The Rockstar and the Explosion

Her mother was a rockstar.

At least that’s what everyone thought. Every day the kids at school would gather around and ask for her mother’s autograph and every day she would have to explain, yet again, that her mother wasn’t Cher.


It was fun, to pretend her mother was someone else and that her life was bigger and better than a cramped trailer sitting on someone else’s property on the edge of an orange grove.

But the truth was, strangely, sweeter than her imaginary life. She never had new clothes or fancy toys.

She ate things like “crap on a shingle” and 18 different varieties of “let’s see what’s in the fridge” casserole. Every October her mother would bring home the JC Penney toy catalogue, hand her a permanent marker and tell her to make her wishlist for Christmas. And every December 25th, she would receive, one toy from her wishlist and the few toys her parents could afford through carefully and meticulously saving box tops and wrappers and UPC codes to send in for some special offer. She never really understood that it was un-cool to wear a Kool-Aid hat or snuggle a stuffed pea pod from the Del Monte vegetable company, not that it really mattered.





She knew how hard her father worked; how long he was away from the house, how tired and ragged he seemed as he trudged though the door of the trailer late at night. She knew his smell – cigarettes and sweat - and she knew she would always remember how he looked as he came through that door the night of the explosion. She had nearly lost him that night. She could hardly recognize him now, half of his face burned and disfigured. In that moment she knew, more than any other moment, just how sweet her reality really was and how she would not…could not trade it.

Run Around Silly

It was one of those summer days. One of those summer days that are so hot, so sticky, she couldn’t possibly imagine putting clothes on and walking out the front door.

So instead, she took her clothes off and snuck out the back door. Not all of them mind you, she kept her underwear on. The grass in the field was nearly as tall as she was and littered with wild flowers; perfect for running, perfect for hiding, perfect for laying down and watching the shapes the clouds took. This day, however, she had just barely reached the edge of her field of flowers before she was discovered.

“Girl, get back in here and put some clothes on!” her mother yelled from the window.

She trudged back, defeated, her head hanging in disappointment. She would not feel the flowers brush softly against her legs or the grass tickle her belly button; not today anyway. She stomped up the stairs, through the door, down the hall and into her room. She begrudgingly pulled the thinnest t-shirt she could find over her head and a pair of her little sister’s shorts over her butt. Yes, they were too small for her, but she figured the less fabric she had on today, the better. As she passed by the window on her way to the kitchen, she spied her little sister on the edge of her field.

How dare she? The girl pounded through the trailer, out the door, down the steps and across the backyard until she reached the edge of the field.

Where was she? I just saw her…. “Tag! You’re it!” A slap on the back and a rush of air was all she felt and she knew that today, she would catch her. She may have been the bigger sister, but she could not run nearly as fast or zig nearly as well as her sister zagged. But today, today felt like the day that she would finally win. She ran. She ran so fast that often she lost sight of what she was running after, having to pause and reassess the situation, only to be smacked on the back again and laughed at as her sister flew effortlessly past. If she was going to win, she had to come up with a plan. She ran again, around the table where her mother and the neighbor sat having tea, three times around the pond and twice around the cars. She ran past the pigpens and through the chickens, scattering them every which way. She ran past the bushes along the side of the trailer and followed her sister’s trail towards the fruit trees. She ran and ran and ran until her feet literally came out from under her. She was flying!
She was falling! There was a cracking sound that she was sure was her back as she hit the ground flat and hard. There was a sharp pain in the back of her head. She couldn’t breath and a single tear swelled and slowly made its way down her dirt-smudged cheek. She could hear her mother calling, running, but she could not answer. She had no air to breath. Someone had stolen it from her. It would be several more seconds before the air would return to her lungs, but even then all she could offer was a guttural sob coked out from her tightened lungs. As she was briskly picked up from the ground and wrapped in her mother’s arms she could hear the laughter and the quick dialogue.

“I told you that if you kept eating those apple cores, an apple tree would soon sprout from the top of your head, didn’t I?” Her mother chuckled as she carefully untangled a branch from the white strands of the girl’s hair. While running under the low branches of the tree, her hair had become tangled on a branch, yanking her off her feet, slamming her to the ground and breaking off the branch in the process. That was what had happened, but that was not what she believed. She believed what her mother had said, that a tree had finally sprouted form her head and that the force of the branch pushing it’s way through is what slammed her to the ground. She pushed away from her mother, her eyes darting back and forth, terrified of what would happen next. “You’d better keep moving,” her mother warned. “If you stop for too long, your feet might become rooted in the ground and then you’ll have to sleep out here with the rest of the trees.”

How could this happen? She couldn’t fathom it, but she knew that of her mother said it, it must be true. I mean, consider her track record: she had sprouted that branch after eating one too many apple cores. Just as her ponderings came to a fevered head, she saw her sister streak past just as she felt the slap on her back and heard the laughter. “Good,” she thought. This provided two opportunities: the chance to keep moving so her feet would not root and the chance to beat her sister at this ridiculous game. She chased her sister through the field, across the rows of carefully planted vegetables (mother screaming in the background, barely discernible, to get out of the garden), around the pond again and around the barn
once,
twice,
three times.
This had to stop,
four times,
five times.
She had an idea! She would change directions! Her sister would never suspect it and she would finally catch her and beat her at this ridiculous game!
Six times,

Switch!

