! And by a lot, I mean every year and sometimes several times in one year. Jesse and I were enrolled in a different school EVERY YEAR. It sucked making new friends all the time, which is why Jesse and I were always so close. I remember her going off to school, and the bus picking her up and dropping her off at my grandpa Dionne’s junkyard (a.k.a. Dionne’s Cambridge Recycling). The bus would pull up in the morning and Jesse would get on happy and excited to see her friends, while I would be so sad to see her go (I was too young to go to school still). So I would spend the entire day around the junk yard counting tea bags, scribbling on pads of paper pretending that I was writing in cursive, making mud pies in the aluminum pie pans people would bring in to get money for, and chasing the many animals around. Then I would sit on the cinder block steps to my grandpa’s office on Georgetown Road, wearing my garage sale- dirt covered clothes, and wait for Jesse’s school bus to drop her off. That bus would pull up and I would be ecstatic to have my playmate, my partner in crime, my sister, and my best friend home. The windows were down, the kids were all yelling, and I could hear what they were saying. “Junk Yard Dog” that’s what I would hear them call my sister as she would be getting off that bus, that yellow ride of hope that promised that she would be something some day. It just made me so sad that she was being picked on. I hated it. I wanted to be on the bus with her so that she wasn’t alone. It seemed like everywhere we went, we were always isolated and alone, just the two of us. We never really fit in anywhere and it never really bothered me that much, but Jesse was always just a little more sensitive to that. We both have come a long way since we were “Junkyard Dogs”. We both have college degrees and good jobs. It’s crazy to think that this was a part of our lives. Jesse always tells me that I remember everything, and its true. I wish I could forget some things but I just cant. Anyways, all of these little things have shaped who we have become and who we have in our life. I hope that my kids never feel like Jesse felt getting off that bus, but if it happens hopefully they can see past it and move forward.
