Raquel Martina Martinez

After years of paying Catholic school tuition, my parents decided to save money and send the three oldest to PUBLIC SCHOOL. We were baby Christian martyrs among the pagan Roman hordes. My younger sister had it the worst.   Situated in a deteriorating, thug-infested neighborhood, her junior high was surrounded by a tall fence and rolls of twisted chicken wire. Need I say more? She still hasn’t forgiven my parents for her painful adolescence.     Meanwhile, my older brother and I went to the same high school, so we had each other in an emergency. After years of torture at the hands of menopausal nuns and sadistic monks, my brother was finally a freed man, attending a new school where he was known as “the cute, new guy.” You know how that goes.   His foray into public school was nothing like my sister’s.     Me.   I was lost.   In my old life, I’d known who my friends were and where I fit in. Now in a school the size of a small Texas town, I was faceless and friendless, a nobody

Back in the day, I was friends with a junior high crowd who always ran for class president and got selected class sweethearts.   We were the “cool crowd,” the trendsetters. In the seventh grade, one of my BFF’s hosted the first boy/girl dance party, and all of a sudden this light turned on in my brain.   Boys weren’t yucky. Another friend was the first to go “steady” (this meant nothing more back then than holding hands and smooching with mouths closed), and I was even more intrigued by a new notion.   Boys are not yucky and kissing boys is good. When Mother Superior discovered these new events, she dragged our whole gang into her office without benefit of lawyer representation or being given our Miranda Warning.   Sensing she may have been too late to stop our sinful   spiral, she   called for stricter intervention – she summoned the parish priest. Father stood like Moses before the sinning Jews at the foot of Mount Sinai and warned us about the evils of handholding an

1.       If the 60’s are the new 40’s, someone forgot to tell my butt. 2.     I made Dick and Jane readers out of yellow scrap paper. 3.     The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less. 4.     I gave away my identity in tiny bits and pieces. 5.     There once was a little girl who loved to read, write, and do multiplication. 6.     No, I am not a vampire; I am a Boomer and I am aging. 7.     Guess who is struggling to keep up? 8.     I taught thousands, now all grown men and women. 9.     His ruthless abandon with onion, garlic, and everything chicken left me weak. 10. I decided to scuttle my ships and march toward my destiny at all cost. 11.   My oldest grandson turns ten, a full dime. 12. Life is a game. Play it well and there will be no regrets. 13. Let’s view the 4 th of July not through sunglasses but through the eyes of an immigrant. 14. A well-constructed sentence is a thing of beauty. 15. What really hurts more than anything is ego.

I never wanted any. I’d had enough of changing diapers on younger sibs by the time I finished high school.   I love kids, but I was going to college. My family, especially the women, said it had more to do with my (lack of) looks than intelligence.   They all worried that by the time I finished with college I would be past my Sell By date.   They worried the mainspring on my biological clock would be rusted, and my hourglass figure would resemble more a weatherworn sundial. I didn’t care.   After college, I was off to see the world. Las mujeres (the women) reminded me that a woman’s religious obligation was to marry and have a large, Catholic family.   Religious?   Half of them hadn’t stepped inside a church more than twice in their lifetimes, once for their baptisms, the second time for their weddings.   Three times if they’d had a quincea ñ era. I was going to live my life soltera (single) – no husband, no children, and no cat either. Eighteen months after I graduated from c