It was the late 1950s, and I was a painfully shy and lonely teenage girl who was nearsighted and wore glasses. Not only glasses, but horror of all horrors, the ugly blue plastic kind with wings. My parents and I had just moved to a small apartment in Birmingham, Alabama’s Southside, in an area where I didn’t know a soul. That fall, I would be attending a new high school, where I would be the “new girl.” An only child, I had always longed for brothers and sisters, and all my life I had been wishing I could find a place where I belonged, where I might somehow fit in.
While waiting around for school to start, I had nothing to do. But I soon discovered, right down the street from our apartment, a charming little spot called Caldwell
