I was eight years old. Had an older sister and brother and we were moving in to the home of an "aunt" with three children of corresponding ages/genders. That's how I started 3rd grade. It was country but they'd only inherited the house a year and a half before we showed up so they weren't country. They were Top 40.
Lotta disco here. I know disco wasn't supposed to be cool but we were from "Dee-troit", stuck in fucking Dogpatch, so fuck cool.
Here's the rub. Kids aren't always kind or compassionate or even merciful. And the three of us were stuck somewhere that we literally didn't belong, in the space of "cousins" who were where they were supposed to be. If you're not careful, you could go through life feelings like you don't belong anywhere at all.
Learned to ice skate. What to do when you broke through the waste-deep ice. To put my initials on my clothes.
I was the youngest of a blended double family. In a place that I had no context of. I'd lived in Ann Arbor and suburban Detroit and now I was in fucking woods.
But life keeps going, despite the consternation of lost little kids. And I was then privy to my first assassination. What a way to roll out the eighties .
But life goes on. My first record. A disco track on Motown. With a map of Detroit streets on the label.
Not long after the new year we moved back home. Our mother quipped that she had read every book in the local library. (Like they had a library. Or books).
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