In Honor of My Sibling’s birthday.

Date: October 25, 1977.

The baby was coming two months ahead of schedule. Ignorant of how scary this might be, (after all, I was two months early too and here I was, a sixth grader and just fine), I felt happy to know I would find out soon; brother or sister.

My brothers and I got farmed out to our best friends’ homes respectively for the duration. Huzzah! Unrestricted time with peers is every adolescent’s dream; except this one came with a parent that was on a health kick.

Being a good friend, she tried to warn me, but it wasn’t like I had any choice. My parents were hi-tailing it two hours to the big hospital. I came psyched with my pj’s, tooth brush and clothes for the next three days.

Then we were served snack.

Raisins.

Raisins were something you stuck in oatmeal. Raisins were in cookies you ate only after all other options had been exhausted. Raisins were grapes gone bad.

“Can I have a drink?”

Her mom poured us each some water... without ice... from the tap.

As green and as healthy and as ecologically and economically friendly as this may have been, I was an unenlightened seventies sixth grader. This was Not a snack.

My friend meekly drank her luke warm tap water and gave me a “You know how They are” look. We ran to her room to listen to the Doobie Brothers, read Dynamite! and talk about Star Wars. For the next two hours, if one didn’t count the hunger pains, it was pure bliss. My best friend explained that her mother was trying to purge their family of impurities and warned that dinner might not be fun. I promised to be a gracious guest, being her best friend and all, we could tough it out.

Dinner was served.

I don’t think anyone has ever licked their lips in joy and anticipation at a meal like this, or if they have, common sense has prevailed enough that they haven’t gone public. I stared at the plate. The following is 100% unembellished unvarnished, ungarnished truth. Warning! Not for the squeamish or slightly queasy.

Liver: enemy of every respectable child without a gallon of ketchup at their side.
Pickled beets: I have family that eat these so I won’t insult their taste buds. That being said, I wasn’t happy.
Lima beans: My husband loves them. He serves them. I still won’t eat them.
Water. *Still from tap. Single feeble melting cube.

We sat down for grace before meals.

I admit, my prayer was silent and heart felt. “Please please God. Deliver me from this food.”

The phone rang as soon as we said “Amen.”

It was my Dad. I had a sister. Mary Jennifer. I was pumped to even up the score with my brothers. Then inspiration struck. I whooped to her family and gushed, “I have a sister! Oh, I’m too excited I can’t eat!” and ran up the stairs. My best friend saw opportunity and took it. “ME TOO!” she shouted and bolted after me.

I heard her brother and sister try the same stunt to no effect. We played cards until we were sure dinner had been put away. We laughed and snuck down around ten o’clock to feast on vanilla ice cream and Coca-cola.

“To Mary Jennifer!”
“To your sister!”

And the bubbly soda shot through our noses. Truly, it was a great celebration to be alive.

Happy Birthday Sis and many more! Pass the ice cream and soda please.

Higher Concepts of Math and Me

“Why do I have to learn these things?”the familiar lament uttered by my daughter resonated with my own grade school experience.

“No one has ever asked me to recite the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales either but I had to learn it."

My daughter gave me a look.

"Okay, I haven’t had to use the quadratic equation in my adult life…yet.” I admitted.

“Will I ever need this?”

“You never know, there might be some math mugger out there who will tell you give me all your money or explain the transitive property. If a=b and b=c then a=c.”

“Mommmm!”

“Okay, let me think and try this again.”

Higher math skills have never been my strong suit. In college, I got through the required core calculus class on a good calculator, prayer and several all nighters of cramming formulas into my liberal arts based brain.

When my oldest first needed assistance in seventh grade, I cagily suggested he teach the material to me, as that would indicate how much of the stuff he really knew.

After considering the possibility for all of ten seconds, he went upstairs to his room to study.

Using a similar approach with subsequent children, I had managed to avoid solving for “X” since my own eleventh grade. It’s not that I was a poor student. I always did the homework; I never skipped class. I even liked my teacher. I always thought knew the stuff. Then the test would come, and somehow, all the theorems in my brain became more secret and less accessible than Coca-cola’s formula.

