Chapter 3: Settling In and Meeting New People

It took a month before the jibes about my riding the short bus started to dwindle. I’d pretty well established I wasn’t in any way handicapped and slowly I was beginning to be treated just like another ‘new kid’ in class. What made things a little easier was two different occasions when I was approached by first a student and later, a staff member.

“You’re Joel Timmins, aren’t you?” an attractive young lady asked as she approached me in the hallway near my locker.

“Uh ... yeah, I’m him,” I managed, curious at what this was about.

“I wanted to thank you for helping my younger brother Warren on the bus each day. He says you’re really nice to all the kids and he’s happy to see you each day.”

“Oh ... uh ... well, thanks. Warren’s a nice guy,” I managed.

“I’m Teresa Johnson, his sister. I’m a junior here. I understand you’re a senior.”

“Yes, that’s right. We just moved to Oregon from Iowa this summer,” I said.

“Well, it’s nice meeting you, Joel. I’m sure we’ll see each other around,” she smiled before walking away.

That was a pleasant surprise. And, she was a very attractive young lady too. She was quite conservatively dressed, considering how some of the other girls appeared in my classes. I’d have to keep her in mind for a possible future date ... perhaps.

The second occasion was when I was scheduled to meet with the boys’ counselor. Mr. Pankhurst met with all the new students I was told.

“Hello, Joel. Welcome to Clarksville High. How are you settling in?” he asked in a pleasant tone.

“Pretty good, Sir. No complaints,” I said, waiting to see what he wanted.

“I understand you come to school on the special needs bus. That must have caused you a couple of problems,” he said with a slight smile.

“Well, I did get a few comments about it, but they seemed to have dwindled down to almost nothing. I guess most kids have figured out I’m not ... well ... special needs.”

He laughed. “You mean, they don’t think you’re a ‘retard.’ I’ve heard all those kinds of ugly remarks before, I assure you.” His tone was quite lighthearted.

“Yeah ... well ... I don’t get to spend a lot of time with some of the other kids, so I guess I don’t hear what’s said behind my back. So far, it hasn’t caused me any big problems.”

“I understand that you’ve been helping out the driver loading the kids on and off the bus. Is that true?”

“Yeah ... well Mrs. Tasker has a bad back and it was something I could do to speed up the process, so I pitched in. I don’t mind it. It’s kind of nice to help out the kids. They don’t get to interact with other kids much I guess. I know them all by name now and we greet each other.”

“That’s very good of you, Joel. Did you know that you can earn extra credits for what’s called community involvement? That’s what we use as a general term for volunteering.”

“No, I didn’t know that. It doesn’t seem like much to earn extra credits. It really doesn’t take up much of my time,” I admitted.

“Doesn’t matter. The fact that you do it is the important thing. I’ve talked to Shelly McGuire and she’s very complimentary about your helping. Most of those kids don’t have much to look forward to except being in school. You’re making their day a little better just by helping them. Well done, Joel. Keep up the good work and I’ll make a note to check in with you before the end of the first semester.”

“Yes, Sir. Thank you, Sir,” I said, rising to leave.

My meeting with Mr. Pankhurst was a pleasant surprise. It made me feel pretty good, just as he said my help made the kids on the bus feel pretty good.

As the fall progressed, I settled into Clarksville High and felt a lot more comfortable. I’d met some of my fellow students and while we didn’t hang out together, I seemed to have gotten over the ‘short bus’ problem and that was a relief. I’d seen Teresa Johnson several times as we passed in the hallways between classes and she never failed to say hello and smile. I always returned the gesture. One of these days I’d work up enough courage to ask her for a date. So far she was the only female I’d really gotten to know.

One thing about living over three thousand feet up is that cold nights come sooner and cold weather lasts longer. Luckily, it was a relatively dry climate, so we didn’t get a lot of gloomy weather but it did get me thinking about buying a car. In order to afford to run it, I’d need a weekend job. I thought about asking Dad, but I couldn’t see anything that I could do that would be useful. I asked around to some of my friends and none of them could come up with any suggestions. I was going to have to make do with the funds I had on hand, not a problem considering the summer job and the reward for my clean up on the packaging stores. But for now, I’d still be commuting to school on the short bus.

I know a lot of people think of Iowa as a giant farmer’s field, filled with wheat or corn or soybeans. It’s a lot more, of course. Davenport is right on the Mississippi River and a lot of barge traffic travels up and down the river through the east side of the city, across from Moline, Illinois. Interstate 80 runs right through the city and eventually ends in San Francisco. In other words, it was no small hick town, with a hundred thousand people living there.

Clarksville, however, was just the opposite. The population was about six thousand, counting the surrounding area, and the only road running through the town was Highway 26. There was a short spur of the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe rail line which serviced Dad’s plant with tank and hopper cars. There were other towns around us, of course. The closest were Redmond and Prineville, while Bend was probably the biggest town nearby. As far as I could see, we were pretty much out in the middle of nowhere.

I was enrolled in the senior computer science class and so far it had been pretty much a rehash of what I had learned in my junior year in Davenport. We weren’t into coding or anything advanced like that but we were beginning to look at how to develop and use programs to do actual work. As the course progressed, the teacher, Mr. Conradi, gave us an assignment to be completed by the end of the fall semester. It was to develop a program that could be used usefully in a small business. When I heard the assignment, I thought of all the work I put in during the summer and wondered if I could use that toward meeting the assignment objectives.

“Uh, Mr. Conradi, I wonder if I could talk to you about the assignment?” I asked, having approached him after class one afternoon.

“Certainly. Is there something you need help with?”

“Uh, actually, no, Sir. Last summer I worked at East Cascades Fertilizer,” I began. “My job was to sort out the various packaging and compile a program that would keep track of inventory and usage. The plant has a wide variety of products and labels, both for their own labels and for other customers. I was able to build a program to do both those things and link them to their billing and shipping programs so that the inventory was an immediate information source. The orders incoming would be logged and the packaging inventory deducted right away. Then, when it was shipped, any discrepancy was noted and the inventory was adjusted at that time.”