Free Spoken from the Heart by Laura Bush Page A

Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the planets, the glowing pink of Venus or the distant fire of Jupiter, as her mother had done for her. And she would say, "Laura, look at the sky, because it won't look like this again for another year.
    "Look up," she would say, "Laura, look up."

    But I wasn't the only one gazing up at that all-encompassing sky. Amid baseball diamonds, backyard slides, and sandlots, another child was listening to the croak of frogs and watching for the stars. That boy was George W. Bush. My Midland childhood was his as well. We were the same age, and only about ten blocks separated our two homes, his on Ohio, mine on Princeton. My elementary school friends Mike Proctor and Robert McCleskey played catch with George; his dad, George H. W. Bush, coached the local Little League. The Bushes lived in Midland from the time George was three until the year 1959, but the closest he and I ever came to meeting was passing each other in the hallways of the seventh grade at San Jacinto Junior High.

    By age twelve, I was old enough to ride my bike on a Saturday morning to the Rexall drugstore for a ham sandwich. But, like most twelve-year-old girls, I longed to do more grown-up things.
    In Midland, our first escape came directly from Hollywood. For two hours in the plush seats and darkened rooms of the downtown movie houses, we were transported to Europe or back in time. The women were glamorous and the men dapper, everyone was a wit, and there was almost always a happy ending. We never imagined that the Wild West was actually a movable set on a back lot, that each looming mountain was the backside of the same Hollywood hill, or that the acres of picture-perfect New England snows were manufactured under blue California skies by giant ice machines. Our lives grew as large as those on the celluloid reels that filled the screen. We went to the movies nearly every weekend.
    On Saturday afternoons, Mother would load my friends and me into the car and drive down to the Yucca Theater, where we would rush to the ticket line. The Yucca showed mostly family fare or westerns. But we vaguely knew there was more to Hollywood. Once, as soon as Mother had waved to us and driven out of sight, we raced around to the other downtown theater, the Ritz, to watch the film Blue Denim, about teenage pregnancy, a subject that was all but taboo in Midland. Carol Lynley, the star, played a fifteen-year-old girl. She herself was only seventeen.
    Boys and girls paired off early in Midland. Before elementary school ended, a small frenzy had built around trading disks, flat circles engraved with our names. In the sixth grade, I was convinced that a boy was going to ask me to trade disks with him. After school, I dragged Mother to the Kruger Jewelry store to buy a gold-plated disk. He never asked. Another boy, Robert McCleskey, did invite me to the Yucca Theater to see Gone With the Wind and still remains one of our best friends.
    By seventh grade, boys began calling for what we dubbed "Daddy dates." Girls sat in the backs of the cars with their adolescent escorts while the boys' fathers drove. I had one "Daddy date" after I turned thirteen, which not coincidentally was the year I traded in my thick glasses for hard contact lenses that sat right on top of my blue eyes. My date was Kevin O'Neill, whose brother Joe would be the one to introduce me to George W. Bush almost twenty years later. Kevin invited me to a dance, and his father, Mr. O'Neill, a wealthy oilman who had come to Midland from Philadelphia, drove us. By age fourteen, chaperoning parents became increasingly superfluous. Fourteen was the age when most Texas kids got their driver's licenses.
    Regan Kimberlin was my best friend at San Jacinto Junior High, and she loved being behind the wheel. She had raven black hair, green eyes, and a throaty laugh, and she had attended almost every school in Midland, including second grade at Sam Houston Elementary with George. Regan's mother, Wanda, was on about the