10. Foundation School

 

WITHDRAWING THE CHILDREN FROM school was easier that I thought. I told the principal, “I’m putting them in private school,” conjuring up a different image than a home school venture run by paranoid parents teaching their kids in the park. Listening to Roy Masters, we all believed public school endangered our children and unable to afford a private education, his Foundation School provided an inexpensive, legal option.

Nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, our one room schoolhouse stood in the center of Glendora City Park surrounded by old oak trees and picnic tables scattered the well-watered grass, two tennis courts, a playground, and public restrooms. The Boy Scout log cabin had huge, shuttered windows without glass, a fireplace, a desk, a cubicle called, The Adult Room and twenty-five wooden benches.

The first morning, me and Earlene, my new Jamaican friend, both in our early thirties, joined Dorothy, Robin, Mary Lou, and Janie, in their twenties. We sat with our children on the benches facing Mrs. Johnson our trim, gray-haired teacher we’d hired at the last-minute. She asked families to contribute three dollars for school supplies and said she wanted to evaluate each child—to discern their learning style. Dorothy cringed saying it wasn’t necessary. Earlene said, “It’s okay to ask them what they’re interested in learning.” 

Felix, her fourteen-year-old son, raised his hand. “I’m interested in photography.” His older brother, Darrell, said electricity. Her daughters and Melissa wanted to macrame.

Terry said, “I like playing tennis!”

Mrs. Johnson frowned, “What about math and science? I have pre-algebra workbooks. for the teenage boys.” Workbooks? We didn’t believe in rote learning, least of all workbooks. In our rushed interview, she said she listened to Roy Masters. We assumed she’d heard his tirades about not pressuring children and understood our philosophy of learning, pursuing their interests, allowing for discovery and the value of field trips.

The next day parents brought skeins of hemp twine, jute rope, and ceramic beads and the girls learned to macrame pot hangers for spider plants. The teacher brought math workbooks for the older boys. “I only want Darrell to learn math he needs to study electricity,” Earlene said. 

Mrs. Johnson summoned me and Terry into Adult Room. She held up a thick pre-algebra workbook. “He doesn’t have to do all the problems. Would fifteen minutes a day be too much?”

“You tell her, Mom,” he said. “I can’t.”

 “You may leave, Terry” she said, folding her pale hands on the workbook.

“He’s not ready Mrs. Johnson.”

She stiffened in her chair. “When he hasn’t learned anything, you’ll blame me.”

“Don’t worry, we won’t.” I remembered Terry’s love of magic, turning doves to rabbits, researching new tricks. “When our children find their passion, they’ll be excited about learning.”

“I understand,” she said, wringing her hands. But I knew she didn’t.

Studying at Chouinard Art Institute in the sixties, I’d participated in Walt Disney’s “idealistic experiment,” and reading Summerhill, A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing by A.S Neill about a school founded in England in 1921, validated my belief in inner guidance learning.

Bound together only by our fear, fear of drugs, and failing as parents, I suspected some parents seeking safety for their kids had no desire to explore alternative methods of education.

 

Two weeks later, the younger kids huddled around a table in the cabin doing English and math with the teacher. The older girls worked on macrame. Boys played tennis and soccer in the park. Tears welling in her eyes, Mary Lou said, “Douglas just wants to play with the other kids when I want him to do his multiplication tables.”

Smiling all glassy-eyed, Mrs. Johnson cornered me outside. “You think I’m different than you, overeducated, wanting power, but now I understand. It’s the parent’s school, not mine.”

I didn’t know how the parents felt about the spiritual underpinnings of our philosophy, but I saw it as God’s school. The headmaster, dean of admissions, guidance counselor, and teacher within, I’d relied on Him to find the building and the families. I needed to keep the faith.

