I am standing next to the teacher, Mrs. Heisler, one I liked very much until the very last day of school that year. The class had made several realistic scenic layouts with clay and paint. One was from the dinosaur era. I don't recall the other one. She held a lottery for who would get each one on the final day of class. Even the kids who won could not take them home because of weight or size, so other kids got them instead. Everyone else had gone home, and I was helping her clean up--perhaps I didn't feel like going home right away. I noticed in a back drawer or cabinet that we had not raffled off one of the plastic dinosaurs and casually mentioned it. She suddenly, and without provocation that I could see, yelled at me to put that item away and close the drawer. I was taken aback and my feelings were terribly hurt. At this point at home we certainly were dealing with the succession of house keepers and then Grandma Sanchez, and mom was not living with us anymore. A teacher I liked was the one constant in my life, and here she was yelling at me all out of proportion to what I had done, if I had even done anything wrong. I remember walking out the door in the afternoon sunlight, hurt beyond imagining.
That summer we would, along with Grandma Sanchez, move to a single-level apartment building in Orange, CA. Dad had been courting a woman whom he had met when he visited the paint store where she worked. She was divorced with two kids of her own. Again with the help of the grandparents, dad was having a triplex built at 1947 Lomita Avenue in Orange. All six of us (eventually seven, another girl would be born, Lorri, in 1961) would live in the much larger, front unit. The two identical, smaller units in back would be rented out and provide additional income to help defray the mortgage. The familiar house at 13222 Foxley Drive would no longer be home. For two young kids, we had lived there from the summer of 1954 until the summer of 1959, an entire lifetime of growing up. Dental work. Trips to the doctor. Friends like the Tiptons and the Hofeldts. Holidays. Learning to ride bikes. Going on adventures.
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