The 7th Year of Schooling

7th grade wasn’t a terribly exciting year which is probably a good thing since we all know how much drama there can be in just a few hours of middle school.  I had kind of a gradual switching over of friends over 6th and 7th grade because my elementary “girlfriends” had become rather catty and I just couldn’t handle all that will you tell so and so …..and she said this about her….If you are a female, you know exactly what I am talking about.  So thank you middle school friends for keeping that to a minimum and being good friends.

If I had to define 7th grade, it would probably be my awkward, clutzy year.  I think I grew 6 inches in the first semester.  I remember waking up one morning and putting my pants on and them being 3-4 inches too short…or so it seemed.  I remember two different times I spilled almost my entire carton of milk on my pants in lunch.  I think both times I had on dark navy blue pants so you really couldn’t tell, but now I have to wonder if I didn’t smell rather sour by the end of the day!!  Then there was the ink pen incident.  I had speech and drama class with Mrs. Massey.  She would always say “Get it?” and we’d say, “Got it!” and she’d say, “Good!”  Anyway, in the basement of the school was a theater.  We would sometimes go down there to practice our pieces.  We’d go to our regular classroom first, take roll, and turn in homework first.  While roll was being taking, I was chewing on my ink pen.  It broke and ink flooded into my mouth.  I froze.  It tasted nasty but I didn’t know what to do.  I couldn’t swallow it, but I couldn’t tell anyone what happened because my mouth was full of ink and I didn’t want it to run down my chin.  Do you know how hard it is to sit and not swallow?  I sat there and sweated it out until I to my great relief I heard her say we were going to go down to the theater that day.  I ran by the water fountain on the way down and spit it out and rinsed my mouth out while I was at it.  I don’t know if anyone ever even knew that happened.

To add to my awkwardness, my mom talked me into getting a popular haircut which I have recently learned is called a bi-level.  I have hair that just needs to be plain, straight, with no more than a slight layering.  It never wanted to feather back but always fell straight down.  Here is a picture of my 7th grade loveliness.  This is 1983 by the way.