Growing Up and Liking It

As if Russ and I have not had enough great travel already this year, today we are enjoying the best place we have been in a long time, the Inn at Palmetto Bluff.  As I write this I am sitting in an Adirondack chair under the shade of a three hundred year old live oak tree draped in Spanish moss, overlooking the wide expanse of the May river and it’s tidal marsh.

We are here as guests of our great friends Michelle and Richard who are getting married tonight in the darling waterside chapel, an occasion of great celebration.  After yesterday afternoon’s croquet and bocce tournaments and Cajun dance dinner party complete with moan inducing oysters it is hard to imagine how it can get any better, but I am sure it will exceed my wildest imagination for the perfect wedding.

Breakfast this morning was at a place called Buffalo’s where you had your choice of the biscuit bar or other even more fattening items made to order.  When one of the categories of offerings is “Sticky” you know I  had a hard time finding something low calorie to eat.  Russ had the best grits on earth, which I can verify because I had a one orgasmic bite.

Between breakfast and my upcoming massage Russ, my friend Hannah and I rode our cottage assigned one-speed bikes through a good portion of the 20,000-acre property.  Thank goodness for this exercise to help counteract the intake portions of the day.

As we peddled the winding paths through the forest, me in my white linen shirt, hiked-up so as not to catch in the chain, I had a strong flash back to a movie I saw in fourth grade called “Growing Up and Liking it.”

One day, late in the school year the boys were taken from our classroom and sent to another room while the girls remained in our classroom with all the blinds drawn.  Our teacher, Miss Stoelting, turned on the projector to a movie that opened with a girl, much older than our 9 year-old selves, maybe she was 12, riding a one-speed bike in the dappled sunlight wearing a cute white culottes.

The music played and the male announcer started talking about how girls grow up and change… the movie, made by the Kotex company, was all about getting your period.  As fourth graders, we were horrified.  It was all news to us.  We were a test class to see if fourth graders needed to know this information.  We did not.

A soon as the movie was over we all ran to the girl’s room, filling every stall.  I remember pulling my underpants down to see if I was bleeding and calling out to my friends to see if theirs had started, sure that it was eminent because that was why they had showed us the movie.

When we returned to the classroom our upstanding teacher told us to lie to the boys and tell them we had seen a movie about dolls.  Upon their return the boys told us they had seen a movie about cars and we told them our grown-up sanctioned lie.

I so badly wanted to know if the boys really saw a movie about cars, but never had the nerve to ask them.  If you happen to be one of those boys please call and let me know.

Once the shock about the growing-up part subsided my big take away from that movie was that you could still ride your bike when you have your period.  I still laugh about the 1960’s propaganda title, and the fact that the narrator was a man.

During those adolescent years there was no liking growing up.  You just wanted to be grown up. But man, today enjoying another great rite-of-passage, a wedding, I am so glad that I am a grown up and can still ride a bike whenever I want.