The year was 1987 and my small statured self, strutted into
Mrs. Wright’s Kindergarten class at Walnut Heights Elementary School, one of
several public schools in the Alcalanes School District. Nap was still on the
schedule, as was learning to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (under God) and
the Star Spangled Banner. Older kids learning cherry drops on the bars and
playing ‘Butts Up’ with bouncy red balls overran our playground. Butts Up was a
game I would later get into, which involved the loser standing against the
handball wall and allowing the winning player to shamingly peg their butt with
a ball as hard as they could. Really, there was no game I didn’t play, up until
many of them throughout my formative years, were banned for being ‘too
dangerous.’ In the late 80s, pre-litigious
years, we had it good.
We participated in Red Rover, a game that encouraged kids to
run at full speed toward another group of kids in order to break through their
locked hands. It was all fun and games until some kid got clotheslined and
catapulted backward or worse, a weak wrist wrenched into a position not designed
for human joints. We had tanbark to
break our falls not soft rubbery foam to save our little bruised knees. When we
warred on the monkey bars, we knew the consequence would be falling into the murky
puddle of water and bark below the bars, soiling our layered puffy socks. We
got splinters and caught our fingers in the metal chain of tire swings, which
literally were a used truck tire attached to a chain. We sprained wrists on
tetherballs and poked our eyes out with slap bracelets. I believe they built us
tougher back then.
In my afterschool program ‘Club’, I was often playing
capture the flag in the nature area behind the school. The small, leapable
stream acted as the boundary and several secret circles of benches doubled as
amazing ‘jails’ for when ‘prisoners’, aka slow kids, were captured. If not
capturing flags I may have been playing Heads-Up-7-Up or wrestling Terresita
for bragging rights. The nickname Rorin Lauren, and perhaps an invincible mentality
came out of those years in elementary school. Proudly shaving the underside of my head with
the letters WHO (Walnut Heights Otters) to rep my neighborhood swim team and
growing stronger alongside the other girls on my relay team also helped grow an
inner sense of strength and belonging.
We raised funds for good causes and learned that giving back
to our community was important. We
jumped rope for heart disease and raised awareness about obesity and the value
of exercise. We bounced on Pogo Balls
and trampolines and jumped over Skip Its that counted our rotations. We raised
money with sales from Girl Scout cookies to fund our adventures. Troop 776’s Thin
Mints and Peanut Butter Patties helped us to earn camping and sewing badges,
although I must not have learned that sewing part because when I looked back at
my sash, all the patches Ide earned were stapled on. Some might say lazy, some might say
innovative, either way I’m pretty sure I was more interested in playing in the
mud and raising my version of ‘hell’ in someone’s backyard than threading a
needle. Proud Tomboy. Still am. From Brownies
to Girl Scouts I bridged, applying myself to learn more silly songs like ‘I Sit
Upon My Sit Upon’ and The Girl Scout Law. I made new friends and kept the old.
To this day I am still a collector of good humans and some of those troopers
remain integral parts of my chosen family.
I remember finding items like Teddy Ruxpin under the
Christmas tree. An animatronic bear that played a cassette and ‘read’ stories
aloud to you. It was an amazing technological advancement for its time that had
me enraptured for days, listening to the adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, Grubby and
the WhosiWhatsits. He was a 30 lbs. wonder brick of a toy. Perhaps it was the
batteries or Teddy’s blinking (creepy) eyes that drew my attention away from my
previously beloved micro machines or wooden blocks. I would spend hours building
marble machine ramps down into the pit from our family room only to watch a
marble drop for approximately 8 seconds. I believe this is how I learned
patience but quite possibly, and more importantly, the reason why kids these
days don’t have much of any. Immediate
gratification is a two edged sword. And, I just said, “kids these days”=my
generation, we, you, us, are aging, gaining experience by the minute, growing
knowledge, getting old. Believe it.
I remember tearing open packages of baseball cards. Top Deck
if you were lucky, Fleer if you wanted a cardboard piece of bubblegum that left
a powdery film on Chris Sabo’s goggled, cheating face. It was the years of the Bash Brothers in
Oakland and Will ‘the Thrill’ Clark in San Francisco. I could name every player
on the ‘87, ‘88 and ‘89 San Francisco roster and would later meet Will Clark in
his full camouflage gear and Kevin Mitchell on the back of his Harley Davidson.
