My wife found a lot of documents while I was in a creative writing class at a local College in the very early 2000s here on the northern California coast. Some of it was really good and because all this is about 24 years ago now and I'm 76, much of it (about 75% of the details) I likely wouldn't remember now. So, the fact that my 24 years younger self wrote all this impressed me because it is like learning details of yourself that you have mostly forgotten.
In other words I remember everything said when I read it again and I am grateful I wrote all these details down when I still had them clearer in my mind when I was only around 50 years old. Now, at 76 some of those details I likely wouldn't recall from scratch like I did then. You can still feel the freshness of my mind as I connected with being 15 years old in High School for example.
The first page of all of this is about me being a sophomore in High School which is Glendale High School in Glendale, California when I was 15 years old. I had just graduated in the 9th grade from Woodrow Wilson Junior High school which fed into Glendale High School (both public Schools).
And I was in my first year of French classes (I took two years of French in High School there). Behind me sat a beautiful surfer girl named Dana who was obviously interested in me because I was always a kind nice gentleman like I had been trained to be by my minister parents who ran a church in Los Angeles. She was trying to dominate me into being her lover likely. So, she was playing cat and mouse with me with me being the mouse in this situation. Though I was attracted to her she was a senior and I a lowly Sophomore. It was literally dangerous to get involved with a senior when I was a sophomore. She was very aggressive and insistant that I interact more deeply with her. She wouldn't take no for an answer.
One day, I was wearing then in 1963 a Madras shirt which is a Spanish very bright shirt with a pattern that reminds me of a Scottish Kilt only Spanish style. It had an affectation on it which was called "laughingly" at the time a Fruit Loop. Well, Dana started grabbing my fruit loop and wanting my attention and I told her to stop in class from doing this. But, she wouldn't stop and so kept twisting the fruit loop on my madras shirt until it tore off the shirt and tore the shirt a little bit when she did this. I was pretty upset because this was a new shirt and my family though well provided for wasn't rich. We rented a duplex near Glendale High School and even though I always had a bicycle we never owned our own home in my life and I was 15 years old at that time.
So, I was upset she was wrecking one of my newest and most favorite shirts.
It wasn't that I didn't feel attracted to her it was that I refused to be her victim. If I was going to be involved with her it would be on my terms not hers. I was willing to be her friend in class but I wouldn't let her take me to bed out of class then discard me like some kind of dead mouse. Though I was attracted to her I hadn't even kissed a girl yet (even though girls had wanted to go steady with me since I was 10 years old. I just wasn't ready to date ANYONE until the next few months when President Kennedy was Assassinated and it scared me into dating a girl in my English Class that was another beautiful blonde haired blue eyed girl that I didn't feel intimidated by.
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