11:56 am - Sunday, Jun. 16, 2002
Song:
My old neighborhood is always the place I picture when I read "To Kill A Mocking Bird". The dipiction in the movie doesn't seem right. My world seems to fit better.
Amy, Alex, and Andrew lived in an old farm house with a gigantic backyard. This is where Scout and Jem live in my mind. Thier back yard had a wooden fence around it. On one side of that fence was a one story broken down house. The only place in the neighborhood that, despite how white trash the area is, people parked on thier front lawns. It had two trees right on the edge of the property line between the two yards, and a backyard of random odds and ends. This is the Radley place in my mind.
Down the block where Cieara and Josh lived, this was where Dill was staying. And the pink house across from mine, where the sweet lady with the cakes (in the book) lived.
My mom read that book to me for the first time when I was seven. I still read it nearly three times a year. It's something I just don't get tired of.
I miss that neighborhood. It never bothered me that it was in the shade of the freeway, or that the fact that I hoped to go to College was shocking since most people around there didn't have highschool diplomas. I wasn't like the people in the area, yet I fit.
I was the oldest, so everyone else followed me. When I started playing basketball and convinced my parents to get me a hoop, everyone wanted to play basketball. I gave lessons at differant levels for a nickle. I wasn't very good, but I was better then them, making me the perfect teacher.
A nickle was an extreme ammount of money to me then. I was in elementry school, I got a dollar a week for allowance. I seriously doubted my parents could have afforded much more. I tried not to ask for things, because even then I knew we couldn't afford it. The only reason we didn't get those food boxes at Christmas is because my parents refused then. We had accepted one at one Christmas and it was full of stcky candy canes, peas and a can of clam chowder that was one year past it's experation date. To this day my mom still refuses to give St. Vincent de Paul money.
I really don't remember when it was that my family started to have money. In sixth grade, we moved from that neighborhood into a much nicer house in a neighborhood with higher property value. This did not make the neighborhood better in my eyes.
My mother had gotten a new job, and for the first time that I could remember, my father had a job.
I spent so much of my childhood with my dad. He was such an asshole then. He would just scream and my brother and I. He's changed alot.
We've all changed alot.
It bothers me when Rahnia claims I'm rich, or Christina's mom calls me "that stuck up little rich bitch". I'm not rich. Even now my family is only like middle-middle class. I realize I'm lucky to have everything I have. But I'm not rich. And I'm not poor. I'm just, lucky.
My mind is still in the place thought where asking my mom for five dollars is an extreme ammount of money and spending more then twenty dollars on a pair of pants seems too much. I don't care if my allowance is thirty dollars a week or if I have six computers in my house. It's an example that we don't save money, we spend it.
Most of the time I still feel like that little girl who lived in the shadow of the freeway. The one with lemonade stands and play circuses. The one whose parents wouldn't let her watch the Power Rangers because it was "too violent". Alot of the time I don't know what I'm doing here, who I am. I just know, I'm lucky. And I'll admit, a spoiled brat.
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