The ’89 series was an epic showdown in
what was coined the ‘Battle of the Bay’, only the lackluster Giants got swept
in four games and the most ‘epic’ thing was the earthquake during game three
that rocked the stadium and stunned people across the Bay. If you can remember where you were when that
quake hit, you can proudly consider yourself a northern California native.
If not opening up baseball cards, I remember pleading to buy
packages of Garbage Pail Kids. Those crude little cards that incorporated every
gross bodily fluid alliteratively attached to kids names of that generation. I
was in elementary school and my card was called ‘Pourin Lauren’ depicting a boozed
up waitress in fishnet stockings holding a tray complete with milk bottle and
cocktail. Were these things marketed and sold to kids? Yes. Were they
appropriate? Sure thing J
Loosen up everyone.
In elementary school our minds grew with projects like the
California Mission Report and the State Report that seemed a huge and
insurmountable part of the 5th grade curriculum. I remember that
project looming all year. We worked so hard on gathering information from the
Encyclopedia Britanica and drawing depictions of state flowers and important
industry in our assigned state. When we were all said and done, I remember
sliding my report into a clear plastic cover with a long, hard plastic binding
to make it look ‘professional’. That’s how you knew it was a big deal, when it
had the goofy plastic cover. Do those
things still exist?
We took pride in learning cursive and how to gracefully
connect that capital L to the lowercase a. We learned checkers and practiced our skills
against other players. In the 4th grade when we learned chess I
remember thinking I wasn’t much of a thinker, as I preferred checkers because I
did not have to consider two and three moves ahead with a pawn or a rook or
whatever that funny castle thing was. We learned to Square Dance and were
coached in the art of dodge ball and four square. We waited in line for school
lunch (full disclosure, I was spoiled so only waited in line on pizza Friday).
They served peperoni and cheese pizza, the difference being peperoni had one
slice of peperoni in the middle of a square cut slice. One piece! If some caca-farty-head came by and
stole your one piece of peperoni you then had cheese. Boring cheese. Imagine the
9-year-old disappointment. Snack bar included corn nuts and fruit roll ups that
we would wrap around our index fingers and suck on until they were sticky,
gooey messes. I hit up the milk cart
everyday and by the 5th grade, inflation had raised the price of a
milk box to $.25.
At home after school we would watch Tiny Toons and later on
Saved By the Bell, where everyone, even the boys, crushed on Zack Morris or the
muscles of AC Slater. I had a routine of eating and watching some television
before going out to play with Elaine or Sarah or other Amigo Laners. The day my
Dad brought home our first computer, the Apple II GS, I remember staying inside
for a record amount of time to discover what that machine could do. It came
with a dot matrix printer that I created cards and banners on. One year for my
mom’s birthday I recall waiting what felt like 2.5 hours and two ink cartridges
later, to print out a color banner that read ‘Happy Birthday’. The perforated
paper allowed you to hang it as one piece of paper in proper banner style. Boy
did my Mom feign excitement well, which made those 2.5 hours so worth it to my 3rd
grade self.
I played Oregon Trail and often lost an uncle to dysentery
or typhoid or ran out of money purchasing an axle for our wagon that was broken
along our harrowing journey. At least there was excess beef jerky stocked in
the covered wagon that I had bartered for at the general store. I begged for
several weeks for Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, which had me flying
around the world as a detective, cracking cases about evil villains attempting
to take over the world. In refelction, I think this is something I need to be
doing right now. The computer competed with the original 16 bit Nintendo System
that had two manageable buttons. I was the lucky kid who got the Power Pad
allowing me to compete with world-class athletes in track and field. Over the
years I could dominate Cheetah and bury friends in the 100-meter hurdles. What
are meters anyway? Duck hunt was not my strong suit but that was ok really
because I never did like that laughing dog that taunted you after missing several
ducks in a row. Then came Mario 3, which turned gamer’s lives upside down
because with a tail, Mario had the ability to fly. Imagine the massive leaps
forward in gaming systems when a miniature man can wiz around in the sky with a
raccoon’s tail! Later on in life I would be swept up by the SEGA system and
learn the ‘blood code’ for Mortal Combat and ways to help Sonic & Tails zip
past the rest.
