Laura Wilcox Jenkins:  

Life At times, I feel as though I've been out of High School for only about a decade. At other times, I look upon those days like they happened in a movie or I read about them in a book. Since graduation, my life has gone like this: work, get married, move 3 times, have baby boy, move up to No. Calif., have baby boy #2, move, then move back to So. Calif., have baby boy #3, buy house in Palmdale, have baby boy #4, sell home and move to Frederick, MD, stay put for 8 whole years, then move back to So. Calif. Move back to family home in Sylmar, help sis with twin pregnancy and subsequent care of twins, then move to Lancaster, CA. A move to Colorado (Broomfield, between Boulder and Denver) for eight years; then, yet another job transfer and a move to Scottsdale, Arizona. Besides the moves and boy-raising, there were part-time jobs, attempts to get a college education, a crisis or two; plus life's inevitable ups and downs and joys and sadnesses peppered throughout. Basically, however, God has blessed me and my whole family. We became grandparents to a beautiful baby girl in 2016. My husband will be retiring soon and we will most likely be moving back to Colorado, God Willing. School Ask two different people from two different eras of my school life to describe me, and you'd think they were talking about two different people. I alternated between being painfully shy (especially in elementary school) to extremely talkative and at times even outgoing. Sometimes I could go whole days barely saying a word, another day I'd be singing a solo, or auditioning for a part, or being reprimanded for talking too much in class. My poor parents, they didn't know which Laura I was from day to day! Jr. High can be summed up in one word: insecurity. Thankfully, I knew some of the best people EVER, so my self-esteem didn't suffer irreparable damage. Kevin and I walked home from school and would challenge each other to a game of ping-pong every once in a while on my parent's lanai. Yvonne and I met in Mrs. Weiser's Girl's Glee class and I found out there was someone else in jr. high who liked Simon and Garfunkel over Bobby Sherman! I remember having debates in foods class over who was better: the Beatles or the Monkees! Loretta, Patty, and Diane were the fellow debate-ees. Patty and I also shared a math class together, we were convinced our teacher was really a bee disguised as a human. He had all the quirky characteristics. So we put a dead bee in a lovely little cotton lined box on his desk to let him know that his secret identity was discovered. When school resumed, we had a different teacher and we thought WE were responsible. It was quite humbling. One of my fondest memories of High School was participating in the annual "It's a White Christmas" tradition, otherwise known as jumping the fences and decorating the campus of Sylmar High with white toilet paper! The cops showed up and I couldn't find a way to get back over the fence; they caught me pathetically try...Expand for more