Blue Plaid Memories

 



I'm going through old photos and I come across this one of me in the third grade, shortly before I got my first pair of glasses.  The photo was taken on Christmas day, 1970, in the house on East First Street in Edmond where we lived until the summer of 1973.  I'm sitting at the desk that my Dad refinished for me, working on a model of a souped up 1911 fire engine called the Firecracker by Monogram.  I had begged my parents' to get me that particular model for Christmas for weeks.  That year, for some reason, we had celebrated Christmas on the evening of the 24th, so I didn't get to start building the model till the next day.  I still have that model in the china cabinet in my dining room.  The antique globe sitting on the desk is also in my dining room, on top of the china cabinet, and the desk itself is at my parents' house.
    Other things in the room also bring back some rather random memories.  My mother made the curtains.  My Dad had laid the orange carpet squares as part of the process of remodeling the house into a quadraplex.  That orange thing with the black handle next to the desk is the Sears typewriter with the snap on cover that I had gotten for my eighth birthday the previous summer, and the turquoisey container I was using for a trash can was actually a Lucerne potato chip canister from Safeway.  I loved that belt I was wearing, and was disappointed when I outgrew it.
    But what stands out to me now are the pants that matched the curtains, and the bulletin board full of pictures of Donnie Osmond.  How is it possible that no one knew I was gay?