Grade school

Grade school was the bane of my existence.  All of my life, I have been a quiet person who minded my own business and hated bullies.  Bullies, however, found me.

When my dad was living, we lived in a very exclusive area, and I was enrolled in an "excellent" Catholic school with a bunch of students whose parents were considered upwardly mobile and progressive.  All they were in reality were bigoted white flighters who were raising a bunch of spoiled, privileged brats.  My parents had grown up poor but proud; my father was what they called in the old days "a self-made man."  My mother, God bless her, was anxious for me to have everything she hadn't.  When my mother was a girl, she'd attended Catholic school at St. Joseph's with her siblings for the $1 reduced tuition, not the $3 paid by her more affluent counterparts.  Her dad, a house painter, repaired the church and school's paint job so his children could go to Catholic school, making their sacraments in a timely fashion.  None of my mother's siblings attended the more expensive Catholic high schools.  Such tuition would have been too extravagant.  While my father trained his horses and rented stables, we could pay, and my mother had high hopes for me.  I was to make friends among the New Orleans area affluent and meet all the "right people." Please understand: my mother was no snob, and I loved her more than anything in the world.  However, she'd been fed an untruth by the learned establishment, deluded into thinking that rich people were "classy."  We all found out the ragged truth in a very short time.

Many of the students of this bastion of the established order were witches, bullies, and privileged brats who deserve a place beside Osama bin Laden in hell.  They believed that their proverbial "shit didn't stink" and loved picking on someone whose father trained racehorses.  I hated most of them with a passion, and I soon learned to look upon their misguided superiority with scorn.  To this day, I hate bullies and all they stand for.

Recently, some of these same people friended me on Facebook. They now want to kiss up to me because I've published some books--name droppers to the end.  I was polite with these women.  Unlike them, I'm not a bully or a rude person, but I reminded them of their behavior towards me and other less boisterous and less "affluent" people.  I let them know I didn't want to be reminded of the "good old days." To me, they weren't good. To the new year and erasing bad memories.