Santa Ana winds delivered hot, smog-free air. Everyone sat at the picnic tables outside except the girls learning macrame with Robin. Terry brought racquets and buckets of balls. Dorothy challenged her daughter, Monica to a match. Kids played; parents watched. James turned eight. Barefoot preschoolers ran free eating chocolate birthday cake.

Again, the next day, hundred-degree heat blew in from the desert. The mountains sparkled. We took our first field trip up into the canyon and spread towels on the bank of a gurgling creek. Melissa caught a butterfly. Holding it gently in her hands, her new friends marveled at the patterns on its wings. Terry befriended, Claude, a fifteen-year-old boy with Down’s Syndrome, inviting him to join the boys traipsing up and down the stream looking for tiny fish. The parents sat in the shade. Getting soaked, children threw buckets of water in the air and watched it spill out. “Look!” I said. “They’re learning all about gravity!”

Mrs. Johnson expressed concern about future field trips. “Next time, I’ll check out phone, bathroom, and safety issues ahead of time.” I wondered who complained about yesterday’s educational excursion to the babbling canyon creek.

 “Can’t we just be adventurous?”

“Adventurous?” She raised her eyebrows as if I’d said a swear word.

Our next field trip adventure did not go as planned. The teacher had checked out Puddingstone Dam, a nearby reservoir but when we arrived, dripping sweat in one hundred-and-five-degree heat, we found the gate locked and a sign. No swimming allowed after September 5th, two weeks before.

The kids wanted to cool off.  Mrs. Johnson suggested a teacher-approved stream but everyone, except Mary Lou who wanted to go home, voted to return to the creek where we’d hunted for fish. The kids continued their gravity experiment. Melissa hunted for butterflies. Mrs. Johnson assigned a project to find different kinds of rocks. No one looked for rocks.

 Dorothy organized a hike on the same Girl Scout trail I’d endured hiking in the heat with my ten-year-old Brownie troop. Felix made us laugh, pretending to be our tour guide pointing out the sites, “This is a tree; this is a rock; this is a magnificent green trash can.”

 

Earlene’s youngest boy, Patrick, turned five. Celebrating, we sat outside eating Mexican cookies. Still hot in late September, the kids played King of the Mountain crowded on a cement base pouring water over each other. The teacher said it looked dangerous. “Let ‘em be,” Earlene said, smoothing her wiry hair with her large pink palms.

Terry and Darrell, bent over a picnic table composing intricate drawings of Spiderman playing tennis. Mothers, listening to Roy Master’s morning radio broadcast in the Adult Room, decided to take our kids on an educational field trip to American Veteran’s air-conditioned Thrift Store’s one-third-off sale in nearby Azusa.

Dorothy said, “It’ll teach them math, how find bargains and save money.”

Everyone wanted to go except Mary Lou. “I don’t think we should go anywhere during school hours.” Mrs. Johnson also thought it an inappropriate field trip. The rest of us piled in our cars and went shopping.

In our fourth week, Earlene and I decided our children had benefitted from our courage to start the school. Not all, but most of the parents agreed, to educate meant to bring forth from within, not stuff in from without and with patience, we might find out what education was meant to be. Earlene sighed, resting her plump elbows on our favorite picnic table. “It’s so simple, but not all those who started gonna’ find it easy to keep goin’!”

I nodded. “I wish they could relax, have a little faith and let it happen.”

At the end of the second month, observing soccer games, Terry giving James a tennis lesson, Melissa and Monica playing cards, the little kids running around the log cabin tossing cups of water in the air, a new teen-age girl’s mother said, “Do they just play—all the time?”

“Mostly!” Earlene said in the past, they’d been motivated by pressure. “It’ll take time. They gotta’ find their own energy.”

Mrs. Johnson took the next day off to visit the Montebello Foundation School, and I invited my friend, Kathy to teach us how to restore antique furniture. “It’s just like Mr. Rogers!” I said, when our drop-in guest arrived toting a green painted chair, drop cloth, and rags. The kids marveled at the stripper’s pungent smell and the magical reappearance the chair’s golden oak.