The first day of fifth grade I clearly remember sporting the
new Air Jordan Vs. All the sneaker heads out there know how baller this shoe
was and still is. Black suede, plastic
mesh, reflective tongue, all sweet. They were a far cry from the white high top
Reeboks with two Velcro straps that I sported for years prior to the teal and
purple Andre Agassi’s that we bought from Simons. I found first day of school outfits
to match my new shoes. B Unique surely had a perfect puff paint match to my
florescent color scheme, sparkles setting off the wisps of color flung to every
side of the shirt. I remember my mom coming home with Hypercolor shirts for my
sister and me because they were ‘so cool’. So cool up until you were that kid
that came in from recess with orange armpits that in no way matched the blue of
the rest of the shirt. Whose idea was
that anyway? Stussy, Mossimo and T&C Surf were the thing along with your pegged
pants and high top Vans. Then overalls and palatzo pants took over, which took
my middle school by storm.
Bad at math then, and bad at math now, they made me buy a
graphing calculator to support a bogus, money making contract with Texas
Instruments. It was the TI-82 back then and to be honest I don’t remember ever gaining
any knowledge from it or with it, only that that $100 calculator could also
spell out 58008. That’s BOOBS upside down. Hindsight once again, maybe I liked
boobs back then too J.
I do remember purchasing my first CD player, which would ignite a new passion
for music and CD shopping at the Wherehouse. If you were lucky, which I was,
you had several friends working there who could get you *discounted (*free)
things from time to time. The CD player
came shrink wrapped with a Kenny G CD which was rapidly disposed of making room
for my first CD ever purchased: 2$hort, ‘Gettin’ It’. The profane and vulgar lyrics were abhorrent
but the man came from Oakland and the beats were sick, so turn that up! Outkast,
E40, Ma$e, Tribe Called Quest and Notorious BIG were the soundtrack of our
lives in high school.
I remember the day Cody and I walked past Newell Plaza to
discover Taco Bell would be coming soon. Taco Bell?! We were so excited at the
thought of this mega fast food chain slanging bean burritos in our neighborhood. We would welcome a switch-up from our beloved
George’s Giant Hamburger French fries dipped in mazes of ketchup and mustard to
Double Decker Tacos doused with packets of mild hot sauce. Those mystery meat
tacos filled my belly directly before soccer practice for what seemed like seven
days a week in high school. I looked up
to Brandy Chastain and Mia Hamm who inspired girls everywhere to play harder
and learn that double-scissor dribbling move. To this day freshly cut grass strikes up
nostalgia of the pristine soccer pitch at Arbalado Park and our team comradery
of yesteryear. We sported Lotto and Diadora all matching track suits and had
soccer bags to match, making us feel intimidating to our opponents as we walked
out onto the mud puddle also known as our home field. In the middle of January,
this scene is intensified when you imagine seeing 17 young women, matching warm
ups, walking out under the lights, breath visible in the bitter cold, stone
cold eyes, prepared for battle. Badass Knights.
We played hacky sack at lunch and laughed at each other
during homecoming week for a silly lip-sync performance. ’99! ’99! LLP! We experimented on Bunson Burners and
dissected hearts. I was one of the last holdouts to get a pager but the quickest
learner when it came to pager code. I could decipher a paragraph in no time
locating the best party lickity split. We drank free smoothies from Juice Time
and filled up on Coke Slurpees when the weather was hot. We cruised with our
windows down and music up, not a care in the world. In retrospect this can
likely be attributed to the fact that social media and things like Facebook did
not exist then. What would we have done
if our every embarrassing or illegal activity was captured and documented for
the rest of the judging world to see? Yes, illegal. I was not exactly a saintJ Instead, we concerned
ourselves with planning 90210 watch parties-Dillon dreamboat and Brenda bitch
successfully wrapping us up in Beverly Hills, California drama.
Those were some brilliant years I spent growing up in the
Bay Area. Years I will never forget…
