Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia. Don't you love the way it just rolls off your tongue? It seemed so exotic, so foreign, so I can't wait to make the vacant lot next door the place of my dreams. When I moved to Texas I was in sixth grade. The same sixth grade I was in when I left Florida. But the difference between the two was night and day. I was eleven going on twelve and everyone else was eleven going on sixteen. I hadn't been at my new school more than an hour or two when a boy from my class wrote me a note asking me to go steady with him. Now I really had very little knowledge of this whole steady thing, but my mother found it highly inappropriate and said no way. I always blamed this event as the kiss of death on my junior high/ high school love life. Basically all going steady meant in sixth grade was wearing some boys id bracelet. Once the word got out that my mom wouldn't let me go steady no one else ever asked. So what does all of this have to do with a magical place called Czechoslovakia? Well while others my age were falling madly in love and going steady, I was busy climbing to the top of the mountain next door to gather pea gravel to bring home for dinner. Or I was crushing chalk rock into fine powder to be baked for our weekly bread. Life in Czechoslovakia was hard and required constant attention. It was here that I met my soon to be new best friend Susan. Susan was overweight and to be honest I had not met many kids my age who were overweight. My first thought was that I did not want a fat friend. But want it or not we became fast friends and continued to be for several more years. Myself and the neighborhood kids all played in that vacant lot until they had the audacity to build a house in Czechoslovakia. By that time I was ready to move onto bigger and better things like plays and carnivals. But that's a whole other story.