Moleskin 4.7: New World

  Meanwhile, for all the resistance to change this old man was showing, my own world was like Richard Nixon: full of it, with a banner headline of unasked for, unexpected news. Not only the house and the dad, but we were dropped into a new neighborhood with none of my old friends. I had to give up the paper route job, and in the fall I would be going to a new school —a bigger junior high school, no less. We started going to a new church, a Baptist church, where my mom was now working as an organist and where my step-dad was the treasurer. And the change kept a-coming: I was given chores: mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage; and a behavior code: being told to speak more courteously to adults, or better, not to speak at all. At ages eight and five my malleable, eager to please brothers seemed impervious to all this, but they had not had more than incidental friendships and didn’t have to quit a job and were still in the first half of elementary school. But I was almost a teenager, brimming with angst and anger, and I did not want all this change.