LOOKING BACK....AGAIN

Buckeye, AZ  circa 1965.  I'm 11 years old.  It's Saturday.  My sister Molly and I are allowed to go to the library.  It is an old place, probably built in the 1940's or so.  It had a high ceiling and wooden floors...smelled of books and dust.  I LOVED it there.  The librarian was Desie Miller.  She was a wonderful older lady who wore glasses and her grey hair was piled upon her head like a favorite hat.  She was always very nice to me and had this wonderful smile.  (I wonder what happened to her...) I would take my time, slowly walking through the stacks of books usually landing up in the Nancy Drew section.  Wasn't Nancy D awesome?  Why don't kids read her anymore?  I remember one of those books was about Nancy visiting friends out on some ranch in the middle of nowhere.  They way the book described the setting just put me there.  I'm still looking for it!  The ranch, that is.  Anyhooselby, after my sis and I got our books, we might stop at the Chevron gas station on the way home.  That was only if we could find 10 cents somewhere.  Maybe we could find a penny or two around the house, or find a pop bottle along the road to turn in for 2 cents.  Whatever it took, if we could scrounge up a dime a strawberry soda was ours.  The gas station had a machine that held bottled soda, and strawberry was our favorite.  So, we would get our soda on the sly....if our father found out he would kill us, so it was a very secret mission.  We'd pass the bottle back and forth, checking the level each time one of us drank, making sure we were even.  We would do this quickly just in case somebody happened by that knew us, even one of our brother's.  Then we check each other's tongues to see how red they were..a red tongue increased the possibility of getting caught.  Great fun.  So here I was, a Nancy Drew mystery in my hands, having just finished a forbidden strawberry soda and the day stretching before me like eternity.  Maybe we would ride our bikes down to the park.  Sometimes we did that and climbed those big old trees, sitting up in the cool leaves practicing our cuss words on each other.  I think Molly won but I came damn close.  Oh, but that's another story.