Although I was born in San Diego during WW II, my parents were from New Orleans and that’s where I grew up.  I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools through high school.  My parents, George and Liz, were quite the couple.  They loved entertaining and had lots of friends, and their friends’ kids were my friends.

You’d have thought, with such gregarious parents, that I’d be an outgoing fool, but I wasn’t.  I was a wallflower from the get-go.  I didn’t like attention drawn to myself.  In fact, I liked being by myself a lot, because I was a dreamer.  I devoured books for hours on end.  I thought I was an artist and would draw pictures all the time, mostly of horses.  Never got good at it!

I’m the oldest of five children, and the six years between me and the next sibling made me a built-in babysitter.  This was okay until I hit my mid teens and began to have a life, and I really wanted a life without little brothers and sister tagging along.

School, for me, was an evil necessity.  I managed to be an average student, and back in those days parents didn’t help with homework except to say go do it.

My best memories:

• riding my bicycle to the lakefront, pretending I was on horseback somewhere out west
• paying my seven cents to take the city bus to downtown New Orleans and wandering around the shopping district
• lying in a great patch of clover at night, with my two guinea pigs, looking up at the sky through treetops
• reading Walter Farley’s Black Stallion series, over and over again
• the day someone invented air conditioning and we got one
• the day someone invented television and we got one
• the rainy Mardi Gras day that we stayed home, watched the parades on TV, and my father bounced Mardi Gras beads and trinkets off the TV screen for us to catch
• the excitement of hurricane preparation
• the fearsome thrill of sitting indoors during the hurricane, watching it through the window

 I left New Orleans when I was 18 ~~ for my first big adventure.