The Incomplete Autobiography of
GryEyes911

Chocolate is medicinal. I just wanted to mention that.

Difficulties occurred in our family life a few months before I started menstruating; my mother, sister and I had moved to Oregon to live with my maternal grandmother "until things got worked out." My body leaped into adolescence in a household of just wimmin-folks, but I didn't know it was a girly-thing to expect. I hadn't particularly been very close to anyone but my father, so when I started cramping and bleeding, I was afraid to come home and have everyone get all hysterical about me. However, I did think I was dying, so I eventually told my mother when I couldn't figure out what was going on.

She did her best to reassure me. We studied little line drawings supposedly representing my innards and the processes through which they were unhappily cramping. Although she'd had some of the resource material hidden away until she could get around to explaining it all (after all, my sister was six years older and this had already become an fairly routine unpleasantness for HER), nobody had expected me to need the educational materials quite so soon.

It wasn't much comfort to know this was gonna keep happening to me for years and years to come, even if I was "a woman now." Who wants to be a woman when you're in grade school?

And managing one's menses in those days was barbaric. Who amongst us would have guessed the contraptions would be so .... uncomfortable? Who INVENTED these things, anyway?!? Just imagine keeping little metal clips from digging into crevices no one should experience chunks of metal, no matter how small. Let's not even go into the subject of sitting for long stretches, and trying to concentrate when one's pubic hair has gotten caught in the front clip and the back clip is poking you in the butt. And not in a fatty part, either, but... well... you get the picture. Such a messy, uncomfortable business.

I did get some confusing information about the whole process, though. (I don't think I asked enough questions during the explanations...) "You can't go swimming when you're on your period." Okay, got that. My cousin pushes me off the rocks into the ocean and I have to swim to shore; I'm terrified that I've done something awful and am gonna die. It's secret girl-stuff, so I couldn't tell him why I cried all the way home... My poor mother found me sobbing in the shower and finally weaseled out the reason.

Oh. Okay. It was a perfectly reasonable issue of fastidiousness, not a medically prohibited activity. I had to admit, shlumping home with a Modess pad full of salt water - in addition to that icky stuff I was sloughing off from my insides (yet again, like the tides, but thankfully on a much longer lunar cycle) was pretty unpleasant.

Apparently, tampons were invented so Olympic swimmers didn't miss exhibitions during "that time of the month." (Probably some poor innovative gal just wanted to find a way to escape the belts and clips, I think, more than to dive into a pool when she was bleeding and cramping and feeling pretty crummy.)

Unfortunately, the more modern inventions weren't really an option for me at that tender age; virgins can't use tampons. (Nobody told me that last part; I "figured" it out all on my own.) For the longest time, I believed there were a whole LOT of promiscuous girls hanging out at the beach and the high school pool!

I gotta admit that many years later I felt pretty racy the first time I tried to use 'em. (For about six seconds, after which I found that whole process pretty yucky too, even if disposal of the evidence was "neater.")

This was the sixties, and the news was full of hippies, student protests and anti-war demonstrations. My grandmother -- god rest her soul -- was pretty opinionated, and she drank vodka, too. Couple of screwdrivers under her belt by the end of the evening news and I'd get to learn some pretty interesting bits of history and other factoids, all of which I packed away into my busy little magpie mind.

Seminal moment (pun intended) #1
Granny ranted about free love and nudity and one night she snorted out this derisive comment: "What's this 'The naked body is beautiful' crap? I see a naked man and all I can think of is a turkey neck and giblets!"

When I was eleven, my mother received Mexican divorce papers in the mail, and my sister went off to college in Portland. Those were pretty pivotal moments for me. I rode a bus nine miles to school and the little coastal hamlet in which we lived was very quaint and everyone knew everybody else. Life in Otter Rock was idyllic for a pre-teen bookworm. The chief of police in nearby Newport and his wife (who was a clerk/matron for the Sheriff's Office) were friends of Mom's who had migrated to Oregon shortly after we left California.

Every small community has its icons and its village idiots, I suppose. Although startling, it wasn't too unbelievable to accept, years later, that Randy Woodfield, the infamous rapist-murderer nick-named "the I-5 Killer" turned out to be one of the local boys who had once "pantsed" me behind the school bus stop.... long before he was accepted as a Green Bay Packer trainee, ousted from the program, returned to the West Coast and started on his spree. Just think, I could have sold that story to The Inquirer if I'd been so inclined!

By the time I was twelve, I had reached my full height of 5'4" and was already wearing a C-cup bra, which I hated. Chubbiness had turned into curves which seemed to garner some unwelcome attention. This was 1965 and 12-year-olds were "too young" to shave their legs, even if the kids at school WERE calling me "Peach-fuzz." Granny was mortified to discover I weighed 127 pounds and absolutely scandalized when Mom gave me permission to remove the excess hair (and instructions on how to do it without causing major blood loss). My mother understood that fuzziness was another burden for an overweight, over-developed and over-bright geeky little girl.