I entered first grade with tears on my face, blood on my lip from a lost loose tooth, no lunch and a hole in my tights.

He was East Cary Junior High School’s Leif Garrett. If I could have had a photo of Skip printed and enlarged, he’d have been on my bedroom wall right next to Tiger Beat poster boys Scott Baio and Shawn Cassidy.

They call it a landline for a reason. Not just because of the cords and cables rooted to the earth. It identified where we all landed when we entered that place called home.

I am about 10 yards behind them and behind me I hear someone say, “Come on Johnny, catch up!” and Johnny says, “I have to wait for the old lady to pass.”

The only time our lives we were truly in danger was when, like Nemo’s dad, we had that unexpected “swim with the jellies.”

I’m a pop out of the birthday cake kinda gal and I started young. I mean I was nine when I planned my first surprise party for my mother’s 30th.

I was moved by the revelations in the development of the pin-pricked image. That volunteer parent had no idea the little light they’d shined on my imagination.

By 2am and we were exhausted and decided that we needed a safer place to rest. That is when Cathy suggested we try the baggage car.

That date in center field? It was the bar no boy could ever reach. Not even my husband.

I am a flag-flying, intensely patriotic daughter of a US Navy veteran, former Girl Scout color guard-saluting, America the Beautiful-singing, 50 state quarter-collecting, 4 th of July apple pie-baking, BBQ sauce-basting, lower-middle to middle class-climbing, life better for my children-dreaming, proud to be an American middle age woman. At least I was proud. But that was when I believed to my core that this country aspired to the values declared in the Declaration of Inde