CAROLINE'S CORNER: PRETTY IS AS PRETTY THINKS

Once upon a time a girlchild was born with a colossal inferiority complex. The child grew and grew and then she grew some more. By the time she reached the seventh grade, everyone in the class was forced to literally look up to her. Inhabitants of the land were not kind. They made such remarks as, "When are you going to stop growing?" and "How is the weather up there?"

Of course Genevieve had no idea when she was going to stop growing, and the weather up there was gloomy and dreary.

The child's parents tried to make her feel beautiful. Every day they said, "Genevieve, stand up straight and you won't look so tall." Of course that statement made no sense to a 12-year-old girl, and she slumped and developed a dowager's hump.

Genevieve also was embarrassed by her multitude of freckles. This was in the days before models in "Seventeen" were coated with freckles. Genevieve tried to hide the speckles, and she longed for creamy peachy skin like her cousin Rose had.

Genevieve was self-conscious because she lived on the wrong side of Twenty Mile Bottom. In her small mind, she lived on the wrong side of the tracks. This idea became more entrenched in her baby brain when the librarian at her school remarked that the children who lived across the bottom were not as smart as those in town.

The girlchild grew into womanhood and proved the librarian to be wrong. She had friends and coworkers who believed in her because she was Genevieve.

Freckles came into style. Her freckles faded and were replaced by age spots. Her friends all had age spots, and she fit right in with the group.

She moved far away from Twenty Mile Bottom and because of her lack of sense of direction, she did not know on which side of the bottom she lived.

Genevieve grew to enjoy being tall because she could eat more and the calories had more places to hide. She could reach things in high places without getting on stools or ladders. She concluded that long legs were the best legs.

All things considered, Genevieve was proud of herself because she had outgrown her self-imposed humiliations of childhood.

Then, when she was 50, Genevieve went out to eat with Auntie, who said, "Cousin Tony saw Cousin Rose last week. He thought she was so beautiful, and her skin was creamy peachy. He thought she was a really neat person."

Being the jokester that she is, Genevieve asked, "What about me?"

"Oh, you know Cousin Tony really loves you," Auntie replied.

Genevieve felt privileged to be loved by her cousin, but for a short time she fell back into her old mode of feeling like the freckled, string bean child from across the bottom.

The moral of the story is: "You can take the girlchild out of Twenty Mile Bottom, but you can't take Twenty Mile Bottom out of the girlchild."