I think the whole problem with math for me started back in eighth grade with an unsolvable math problem.

“If a train travels east at sixty miles an hour…and a man travels west by foot at six miles an hour and they pass in six seconds, how long is the train?”

I got it wrong.

The teacher explained the formula and drew out the solution on the black board. I wrote it down. Then I tried doing the problem again.

I got it wrong.

I restudied the formula and tried a third time on a clean sheet of paper.

Wrong.

I brought it home to my mom and dad.

Wrong.

Thus far I had plugged in the facts over six times and arrived at six separate incorrect answers. Having the problem, the solution, the formula and still being unable to find the one correct answer from the endless infinity of wrong ones, I mollified my adolescent ego. It was justified if I wasn’t able to beat the odds.

Since then, I’ve studiously avoided higher math skills the way Willie Nelson avoids taxes. I have not missed them. They have not missed me. It has been a good arrangement. In college, I was thrilled when I could abandon math all together in favor of being an English Major. Oddly enough, the first eighteen lines of Chaucer's prologue still stick with me in ways math theorems never could.

Last week, I pulled my time tested stunt on my daughter when she asked for help in studying for a test. However, as my algebra teacher taught me, I shouldn’t compare apples to oranges. She took me up on my offer. They were studying formulas like distance equals rate times time.

“Now Mommy. If a train is traveling at sixty miles going East and a man is traveling…”

I’m still getting it wrong. I may have to go find the math mugger and demand, "Explain the theorem of d=rt so I can get it right or I'll make you recite Canterbury Tales in Middle English. "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote..."

First Impressions

When I first saw my future husband across a crowded room at a Notre Dame Freshman mixer, I decided not to introduce myself. He was too serious. Glancing at my outfit, which I thought I projected cool (Actually, it screamed stuck-in-the-early-eighties, saw-and-liked-Xanadu) he thought to himself, “Look at that girl in the silly hat. Bet she’s pretty superficial.”

We were both right.

In graduate school, my advisor called me into his office to discuss the beginning of my program.

“You’re from Texas.” He said, looking at my papers.

“Yes.”

“Well, I heard all the women down there are beautiful and tall. What happened to you?”

I stood up as tall as my five foot two inches would allow and said, “Well that’s true. Down in Texas I’m pretty average, but up here in Boston, I’m stunning.”

I became his assistant. In retrospect, I'm not sure it was a reward.

Meeting my future father-in-law for the first time, my luggage had made the decision to spend the evening at O’Hare. I had to beg and borrow from girls in my dorm to put together an outfit that did not smell like a three hour bus ride. One friend offered to do my hair and gave me sideburns that matched hers and three inch high curled bangs. I’m still recovering.

Interviewing in New York City for a teaching position, there was a carnival going on that day on the playground. The person scheduled to paint faces had not shown and I had just finished talking with the vice principal. For the next two hours, my fingers were covered in grease paint and cold cream. The principal came by the school grounds to put in an appearance. “Who’s that over there?” he asked the vice principal.

I got the job.

When we moved to Maryland, it was the dead of winter and the roads were coated with ice and the grey snow that always grips February. Alone in our rented townhome, I spied a woman walking with a child close to my then one year old son’s age. They were just following the sidewalk. Running out onto the snow barefoot, desperate to make a connection with someone in the area, I must have been a frighteningly mad sight as I screamed. “Hey! Hello! I’d like to meet you!”

We became friends despite that rough intro.

And speaking of introductions....

Hi. My name is Sherry Antonetti and I’m a freelance writer.

While my background is special education and English literature, I currently stay home and help shepherd our eight children through their various stages of development. I also write. Why? It provides my offspring with an edited version of their childhood that is as honest as those multi-hued elegantly pasted scrapbooks. These stories are mythic in that they reveal truth without being completely factual.

It is also loads of fun for me.

Pass the fuchsia curly cue scissors please.

Thank you for considering my voice amongst a sea of bloggers and I hope I made you laugh.