That afternoon we convened an all-school meeting to discuss future field trips. The kids suggested: a farm, the beach, the canyon creek—again. “Can we take a field trip to a dairy?” Melissa said. “I’ve always wanted to milk a cow.”

The following morning Mrs. Johnson approached me, pouting.  “Mary Lou’s the only one who’s paid me the three-dollar material fee and I’m also upset, because everyone is talking about me behind my back.”

Before I could make a case for the defense, Dorothy spoke up, “Mrs. Johnson, instead of letting these feelings build, let’s sit down and discuss this—right now.”

All the mothers circled around our conference table under the live oaks where we could  meet and still watch the children wandering around the park.

Mrs. Johnson sat bending and unbending the corner of the workbook cover in her lap. “I’m also worried about what we’ll do when it rains.”

“No worry,” I said. “We’ll light a fire in the fireplace. It’ll be cozy.”

 “I’m getting mixed messages. What do you want from me?”

“It’s confusing, I know. First, we give you authority and then we take it back.”

Robin spoke up, “We really only need you because we’re required by law to have a credentialed teacher in attendance.”

“I don’t understand any of you,” Mary Lou said. The teacher nodded.

“How was your visit to the Montebello school?” I said in a cheery voice.

“Oh, wonderful! Everyone was working on projects. Some parents taught kids how to type, and others helped with a science experiment. The teacher wasn’t doing anything.”

“They’re a year old,” I said. “We’re just getting started. We need to be patient.”

 

In our sixth month, all the parents and children visited the Montebello Foundation School housed in several classrooms of a local church. “The children formed classes in Spanish, English and Science because they wanted to,” a mother told us. “All last year they just played but now they’re finding their inner motivation.” Seeing happy children roaming free confirmed my belief about what our school should and could be. Why had I doubted myself—even for a moment?

Montebello’s hired teacher told us to relax, the children knew what they needed, and would want to learn to read and do math—if not pressured. “The teacher’s role is just a legal thing,” he said. “You should be happy to pay Mrs. Johnson even if all she does is come and sign her name in the roll book. Perhaps you could put her in charge of planning field trips.”

 

 

 

Greek Cross Nine Patch, Quilt by Eva Margueriette

 

11. Terry’s Quilt

 

SNATCHING UP COTTON PRINTS and raw muslin in fabric store remnant bins, I dived into quilting with the same passion once reserved for painting. Intriguing patterns caught my attention: Cross and Crown, Contrary Wife, with which I identified, and Sweet Honeybee, perfect for Melissa whose name meant honeybee in Greek. Wanting to wrap Terry in a layer of protection, I chose The Disappearing Magician a Greek Cross nine-patch for my son who once called himself, The Magnificent.

Painting with scissors like Matisse who collaged his late-life creations, I cut squares of unbleached muslin and triangles of tarnished gold alizarin fabric and pieced them into ten-inch blocks of equal armed crosses. Instead of my palette, paint, and brushes, I cluttered the kitchen table with straight pins, spooled thread, and scraps from the flowered cotton dress I’d stolen from Bullocks in Pasadena. 

Cutting the twenty-year-old material, I wondered why my mother never noticed me wearing the expensive dress the first day of my senior year, or the seven cotton blouses in pastel colors, I’d also lifted at the back-to-school sale. Nor had she questioned the Woolworth’s lipstick or the designer bathing suit from McBratney’s, I snuck home when I first learned to shoplift in eighth grade. Afraid of being caught but addicted to the adrenalin rush, I told myself the store had plenty of clothes and I needed them more than they did.

It rained for a week that January Terry turned fifteen. As I’d promised, the fireplace kept the cabin warm and cozy. The little kids paraded around the park brandishing umbrellas, stomping in muddy puddles. The older boys swept water off the tennis court until the sun came out, but soon a downpour followed every letup. 

