"I was built too close to the ground!", my mother used to say and we would all laugh. She was five-foot-two and said she suffered mightily from being a short person. So she was pretty sympathetic to my problems as a short and skinny child. But I don't think she ever really appreciated how I felt about being called PeeWee by my brother and father...she said I should be proud that they loved me enough to give me a nickname. So I learned to live with PeeWee.

But when the kids at school started singing "Puddin' Head Jones was fat and funny, dumber than sticks and stones", a song that was popular for a while during my grammar school days, I would fly into a rage and try to do battle regardless of my size. A mistake a small person should not make!

"Take that back", I remember yelling at the top of my lungs, "take it back!", but I don't think anybody ever did. And when I told my mother about it in great indignation, she said "Now, Maureen, at least they like you well enough to tease you...just don't pay any attention to them." I never understood her viewpoint that it was better to be noticed in a negative way than not to be noticed at all! I wonder if I would have reacted differently if I had actually been a "fat" Jones...the irony was that I was very thin as a child!

One time, though, she expressed some indignation herself. That was the day that Sister Gertruda sent me home from school because my dress was too short. I walked home in tears, ashamed and humiliated, feeling very put upon. When I told Mother about it, her face became very angry-looking, but she didn't say very much to me.

She put a different dress on me and drove me back to school, where she walked me into the classroom to my desk and walked out to find Sister Godfrey, the principal, giving Sister Gertruda a withering look on her way out the door. I have no idea what transpired Sister Godfrey's office, but Sister Gertruda never commented again on my clothing.

Some time later, I was enrolled in dancing classes and learned tap, acrobatic and ballet. I hated every minute of them because I felt so ugly compared to the other kids. But I practiced faithfully, and my parents beamed with pride when I appeared in recitals. So I began to feel like maybe I was an okay kid, at least for a while...