Happy Birthday, Frank Parker!

Good morning!

Well, I don't know that Frank Parker is still alive out there.  If so, he's 82 years old today and I wish him a very happy day and year to come.

I don't know Frank Parker very well, but I know it's his birthday because once, in eighth grade when we were all very young and much younger than eighth-graders are today, a group of us sat around before math class confiding our birthdays to one another. I'll never forget Frank's nice freckled face, confiding with a blush and a laugh, that his birthday was on April Fool's!  I thought it was a wonderful and funny day to have a birthday, and the funny thing  is that I have remembered Frank on every April 1st since then, although I have practically never seen him again.

This important conflab took place on the lower floor of Brownsville Junior High School in an airy pleasant classroom where we were all learning advanced arithmetic.  My, I'm glad I took that class.  Even though  I had struggled in vain with beginning Algebra,  my little rat brain took in arithmetic with no problem whatsoever, and I learned many, many handy things that had never stuck with me before, if, indeed, they'd ever been taught---such as how to figure what percentage number A is of number B.  It is very convenient to know how to figure percentages, or was, in the days before the computer came to take our brains away.  And I learned that I was capable of adding many numbers together at lightning speed without a piece of paper, and doing many other calculating tricks in my head as my own brain devised them.  I loved that class.

Frank and I and the rest of the birthday people in that little group of chatterers all went on to Brownsville High School the next year and found that we'd skipped a grade.  The Texas School System decided that young  Texans needed twelve years of school, where we in the past had done just fine with only eleven.  The adjustment was made by having everyone presently in school just skip a grade and nominally jump to a grade higher the next year.  Actually, that jump may have taken place a year earlier--I can't quite remember now what grade it was that I skipped.  But I remember that pleasant afternoon with my friends in that leafy classroom, before the teacher came in, as if it were yesterday. YAZZYBEL