“The rain won’t stop,” Terry said charging inside, hugging his racquet against his down jacket, tears in his eyes. “We can’t play tennis!”

Melissa came in behind him. “All the kids are afraid of him. He was waving his push broom and yelling—get off the court.”

“Sit down, Terry.” Collapsing on the bench beside me, his eyes darted toward the door as if looking to escape an invisible enemy. 

“What do you want, Mom?”

“I want you to calm down. It’s only a storm. It’s not the end of the world.”

“But it’s coming, and I’m scared.”

“What do you mean?” I searched his wild wet eyes.

He clenched his fists. “What’s going to happen to us when the end of the world comes?”

His question made me question if I’d seeded his fear of the future by my own lack of faith. He’d helped me dehydrate apples and bananas and can pears and peaches. He’d watched me stockpile pork and beans, and fifty-pound bags of wheat to survive the apocalypse.

Night after night, I’d hovered over my Singer in the dim-lit kitchen piecing patches from the stolen dress into ten-inch blocks of equal armed Greek Crosses symbolizing God’s union with the world and His promise, I sang as a child, Glory be to the Father, as it is it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be–world without end.

While my children slept, I spread the finished quilt top on the kitchen floor, studying its design like a painting in progress. The top arms of the second row of Greek crosses added to the lower arms of the first row looked like three Latin crosses on Mount Calvary. The positive, negative shapes repeated over and over like one of the Dutch artist, M.C. Escher’s illusions, played tricks on my mind.  Engrossed in relishing my perceptions, I didn’t notice Terry standing like a phantom in the doorway. “I had another bad dream.”

I looked up from the quilt top into the face of my tall, almost-a-man boy. 

“I just wanted to tell you, so you’d know,” he said.

His green-flecked brown eyes matched the tarnished gold in his Disappearing Magician quilt. “I’m not going to make it, Mom. I’m not one of God’s chosen people.” 

 

 

12. Shattered Illusions

 

THE FOUNDATION SCHOOL MOVED to a church in nearby San Dimas. The church had a heater, real windows and a kitchen. Everyone baked each other birthday cakes, and read, A Wrinkle in Time. From the beginning acceptance into the school required daily attendance of one or both parents who agreed to monitor their children’s behavior. Two new families committed to our stringent rules joined our school. A fireman, his wife, Rose and their four boys. Also, my best friend Kathy, her three children and scientist husband, a Sierra Club member who led a rock-climbing expedition on a tent camping trip in Joshua Tree National Monument.

             Stuart joined us and participated in star gazing ranger talks. Realizing my utopian vision, the parents finally agreed on a balance of academics and play. I bought a 35mm camera, enrolled in photography class with darkroom access and developed hundreds of photos documenting our idealistic experiment.

The teenagers enjoyed making new friends on our joint field trips with Montebello and Huntington Beach Schools. They tide pooled, snorkeled, dug for clams, made chowder on the beach, and backpacked on Catalina Island where wild boar snooped in their tents.

On our last Foundation School field trip, Terry, and his friend David, from the Huntington Beach school got caught smoking marijuana at Disneyland. Underage at fifteen, they avoided arrest. Unable to find me and Melissa in Tomorrow Land, the park police called Stuart at work and told him to pick up his son.

Later that night, I stood in the kitchen looking at the back of Terry’s head. Handsome in his red Adidas sweat suit, he towered over my husband sitting across the table. Unlike his father-son chat six years before when in control a normal rite-of-passage, Stuart’s face burned crimson. “What the hell were you doing smoking pot?”

Stuart considered pot smokers losers. If Terry and David had been caught at the family friendly amusement part smoking Camels or drinking beer would my husband be less angry—and reassuring me, “Boys will be boys.”

Terry lifted the chair legs off the linoleum floor, tilting back and forth. “Stop rocking the damn chair!” Stuart screamed. A summer breeze blew through the window screen. He kept rocking the chair, back and forth, back, and forth. “Damn it! I said stop it.” Rising to his full height, he lunged across the table, and pushed our son in the chest.

