My Journey Through Life, So Far
by
Lesley Renee Charles
Chapter 5
My Senior year of High School was very memorable for me in a few ways. School started well. I was doing great in my Art classes which was something I enjoyed doing. I decided to go to college as an Art Major. I excelled at drawing and painting. I could pretty much get a drawing's perspective down the first time I sketched it. I haven't done much with that lately but I do miss it as it tended to make me relax a little.
The first bit of tragedy was about a week or two before Christmas, my mother had her first heart attack. It started out as indigestion, which got bad at a party with the women she worked with. This led to me and my older brother taking care of the house and my younger brother, who was a handful. During this time he went out on the lake near our house, it was thinly iced over and could have led to a disaster. Luckily it did not. He did not let anyone know where he was, and unfortunately my mother called and wanted to talk to him. I could not find him, so I had to tell her.
She did come home, around Christmas time, but had to do physical therapy some afternoons. Getting dinner fell to me on those days.
I finally stopped group therapy around the middle of the school year. I was mixed about that, I spent almost three years going to it. I did get a good handle on my depression.
The school year seemed to fly bye and Graduation Day came. I was happy to leave the school, but sad about leaving friends behind.
My college years were a great. I went to a local state college and worked my way through it. I was on the college work study program. I worked in the school library which I love doing. It was easy to learn the Library of Congress filing system. One of my job duties were putting the books back on the shelf. This involved putting the returned books in order on shelves behind the Circulation Desk. After they were in order on the shelves, I then had to load up a book cart. After it was loaded I would have to push the cart to the appropriate shelves in the library and put them back. I used to love to do this and during the summer, I used to love to do the fiction books, as I would read books, while no one was looking. I would also have to shelf read, this is basically making sure the books on the shelves were in order. If not, I would have to reorganize them.
I would work in the library during the summer. The summer when I was 21, an incident happened.
I was shelf reading in the upstairs part of the library, when this guy past me going out. I remember thinking that I was glad that he was leaving as I did not like the look in his eyes. I was all alone there as the upstairs librarian was out on lunch.
The guy returned and went into the row of shelves in front of where I was. I was also taking the books down while I was shelf reading and moving them to a table nearby. I was doing this so that I could put the new check-out stickers in the books. While I was still in the row of shelves, I heard a rustling in the row ahead of me, but did not really pay it much notice.
While I was at the table the guy called me over. I thought he had a question. He asked me if I wanted to get together. When he noticed that I did not understand, he directed my attention to his erect penis which was sticking out of his sweat pants. I said no, and turned and left. He hung around for a little while and then left. Right after, the shock set in and I was afraid that he would return and force me.
I told one of the librarians, and she said I should report it. Unfortunately, I chose not to as I was afraid that the police would think that I asked for it as I was effeminate acting.
