living in clare

several times in my life we lived in clare at my grandmas house.usually,the reason was my dads status in the u.s.army. the first time was when i was about 6 months old and my mom and i lived there while dad was in korea. second time was shortly after my sister was born and he was in the process of being transferred to some little army assignment not to far from clare in a place called luddington mi. third time i mentioned in a post awhile back (happy sgt pepper day) was before we went to germany. that lasted a little over 6 months,from june '67 till dec '67. i enrolled in school @clare junior high and had a fairly good time.

one of the strangest things was riding the bus to school. the trip took forever,but had made some friends and it wasn't too bad after a while.we were the first kids picked up,and almost the last to be dropped off. still can't figure out why that was.

i had already been smoking cigarettes for a couple of months, so naturally i fell in with the"bad crowd". which wasn't actually so bad, we were just a little "different" in that we broke some rules. you know,must stay on campus, that sort of thing. oh,and the smoking,which of course was illegal.

another thing about being there was the fact that, even though our parents had been born and raised in that town, my sister and i were not considered "locals". i know there have been dozens of movies with that theme and i can testfy that most of that was true. now,with my dad moving us around every 2 years or so (thank you u.s. army) i had learned how to fit in fairly well anyplace i moved to. mostly places where everbody had known each other since birth.and sometimes it was hard to be accepted. clare was no exception and was probably worse than others, being such a small, farming type community. it was also a little difficult because i knew we weren't going to be there very long, so perhaps i didn't try as hard to fit in. except as i said ,with the bad crowd.

i could go on and on about this, but i've already said enough for now,and haven't even got to the last time we lived in clare. oh well, guess i'll save that for another post...