Read My Own Two Feet for Free Online Page B

being editor when I had so generously shared with him the wisdom gained from my high school journalism. He was amused by my embarrassment; I told him he did not play fair. We both laughed, and Paul chugged down Princeton Street in his Model T coupe to take me to movies in Pomona, to school dances, and out for something to eat afterward. To me he seemed sophisticated because he drank coffee; to him I was amusing because I ordered milk. Afterward he parked in front of the Clapps’ privet hedge, where we enjoyed what I referred to in my diary as “long rambling conversations” about school, our lives, our hopes. We both wanted to write.
    One evening Paul told me that other men were asking how far our relationship had gone. I wastoo shocked to do anything but gasp. Paul smiled, rumpled my hair, and said, “I think I know what you like.”
    What I liked, and for the first time in my life was enjoying, was the companionship of a humorous, congenial young man. After sulky Gerhart and the serious high school boys and Reed College freshmen who trampled my feet at dances, or I trampled theirs, and never seemed particularly congenial, the company of Paul was a joy, and he was understanding of my girlish innocence and enthusiasm. With Paul I did not have to pretend I was having a good time. I really was having a good time. Paul was restoring my faith in young men by helping me to see that a man could be a companion. All I wanted was his company, lots of it.
    Sharing a sense of humor was a new experience for me. Paul and I both thought the words of the school song were funny, a song that began, “Chaffey, where the fronded palm uplifted to the sky…” The tree we sang about was a scruffy fan palm in front of the building. It had a few green fronds rising above generations of withered fronds drooping against the trunk below.
    Although I doubted if Paul really enjoyed dancing, he took me to all the school dances, which I found much more fun than the few dances I hadattended at Grant High, where girls were possessive of boys, couples rarely traded dances, sometimes not at all, and persuading myself I had enjoyed the evening had scarcely been worth the effort of cleaning black shoe polish off my white pumps the next morning.
    At Chaffey we had dance programs, which I had heard Mother tell about but which I thought had gone out of fashion along with hatpins, corset covers, hair receivers, and other artifacts of Mother’s youth. We circulated, talked to other couples, agreed which dances to trade, and marked them on our programs with tiny pencils attached with silk cords. Then we danced away to “Red Sails in the Sunset” and “A Little Bit Independent,” “Blue Moon,” and other popular tunes of the 1930s. Paul and I always sat out “Tiger Rag” because it was too fast, and at the end of the evening, when the band played “Goodnight, Sweetheart,” Paul held me close.
    Sometimes, after the dance, if it was a moonlit night, we went for a short drive eastward toward the desert, where ghostly spheres of tumbleweed rolled across the road. Real tumbleweed, something I had never expected to see, but there it was, rolling along, the tumbling tumbleweed, just as in the words of the song.
    Even the weather took on a new excitement.When rain finally came, it fell harder and faster than the gentle rain of Oregon. One evening after a YWCA dinner at school, I found I could not cross Euclid Avenue’s deep gutters, now overflowing with water carrying rocks and gravel, swifter than a mountain stream, racing straight from the mountains without curves to slow it down. The town had not had time to set out little bridges at intersections. What to do? I returned to school and telephoned the Clapps. Atlee was dispatched to rescue me and arrived in his Rickenbacker, which he maneuvered close enough so that I could, with the help of his outstretched hand, leap onto the running board and,