"Ponies, Pigs and Their Tails, and a Little Girl on the Way to School"

To get to school when we lived on Osborne Lane, I would walk to the intersection near our house and wait for the yellow bus.

When I was in 2^nd or 3^rd grade or so, I had long straight fine hair that easily got scraggly and fly-away.  Mom would often pull it up into a high rubber-banded ponytail before I left for school.  You know the hair-do -- it would swing back and forth when I shook my head, like a real pony’s tail.

That high ponytail would barely last the walk to the bus stop, never mind the bus ride and the entire day at school.  My hair would start slipping and sliding and everything would fall apart.  Besides ... it made me feel like a dork.  Reacting to my uncooperative hair and my overall self-consciousness, I would loosen the pesky rubber band as soon as I got on the bus and let my hair fall where it would.  Doing so felt disloyal to Mom, somehow -- and still does -- but I did it anyway.  I never told Mom how I felt about that hairstyle, and she never seemed to notice that the ponytail was gone when I came home from school.

It occurs to me now that sometimes Mom put my hair into the dreaded pigtails.  At least in a ponytail, maybe I could pretend that I was a horse, and I liked horses.  But pigs and their curly-cue tails and my straight hair!?  Ugh.  This ‘do was essentially two ponytails, sort of, that swung high on either side of my head, above my ears.  One would always be a little higher than the other, or the part in my hair would be crooked.  The lack of what I later recognized as symmetry bothered me.  The pigtails never lasted very long on my head either. 

This memory represents a very early attempt at choosing my own path, which was not easy.