OPERATION: DAD (HOLD)

Thanks so much for being my FIRST commenter.

- I WOULD LIKE TO RECIEVE 5 COMMENTS BEFORE I UPLOAD A NEW CHAPTER. SOOOO                                                                               LET'S GO! -

“Rachel…”said Mr.Walsh,”Miss Gibson?” Mr. Walsh, well that’s my algebra teacher. I find myself daydreaming in this class all the time.” Yes sorry sir,” here we go, I know what’s coming next. . I’m about to be given the famous “Miss Gibson” speech. “Miss Gibson, you know I do not appreciate you always daydreaming in my algebra class. I have about five classes to teach yet fifth period remains the only group with a daydreaming pupil, now I know my class isn’t the most exciting but I assure you that does not give you permission to loose focus the way you do.” As always I reply, “Yes sir, I completely understand Mr. Walsh, wont happen again.”

In my life, getting myself into trouble is about as interesting as it gets around here. I mean it’d be a miracle if a cat got caught up in a tree and if it did happen it’d  be on the front page of the Compaq weekly newspaper. My life goal is to become a journalist, and for what it’s worth my town makes that goal more and more difficult everyday. Nothing interesting ever happens where I live.

I’m Rachel Gibson, and I live in Medford, Oregon. I’m just an ordinary 16-year-old girl who, like most teenagers, has a big dream. You see, I’ve loved to write for as long as I can remember. I’ve always just thought of it as a way to be me. My dad even said that as a baby I could write before I could talk. He used to tell me that since he couldn’t quite grasp the concept of my baby talk, he would have me write what I had to say down on paper. “Oh the power of paper and a pencil,” he would say, “those two objects, why they worked wonders for me, never in my life had I ever understood a baby so well before the day I gave you a single sheet of paper and a #2 pencil.”

I don’t believe him though. After all he is a dad, dads do have a tendency to over exaggerate a lot of things. He used to tell me all the time when I was little that I was the smartest baby he had ever met, and I used to tell him he was the smartest dad I knew just for saying such things.

If you hadn’t actually lived on Crawley Road, the street I live on, for as long as I have you’d think it lacked life. In my perspective, what it lacks in liveliness Medford makes up for in friendliness. That’s one thing I could never deny.

Take Winnie for example, Winnie is the Medford Mailman. He and I have been buddies since the day I first moved to Oregon, when I was only four years old. Winnie had seen me crying on my porch the day I arrived at our new house.  Trying his best to be a model citizen, he’d come to visit my family and welcome us to the town. He’d walked right past me to greet all of my family and when he finished, come right back out; He’d come back to have a nice heart-to-heart talk about how he knew just how I felt.

He said he had moved from Mississippi to Oregon when he was just seven years old. He told me how in the beginning he hated having to move and leave all of his friends, but in the end actually liked it better in Oregon. He told me that having to move hadn’t been as bad as he thought it would be after all and that he could see my family had been watching from the door the whole time. We laughed and joked about how silly they were because they thought we couldn’t see them watching, but we could. When we finished talking, he gave me a grape flavored lollipop and headed home. With the lollipop sticking out of my mouth, I happily waved goodbye to my new Oregon friend.

I remember how life used to be in Miami. Our little, cozy condo on Lillian Drive, inches from the beach, only added to the great life we had. My mom would come pick me up from pre-school and we’d go to the beach to ride bikes or walk through the water. Every Friday after school, Erin and I would walk down to the ice cream parlor down the road. We’d talk and laugh all day, never letting our age difference get in the way of our happiness or what we talked about. Even though Erin was three years older than me, I hung on every word that left her lips with an understanding mind. I loved Fridays, they were our sisterly relax days. Life truly was a blessing, a real gift from god. My dad and me were real pals back then too, a real family with my mom, my big sister Erin, and me, that is before we moved to Oregon. 

Being only three or four years old, I didn’t actually know what I had then, until it was gone. The older I grew the farther our family relationships drifted apart. Erin and I weren’t so close anymore, Mom and Dad got a divorce, and it seemed like the only thing I could count on was on Oregon itself.

Oregon, I guess it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. What with all the beautiful mountains covering the horizon, clear blue skies, fluffy white clouds sailing through the air, and even the occasional long dirt road, it’s pretty nice. One thing is for sure; things were different after we moved. There’s no doubt it was a big change moving from Miami, Florida to Medford, Oregon and there surely wasn’t a beach in front of our house anymore. What’s worse? There wasn’t even an ice cream parlor within walking distance.

I was only four years old. I was so worried.

My mind was filled to the brim with so many questioning thoughts: What had they meant by “New Home”? Did they have schools at the place where we were going to? Why couldn’t we have just stayed in Florida at our old house, where we had so many friends and so much fun at the beach?  And why did things have to change, why couldn’t they just stay the way they were?

The REAL question though was:

Did our having to move have anything to do with that weird phone call daddy got three weeks before today?