 Time stopped as the chair fell over in slow motion. The back of Terry’s head hit the floor. He sat up, dazed. In the absence of blood, everyone went to bed.

 

The next day attending school without Terry, parents spoke to each other in hushed tones, avoiding eye contact. Returning home, Kathy called. “We’ve called a meeting tomorrow to discuss Disneyland. Please bring the roll book.”

Earlene, nor the other mothers who helped launch our utopian vision in the park attended. I arrived on time, but the jury of my peers had begun deliberations much earlier. “You know,” Kathy’s husband said. “The school was founded to protect our children from drugs.”

I hugged my frayed roll book. “I know.”

“We’re afraid Terry has become a negative influence.”

“I’m shocked too, but he’s a good boy. We can work it out.”
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “Your family is no longer welcome in the school.”

“What about Melissa?”

“She’s part of your family,” he said. “Please give me the roll book.”

“I founded the school. Doesn’t that matter?”

“The school matters now,” Kathy’s husband said. I surrendered my beat-up book and left without crying, but driving home, tears blurred my vision of the road ahead.

I detected a glint of sympathy in Stuart’s eye when I told him I’d been thrown out of my own school, but he didn’t console me. “It’s not fair!” Melissa said. “Terry’s the one who got in trouble, but I’ve lost all my friends.”

 I hugged her. “I’m so sorry, Melissa. You were happy, uh?”

“Yea, Mom, I loved the school.”

 

 

13. We Ran Away from Home

 

THAT WEEK SNOOPING IN Terry’s bedroom, I found a plastic bag full of marijuana. “It’s not mine,” he said. “It belongs to Bobby down the street.” I flushed the pot down the toilet like my diet pills six years before when I believed I’d freed my children from the sins of the fathers.

I developed constant stomach pains and my resentment toward Stuart grew like weeds in the planter. For years, I’d fought like a holy warrior knight for the soul of my son, but when I caught him smoking his father’s cigarettes, I knew I’d lost the battle.

Terry hung blankets over his bedroom window, blocking out the light. On the afternoon of July Fourth, he emerged looking fit in his Adidas tennis shorts. His dark hair cut short, his teeth glistened white and straight, but his eyes no longer sparkled.

“Why blankets over the window, Terry? Your room looks like a tomb.”

“You’re looking through the wall,” he snapped. “You’re spying on me!”

I gasped. Like the absence of light in his eyes, his words pierced my heart. “I want to go to Hollywood to see the fireworks.” He asked if he could ride his bike to visit an old Foundation School friend—twenty miles away. Despite all his pleading, Stuart told him no. Still reeling from the Disneyland crisis, for once, I agreed with my husband.

At sunset, I found Terry’s bike in the breezeway, his clothes and sleeping bag tied on the seat rack. “Look, Stuart, he’s going to run away. We’ve got to stop him!”

When Terry returned to his room, we snuck out, removed the front wheel from his Schwinn Racer bike, carried it to our bedroom, and hid it behind our headboard. Our brief in-control-moment proved short-lived because as fireworks exploded in the distance, our troubled son ran away—on foot.

After a sleepless night, he returned unfazed by our questions and threats of punishment. That summer, when Stuart was at work, he argue with me and his sister, disappeared into the night and lied about where he’d been. I recalled the meeting of junior high parents long ago when the grieving father said, “My son lies to us and sneaks out at night. I can’t control him.” Unaware of my ignorance, I said, “If he was my son, I’d simply lock him up in his room.”

“It’s not that simple. I wish it was,” he said. His reply haunted me now.

I remembered my fourteen-year-old self, clutching the fifth of Jack Daniel’s I’d found hidden under dirty clothes in the laundry basket and screaming, “You’ve got to stop drinking, Mommy. You’re killing yourself.”