Eyes wide with terror, bodies twisting, trying to stop the inevitable, heels digging into the soft brown clay. Bad idea! Bad idea!

Darkness,
stars,
throbbing.

Enough.

Summer Night Scare

The girl and her sister shared a bed. A twin bed inside a room the size of a closet, in a hollow tin trailer in the middle of an orange grove, and they loved it. The moment the lights went out and the goodnight kisses were dispersed, the whispers and giggling began. As all good sisters do, they shared secrets and made up stories, argued, laughed and plotted their mischief for the next day. This night was no different. Well, maybe a little different.

“Girls, quiet down in there.” The sweet voice of their mother called from the coveted family room, the one with the television shining so brightly, taunting them with toys they could not afford and lifestyles they thought they’d never know.

More giggles, more whispering.

“Girls, last warning,” came their father’s voice.

But they did not hear. They could not hear above the scheming and mischief that brewed between them. They continued as they had all along. Under their covers, they were protected, safe from anything in the night that meant to do them harm. The fact that there were heavy footsteps heading towards their room meant nothing to them under the protective shield of the comforter. As long as nothing, not a toe, not a finger and certainly not a hair, poked out or dangled or escaped the blanket in anyway, they would be safe. Well, that usually worked anyway.

Usually, but not tonight. Tonight, two hands breached the sanctuary of the blankets and pulled her out into the harsh light of the hallway. There were no words, no glances; only the silent tug of the hand as she was led down the hallway. A door opened and those same two hands gently, but firmly sat her down on the cold, metal steps that led from the trailer down into the hazy darkness of the lawn. She stretched her t-shirt down over her Strawberry Shortcake underwear, pink painted toenails peeked out from under the hem. The door closed with a click and there was silence.

What just happened? How did I end up here? How did the security of the blanket fail me? It’s supposed to protect me! It’s supposed to protect me! Her thoughts were sharply interrupted as the symphony of the evening resumed. A chorus of crickets to her right, tuned up for their big performance. A squirrel chattered in frustration. The throaty calls of the alligators in the nearby canal alarmed the frogs whose own guttural burps of sound served as a warning to their friends. Silence again, this time heavy with anticipation.

Splash!

The thrashing of the alligator hitting the water and snapping its jaws shut around its prey brought the symphony of the evening to its climatic crescendo. And then there was silence. The howl of a lone coyote reverberated through the night air as an afterthought. She realized she was shaking, not from the cold, but from the feeling that the blackness and the symphony would swallow her whole. Just as every nerve ending, every skin cell, every hair on her body stood on end and felt as though they would explode, she heard it. The rhythm, steady and strong like the beat of a giant’s heart. Her eyes scanned the blackness, fearful of what she would find and then she saw him. Glowing white in the pale moonlight, circling and diving, coming closer and closer with each turn. He passed so close she felt she could reach out and stroke the stars that shimmered on his back. He was radiant, mesmerizing; she could not look away. When he turned his head, giant yellow saucers glared at her, menacing, threatening. His beak opened and as he shrieked, so did she. The door opened and the hands reached out and pulled her into the safety of the arms. She looked up, gratefully and frantically searching her mother’s face.

“Are you ready to go to sleep now?”

One Summer Day

The strength of the summer sun was no match for the thin t-shirt she had quickly thrown on earlier that morning. Her hand almost indiscernibly quivered as she poised it just above the leafy green surface of the water. Her blonde hair, haphazardly cut in a crooked line across her forehead, matted to one side by the sweat that now dripped
down,
down,
down
into the murky depths below. All in one moment, the bead of sweat hit the water, they rushed the surface to devour what they assumed was their gift from above and her hand smacked, then scooped the water with the efficiency of a machine. She smiled at herself, pleased with her catch; their round, slimy bodies alternately wriggling and thrashing their tails to be free. She spread her fingers just enough to allow the water to drain through and splash back against the mossy green film covering the pond and unceremoniously dumped them into the bowl with the others.

“…25, 26, 27. Hmmm.” She squinted her eyes and studied the still rippling surface of the water. She strained her eyes a little farther and leaned a little closer. What a strange looking face that was, staring back at her; with eyes like saucers and fur like an Ewok. The face smiled, four little teeth protruding out from the bottom jaw, nearly covering the top lip. It was an odd smile, but an all too familiar one. She looked up as the creature sniffed the mocking surface of the pond.

Smells like grass.
**Sniff**Sniff**
Looks like grass.

Just as she understood where the wheels spinning in his head were taking him, he took his first, and only, carefree step out onto the surface. She dove forward in an attempt to stop the inevitable, but she was inches too late.

