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I’M GETTING PUBLISHED

It’s just in the early phases still, but Flirting With Stupid is getting published. Wow, after 20+ years, I’m actually getting a book published. My dad published a magic book when he was 18, quite a cool feat, based on a trick he created called The Invisible Deck. At age 56 he had his second magic book published and from that point wrote and published approximately 20 books on magic. Many people in the magic business still know Bob Longe and his books on card tricks. He joked when he published his book at age 56 that he felt the need to write a book every 38 years.
It’s taken me many years to make this a reality and I hope that I now follow in my father’s footsteps in having many more books published. I’m thinking Flirting With Stupid could definitely become a series. The future books would include other people’s experiences and dalliances into the world of stupidity. I think those would be even more fun and entertaining. When I tell people the idea of my book, stupid things done and lessons learned, I find everyone has some or many stupid stories of their own. I’ve already collected a number of them from other people. In earlier blogs I’ve shared some rough versions of a couple chapters of Flirting With Stupid. I would love to get your feedback. Here is one of the chapters from FWS. Please let me know what you think. I do not have a thin skin, so feel free to be honest. I would like to know specifically if you find it relatable and amusing. I would also be interested in any feedback on what should be expanded on or left out. Would this be a book that you would be interested in reading? I very much appreciate any responses given. Thank you for taking your time to read this and respond. It is my intention to create a book that you would love to read and recommend to others. Please let me know your thoughts.

Chapter Eight
Stupid Big Feet

Fourth grade was over! No more Sr. Pauline! It was the summer! I loved summer. Even though we had chores to do before we could go out and play, there was plenty of playtime. We would ride our bikes through the neighborhood, or around the block or practice weaving through the parking blocks in the empty parking lot around the corner from us, improving our coordination with our bikes. Oftentimes there would be baseball games in the empty field at the end of our street, which was always a favorite pastime. In the sixties, kids mostly played outdoors, only going home for lunch and dinner. We had no computers, cell phones, or arranged play dates. We would go to our friend’s house if they weren’t already outside and yell their names at their side or back door for them. If they didn’t hear us, we opened the milk chute and would holler in there.
In the evening we would play hide and seek or 10 lives with a frisbee, which is a game where everyone started with 10 lives and you tried to throw the frisbee in such a way that it would hit someone without their being able to catch it. If they caught it you lost a life, if they touched it, or it touched them, and they didn’t actually catch it, they lost a life. Generally, it was a good strategy to go for ankles if possible. Sometimes, even my dad would join in on ten lives. There were a lot of kids in our neighborhood and this was a fun and fast-moving game. We would play until the streetlight at the corner of the street came on, the universal symbol to go home and get ready for bed. There was no air conditioning. Instead, we had big window fans and an attic fan. In the evenings when it cooled down a bit, my parents would put the attic fan on and it would suck all of the hot air out of the house. Mostly, it was pretty comfortable for sleeping. Besides, we’d be so exhausted from the day, sleeping was rarely a problem.
I now had four brothers, one older, three younger. Being the only girl, I got one room with the baby and the boys shared a bedroom. First, I had Marty in with me until he was three and then the youngest Gary came along and Marty graduated to the boys’ room and Gary came into my room. I actually liked having the baby in my room. If they fussed, I would sing to them. I knew how to change their diaper if necessary and I loved to change and dress them in the morning. Since this was in the summer of 1963, Gary would have been the baby. I would generally take care of the baby first, oftentimes mom would come in and finish with the baby, then I would get myself dressed and go down to breakfast. A couple weeks into this summer, something funny started to happen. I went to put on my new summer sneakers and they barely fit. This was really odd, because when you have a smallish income and five kids, you tend to buy shoes and clothes with ‘room to grow’. How could my shoes be tight already? I forced my foot into the shoe and went out to play. Soon my foot was breaking through the shoe, kind of bursting the seams out. My mom was quite dismayed. I think she was more concerned that I was growing so fast and would be a freak of nature, Amazon she called it, much nicer term, than worried about buying me new shoes. This happened three times that summer. Mom bought me the cheapest tennis shoes she could find. I also grew in height, I even passed up Dan temporarily, which he hated even more than I did. At least it was summertime, when kids wore shorts and t-shirts, so the clothes weren’t a big problem. But I was worried. Was I turning into the incredible Hulk who would burst through all of his clothes as he transformed into this enormous beast? Would I go from being the third tallest to the tallest? Where would this end? How could I stay under the radar if I was freakishly tall and had clown feet? Something had to be done!
Mom, at dinner, would ask me why there seemed to be a lot of rags in my room around my bed. I didn’t want to fess up, so I just shrugged. I was always good with a rag bag. I’m not sure if rag bags were common things or not, but mom had this large canvas sack that hung by a hook from the ceiling in the basement and contained all kinds of rags, which could be old T-shirts or undershirts, old sheets cut into smaller pieces, old towels etc. I’ve used rags from the rag bag for all sorts of projects, such as using the old Tshirts for smocks when doing art projects with kids. I was generally in charge of entertaining the kids of my mom’s friends when they got together for coffee, lunch or cards. This time it wasn’t fun and games, it was serious business. I remember reading that in one of the Asian countries, I forget if it was China or Japan, that they would wrap girl’s feet tightly in strips of cloth to keep them from growing. It was supposed to be prestigious to have small feet. One day, I went through the rag bag and selected a good size piece of sheet and began cutting it into 2 inch wide and about 12 inch long strips. I put these under my pillow on my bed and before I went to sleep I would wrap these strips around my feet as tightly as I could. Of course, by morning, they would be mostly falling off of my feet. I would gather them back up and put them back under my pillow, apparently missing the ones that fell to the floor. Even though I think mom was more alarmed than I was at my growth spurt, as she was always a worrier, I didn’t think she’d understand about the rags.
My feet grew from a size 5 to a size 8 that summer. I grew 4 inches in height, from 4’8” to 5’ by age 10. I don’t know if it was the rags that slowed the progress or the spurt was over, but by the time the summer was done I seemed to level off and did not rapidly outgrow my school shoes. My feet had also corrected themselves so I no longer had to wear the despised corrective shoes and instead got grey and black hush puppies with little diamond shaped pieces of red leather where they laced. About this, I was overjoyed. I finally could wear normal shoes!
My feet went back to growing at a normal pace. I quit wrapping them in rags. They did their job. I could walk easy, so to speak.
This lesson took a little longer, but I started to learn not to worry about things you have no control over, like your height and foot size.