"For now let's not worry about who I am, please, finish your story."
"What makes you think I wasn't finished?"
"You set up a dichotomy at the beginning."
"Yeah, fair enough," she mused "new school, old school."
"Please continue..."
"Ok. So we moved from an apartment to a rental house and that meant changing schools mid-semester. The "new school" was an older building without the multi-use rooms or anything interactive, old and boring and like standard nothing nice, but the school yard was amazing. At that school, I lived to be outside with the old trees, the playground, the view of the decorative candy store window changing displays across the street."
"They dropped me off in one of the rooms after asking the teacher briefly if she had room for one more and then she promptly seemed to forget all about me. Apparently the other students had some sort of reading plans, I never got one, and though I can't imagine who else she thought was going to give me one, she was surprised. Maybe she thought they had moved me from another room rather than another school. Finally she decided that it was too far into the year to be bothering with that and I should just read whatever I wanted to read, but all that was available was a bunch of old fun with dick and jane books. I didn't really know how to read yet, not really, or I didn't think so, but I did manage to learn to read the fun with dick and jane books. 1973."
"The one bit of instruction that I do remember getting from the teacher was a bit of her life philosophy which she thought she would give us to live our lives by. It was called ME-3. This, she had said, was a guideline that we should use to make any and all decisions throughout our lives. 1 - God. 2 - Family. 3 - Me. That should be our order of priority."
"So as a child then, how do you make decisions where God is your top priority?"
"Man, I have no idea, but ME-3 is a catchy name for a life philosophy."
