School Days and a Vacation

Our older children continued a second year in public school, but now Christi also went to Grace King for her first year in high school. Don was sent to East Jefferson, a high school for boys. It was the first time the twins had been separated. Don soon had a new friend there, who he sometimes went home with after class. His mother and I got to be friends as well. In high school, the students had a different teacher for each subject.

Don showed some talent in writing in his English class. His handwriting, spelling and grammar left a lot to be desired, but his English teacher gave him high grades, because she loved the stories he wrote about himself. She said she found them hilarious.

Carol was in an advanced math class and she really enjoyed her accounting class because she had an aptitude for organization. She learned a lot about the various bookkeeping journals and paying bills. Since she seemed to have a leaning in this direction, I decided to turn over our household bills to her and let her mail out the monthly payments.

A friend of Carol’s from church got a puppy, and the owner had another he was interested in giving away. Carol begged for the part poodle mix, and we gave in after she agreed it would solely be her dog. She would keep him in her room and take care of his needs and train him. She named him Bimbo. Carol did her best, but puppies aren’t easy to train if you’ve never been around dogs. While teething, Bimbo chewed the legs on her furniture.

She never took him outside, but tried to paper train him instead. Bimbo stayed in her room, but she mostly ignored him. Maybe because he never went outside or got exercise his hair became thin. It was a bad experience, and Carol decided she never wanted another pet. After this failed attempt at dog raising, it was years before she owned another dog.

Christi had been good at spelling and memory work and had a neat handwriting. She loved music and had an excellent singing voice. Her downfall, was a class she had right after lunch which I think was history. She likely found it boring. Her teacher kept contacting me because she said Christi fell asleep in her class every day. She said she had to wake her to tell her the class was over.

Carol and Christi were both picking up some babysitting jobs in the neighborhood, but they didn’t babysit on school nights. There was no reason for her to not be getting enough sleep.

We had to change babysitters for Connie because Miss Dolly started to have problems with early onset Alzheimer’s. The last time she kept Connie, she tried to feed her food from the freezer that wasn’t thawed. After her husband died, she had taken in a boarder. The lady met me at the door crying. She said she couldn’t stay any longer because Dolly was accusing her of stealing and other weird things. The new babysitter, Miss Melanie, kept several other children, but Connie quickly became her favorite.

I changed jobs several times after Connie was born. The first job was a small printing company where I did art and pre-press work. It was a small shop owned by a married couple with only five employees. It was easy relaxed work for small presses. The couple adopted a baby while I was there and they brought him to work with them every day. After a couple of years, they decided to move to Memphis because they didn’t like the Louisiana Napoleonic Code concerning property division when someone died. The second wife wasn’t well protected and children from the first marriage would get the bulk of the estate.

After that, I got a job with a printing company just starting up a few blocks for home. I worked there until they also decided to move further away. Changing jobs didn’t bother me because I never had trouble getting another one. I could do art, camera or anything involved with printing other than running the press.

We tried to take a family vacation every year with the kids. We bought a new Dodge Charger and Evan agreed to try it out on the road. It was the first vacation we took with Connie, and we decided to go to Niagara Falls. It was also the first trip I ever planned carefully before leaving home. In the Shelby family, it is dangerous to make plans. It is far better just to let things happen. That way no one has unrealistic expectations. I won’t elaborate on it here as I have a whole chapter dealing with the problems involved in planning, which I will share next.

Connie didn’t give me nearly as much grief as Evan did on this trip. She was a pretty good traveler until we got ready to walk beneath the falls. This meant everyone was required to put on a heavy black rubber raincoat with a hood. I’ve already mentioned that Connie was born with inflexible ideas about what was allowed on her body and what was not to be tolerated. I’m sure you can imagine what we had to deal with in order to get her to comply. It is likely she was afraid of the roar of the falls, but her own roar for having to wear that coat came out loud and clear. That part of our trip was cut short due to her displeasure.

We really enjoyed the Canadian side of the falls and the beautiful formal English gardens. Since it was our first time in Canada, we drove a long way through the countryside and then back into Michigan. There were things I wanted to do in Detroit, but Evan was still upset with me about the early part of the trip and was anxious to get home.