“Hell’s bells!” she scowled, leaning against the kitchen counter nursing a never-empty plastic blue glass of bourbon and Coke, flicking a lit Benson and Hedges in the metal ashtray.

“All I said was…”

“Don’t you dare talk back to me!” she bristled, puffing on her beige filtered cigarette smeared lipstick-red. A smokey halo encircled her head and drifted to the ceiling. “Mind your own business, young lady. I’ll do as I damn well please.”

The Ed Sullivan Show blared on the TV. My stepfather, Lee, sat staring at the long-legged dancers strutting across the stage while he jiggled coins in his pocket. His nervous habit still rings in my ears. “Please help Mommy stop drinking. She won’t listen to me.”

“Stay out of it,” he said. “You’re too young to know what’s going on.”

Now, twenty-two years later, I begged Stuart, “Please help me help Terry.” I’d found another bag of marijuana and more empty Vodka bottles under his bed. Obsessed with saving my son, I ramped up my search and seizure missions.

In the fall, we enrolled Terry in Monrovia High School, our alma mater, and Melissa in Light and Life, a neighborhood Christian school. Terry continued going AWOL. Not knowing if he was dead or alive, I stayed awake all night crying, holding my aching stomach.

One night, after midnight and another nightly battle, Terry slammed the door, and disappeared. Stuart finished his swing-shift hours before but still hadn’t come home. No longer capable of carrying the  weight of Terry’s out-of-control behavior, Stuart needed to heed my warnings, stop drinking, come home, and take care of his family.

Such a desperate situation demanded desperate action. Terry got Stuart’s attention when he ran away of the Fourth of July. I too wanted to be heard. I recalled a father in the Foundation School say, “A teenage boy needs his father more than his mother.” Figuring to solve that problem, I called the bar to tell Stuart to come home and take care of Melissa because I was leaving. the bartender said, “He just left.” He’d always lied to protect his loyal customers from nagging wives.

“I know he’s there. Tell Stuart I’m coming to talk to him!”

Awakening Melissa, I said I’d be gone for a few days, assured her Stuart would be home soon and waited for her to go back to sleep. Fishing in the freezer, I found my secret $800 cash-stash saved from cleaning houses, wrapped in aluminum foil like a pound of frozen hamburger.

I tucked the thawing cash in my over-sized purse, packed clothes, face cream, and a toothbrush, loaded my suitcase, pillow and sleeping bag in the woody wagon and drove to the newspaper ten minutes from home.

The bar closed at two in the morning. In the newspaper parking lot next door, my headlights spotted Stuart and his co-workers drinking beer, empty cans of Coors bent and scattered at their feet. Startled by the light, my husband and his cronies looked like roaches in our first rental scrambling for cover when we flipped on the kitchen light in the middle of the night.

“Terry’s gone again. You need to go home because I’m leaving!”

“Where’re you going?”

“I don’t know, not home!”  I shifted into drive and peeled away, tires screeching on the black top, hoping my leaving forced Stuart to grow up and take responsibility for his family.

Close to home,  parked in Santa Teresita Hospital’s well-lit parking lot beside a planter of orange marigolds, I locked the doors, crawled into my sleeping  on the back seat, and slept.

At sunrise, the San Gabriel Mountains bathed baby blue in morning light, I drove to a nearby gas station bathroom and washed my face with paper towels. Brushing my teeth, I remembered my patient Jamaican friend, Earlene, who lived south of Huntington Drive, only blocks away.

I knocked on her door. “I ran away from home, Earlene.”

She lead me down a dark hall into her bedroom and pointed to a cot in the corner by an Arrowhead water cooler. “You can sleep here. I’ll get ya’ some

sheets.” Later, I called Melissa divulging my hideout and relieved when she said Terry came home and her dad had taken them to school. I felt safe sleeping in Earlene’s tiny room, and happy for the first time—in a long time.

