I guess I always knew my childhood was different from other children’s lives.  The children I read about in my collection of books, always portrayed a home with a picket fence in front and a mother who baked cookies for her children and a father who went off to work and came home at night.  Sure my mom was at home but our home consisted of a few rooms behind her beauty shop.  And Dad’s business was in the garage painting signs or trimming windows at the local department store.

My world of play was my imagination. I never thought that we were poor, but I knew money wasn’t plentiful either.  There wasn’t an abundance of toys but that didn’t matter.  I could always figure out something creative to do.

One day, when I was 7, I discovered a beautiful round beauty shop mirror stored under my mom and dad’s bed.  I pulled it out and cautiously leaned it against the bed.  I could see all of myself so I began to dance around in front of it, practicing the dance steps I had learned at tap class.

Suddenly the mirror slipped and crashed into many pieces.  I was horrified!  I remembered my mother telling me that if you broke a mirror you would have 7 years of bad luck.  I thought, maybe if no one knows about it, there won’t be bad luck, so I carefully took the pieces out the back door and hid them in some tall grass in the back yard.

Of course Mom found them.  She didn’t get after me but I felt terrible because I knew I had broken something very expensive.  In the midst of all the turmoil I did some quick calculations and figured that I would have bad luck until I was 14 years old.  (I remember turning 14 and thinking the curse is finally off!)