Through The Looking Glass

by Gloria (38-A-1)

I guess my story is different simply because it is true to the "pattern" laid down by Psychologists in general, and no other TV that I know follows this pattern at all. I wore dresses till three or four years old, my hair in long curls till six and one half years old. But, so did half the infant boys of that period. I wore "sissy" Buster Brown hats and suits (patterned after a "bad boy" comic strip), but so did many other boys in our small town. And, I find that I have al- most no recollection of all this. After all, I did not know whether I was a boy or a girl, nobody told me!

I remember my neighbor and playmate, with his straight "dutch bob" he made a perfect Buster Brown, while my own "naturally curly" hair did not make for perfection. My little friend succumbed to "infantile paralysis" at five, I remember him in his beautiful casket, I could not understand death. I remember my mother combing my curls with resulting pain, her twisting the hair around her finger to fall in a perfect curl, my getting them caught in the belt of the old treadle sewing machine, and most vividly of all the trip to the barber where I was shorn of my long curls midst tears and cries of protest. Each Auntie received a curl, the forelock with its white ribbon intact, joined mother's keepsakes, I have it today, as soft and silky and as perfectly curled as it was that fateful day fifty five years ago.

I never had many close friends while growing up through the first six grades of school, and no girl playmates whatever. Consequently I was shy around girls, speechless and bashful to the nth degree. But I always envied them their pretty frocks, their lighthearted camera die, their skipping games, jacks and playing house, all of which were de- nied me as a boy. I think, from my earliest recollection, I would have much preferred being a girl.

Dad was a "land salesman" in my youth. One of a group who took rail cars of local farmers (all farmers were rich in those days) to far away New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle, Missouri, the Dakotas, Florida and even up to Starbuck, Canada, selling that new land in large tracts. Mother and we boys (I had one baby brother now) followed in those primitive trains, stopping at those early day railroad restaurants and hotels. Naturally I changed schools often, and did not make many

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