The next evening, I attended Terry’s Back to School Night at Monrovia High, my alma mater, where as a freshman at thirteen, I’d met Stuart, a seventeen- year-old junior. Our paths should never have crossed. If I hadn’t skipped third grade and he hadn’t flunked second grade, he would have graduated the year before I arrived on campus.

The landmark 1928 school tower looked eerie at night. When I said, “I’m Terry’s mom,” his new special education teacher treated me with unusual kindness. “He’s a nice young man,” she said. I left feeling hopeful. She didn’t tell me he’d already been caught smoking on campus with a group of other troubled boys.

On the fourth day, I treated Earlene to lunch at La Parisienne, a fancy French restaurant in Duarte. My large, dark-skinned friend and I, wearing our best Am-Vet-Thrift-Store dresses purchased on our school field trip, sauntered in looking as uppity as possible as the maître d’ led us into the dining room packed with businessmen in expensive gray suits. The waiter handed us a leather-bound menu embossed in gold lettering listing authentic French cuisine at gourmet prices. Giggling, we raised our eyebrows in sync.

“Money’s no object,” I said. “Order whatever you want.”

Not wanting to appear unsophisticated asking questions or attempting foreign pronunciation, we ordered by pointing to the cheapest entrée choices.

Earlene looked elegant holding a silver-plated fork and knife cutting something resembling chicken. Tasting buttery sautéed mushrooms in my savory omelet, I sighed. “I’d love to go to France and eat like this every day,”

“Wouldn’t that be expensive?”

“I could save the money,” I said. “I want to see where Cézanne painted.”

“Who’s that? A friend a’ yours?”

“Yes, a good friend!”

One day driving back to Earlene’s after cleaning a client’s home in ninety-degree heat, I spotted a Grand Opening sign at Heritage Savings & Loan on Huntington Drive in Duarte. Free to do whatever I wanted; the air-conditioned bank event seemed an inviting field trip. I brushed my long, straight hair and put on lipstick but wearing jeans and moccasins, I still looked more like a bohemian art student than a bank customer,

I poured real coffee in a Styrofoam cup, piled store-bought cookies on a cocktail napkin and plopped down on a plush sofa. Not accustomed to drinking caffeinated coffee, it zapped me with the same adrenalin rush as the amphetamine-laced diet pills I’d taken years before. Soaking up the ambiance, the smell of new furniture, polished floors, and cool clean air, I didn’t want to leave.

The bank manager approached me, her blond teased hair sprayed stiff. Since I’d lingered too long and eaten more than my share of cookies, I thought she intended to throw me out. Instead, she smiled. “How can I help you?”

She didn’t know I’d stuffed my life savings in my purse. I told her as a child attending Monroe Elementary School in Monrovia, I’d loved saving a dollar every week and how good it felt when the teacher recorded the deposits in my little blue Bank of America book. Fueled by another cup of caffeinated coffee, I kept talking and talking about how I’d read the book, The Richest Man in Babylon which revealed his secret to wealth. “I remember he gave away ten percent and invested ten percent, but he always saved ten percent of everything he earned.”

“So, you really do believe in saving?”

“Oh yes.”

“We are a savings and loan you know! Come, I want to show you something.” I sank into a blue upholstered chair as she mulled over printed charts spread on her desk, “How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“So, you were born in 1944!” Her hands flew across the keys, punching numbers. She leaned forward holding out a slip of paper ripped from her adding machine. “If you save $2000 a year in an IRA account you will have $100,000 in the bank when you turn sixty-five.”

“Wow, that’s a fortune. I could go to France!”

Saving money in a bank instead of the freezer, seemed like a good idea. I didn’t have enough cash to start an IRA, but I opened a savings account with what remained after lunch at the fancy French restaurant. Returning to ninety-degree heat and my uncertain life, I thanked the lady for her financial advice and left the bank like a wealthy entrepreneur who’d invested capital in future dreams.