If you ask my parents, they will tell you that I have always been something of an "old soul." As a kid, I was thought to be wise beyond my years and I usually related better to the older crowd than to my peers.
School was no different. When participating in simple activities like writing stories or drawing pictures, it was easy to see that I wasn't on the same wave-length as my fellow classmates.
While kids my age were into The Babysitter Club books and watching cartoons on Nickelodeon, I was reading The Grapes of Wrath and rocking out to 1960s Barbra Streisand on vinyl.
Note: Yes, you can rock out to Barbra. You can rock out hard.
Not just one for classic music and timeless literature, I also loved old movies, musical theatre, and vintage television. I watched old reruns religiously from the time I was six, and I still watch them to this day. I tried to share my enthusiasm with my friends at school, but I’m pretty sure it was lost on them.
Of all the old shows I watched growing up, there were none I loved more than I Love Lucy. A slapstick genius, Lucille Ball was my red-headed hero and I wanted to be just like her.
I would get so involved in those iconic storylines that I would actually cry in frustration at the grievous injustices inflicted upon the titular character in each and every episode.
I was into anything and everything Lucy. By the third grade I had read her autobiography twice and was already on the road to a pretty decent collection of memorabilia.
So you can imagine my utter delight when I was given an I Love Lucy t-shirt as a present. It was white and had a headshot of the woman herself in all her black-and-white glory across the front.
The next day, I wore my new shirt to school. I was beyond excited to show off my bounty.
Their ignorance didn’t matter. I couldn’t be deflated. As long as I had my Lucy shirt, I was untouchable. Like a superhero, only much sadder.
Everything was going well for me – until math time. My teacher, Mrs. Whitmyer, asked us to take out our math homework for collection. My heart stopped. What math homework?!
I had been so engrossed in my Lucy shirt that I had completely forgotten to do my math homework the night before. Students who turned in no homework got a zero for that assignment. Panic filled me. I had never gotten a zero before! I had never failed ANYTHING before that point. Ever.
Even if getting a zero wasn’t worse than being eaten by a shark (it totally is, though), it felt that way to me and I was very close to tears by the time Mrs. Whitmyer approached my desk. Unfortunately for me, there was nothing I could do – I was empty handed.
Two strikes. There were already two strikes against my Lucy shirt and we hadn’t even gotten halfway through the day. When lunchtime rolled around and I managed to spill both ketchup and mustard down my shirt within the first five minutes of eating, I started to think that the shirt was too powerful for me.
Maybe it was meant to be admired from afar, and not worn by the inexperienced likes of an eight-year-old. Recess only served to prove this theory.
While paying more attention to my shirt than to where I was going, I tripped over a rock and fell shirt-first in the mud. I was beside myself. One of the supervising teachers came over to see if I was okay and then sent me to the nurse to get cleaned up.
If that wasn’t enough to convince me not to wear the shirt, then getting stung by a bee on the way to the nurse’s office most definitely was.
I never wore the shirt again. I still have it, in all its stained and tormented glory:
And, for what it’s worth, I’m still an old soul.