For a moment, the water was still. There was no movement, no ripples; it was as if the depths had swallowed him as hungrily as the tadpoles had devoured the beads of sweat. Her eyes frantically darted back and forth, searching for any sign, any movement. She had always had nightmares about this pond, its inky blackness and never-ending depths, but she couldn’t walk away from this. Not this time. She plunged her arm in, past the green film, past the menacing ink, and did not stop until the water slapped the side of her face. With her ear against the water, she could hear her heart
pounding,
pounding,
the fear of the unknown gripping her in its icy claws. She flailed her arm back and forth, in circles, but could not find what she was looking for. As she pulled back, moss and algae clung to the side of her furrowed brow and she pondered for a moment, hesitantly coming to the realization of what she must do. She gripped the edge of the abyss with both hands, digging her fingers into the soft earth, and plunged her head in, up to her shoulders. There was silence, and as she opened her eyes it stung for a moment and the fear gripped her again. She began to panic, searching wildly for the smallest glimpse of something familiar. All at once, two large eyes stared back at her. Those same four teeth shone white against the eternity of the abyss. She opened her mouth to scream, but inhaled instead. The earth gave way, her fingers frantically scratching and clawing, but finding nothing. The euphoric feeling of weightlessness encompassed her for but a moment before her mind snapped itself back to the shattering realization that she
could
not
breathe.
When she could not hold her breath anymore, she closed her eyes as tight as she could an opened her mouth. The weightlessness of the water swirled around her violently and as she drew in for what would surely be her final breath, she began to choke. Air mixed with water. Liquid became solid. And the pounding of her heart became the pounding of a hand against her back. She opened the corner of one eye. The light stung now just as the water had and the image before her was bleary, but she knew. He had saved her. Again.

“What am I going to do with the two of you?” He said.

She coughed again and turned her head to the soaking, furry figure beside her. She smiled. He was safe too.

He chuckled to himself as he picked her up in his strong arms. “Looks like the tadpoles caught you today, instead, huh?”

The Geese, A Snake and her Hero

The sweat glistened against the red-brown skin of his back even as the sun darkened his already discernible pigment. To call him a red-neck would be fair, I suppose based on his where he lived, but to look closer, his skin tone told a richer and more textured story. His great grandfather was a Pottawatomie Indian and today, he worked the soil just as his ancestors had done hundreds of years before him. With every plunge of the shovel, every swing of the hoe, his muscles contracted and relaxed sending waves of satisfactory pain radiating through his shoulders. He smiled, feeling the symbiosis of the day, the joy of earth and body moving together in unison to create something beautiful. As he paused to sponge away the sweat that was stinging his eyes and impeding his progress, he heard a sound. A sound he prayed every day he would never hear. His daughter, his blonde haired, blue-eyed angel had unleashed a chilling scream from the other side of the farm. He ran. The parched earth whispered to him with every pound of his foot, “Save her. Save her.” As he rounded the corner of the hollow tin trailer he labored so hard to provide them with, he saw it. It’s black body swayed and glistened in the remnants of the afternoon sun. Seeing it’s neck splayed out and the venom visibly pooling into droplets on the end of each fang, terror seized him. His knuckles, whitened by the tension, twisted around the grip of his machete; his dirt encrusted fingernails digging into his palm. He knew he needed to act quickly, but one wrong move, one miscalculated second could cost him her life. Just as the muscles in his legs responded to the brain’s commands to move forward, he was forced to pull back. Teesa, his wife’s favored pet, an African goose who always chased the girl around the yard, pecking mercilessly at her little apple bottom, jumped between the harbinger of death and the treasured one. Wings stretched as far out to the sides as she could, she swayed her neck from side to side, mocking the intruder. He spat in frustration. She honked in determination. This was his chance. He sprung forward, in fluid motion, swinging the machete with one arm and reaching down to grasp the still floundering tail with the other. He did not pause to verify that the head was detached. He did not relax the still throbbing muscles. The roar of the symphony of death slammed the back of his sweat filled eyes, causing him to stumble across the uneven terrain as he ran. Only when he reached the edge of the canal did he pause. He swung the bloody rope around and around and around his head, the theme music to Indiana Jones growing louder, drowning out the symphony of death. As the body flew across the canal and landed, lifeless on the far bank, he felt a tiny, soft hand slip into his. He could feel her smiling up at him, but his gaze remained fixed; fixed on the intruder, fixed on what could have been. Only once the melodies of death and victory had intertwined and slowly faded did he kneel and pull her close. He could hear them in the distance now, growing stronger and louder. Drums? It sounded like Indian drums, old, ancestral, calling to him, strengthening him. He had saved her…this time.

Dragonflies

The hollow tin feeling of the trailer was always a little unsettling. The floor would give and bounce ever so slightly as she walked across it. The doors would shudder as those of a cardboard playhouse when opened and closed. The air conditioner would fruitlessly heave tepid air up from the vents in the floor, startling her at those inopportune moments that she chose to linger over them. Vicious beams of summer sun created the sweltering mirage of heat waves off the roof just as a brief and random shower would bellow forth the grandest timpani.

The timpani would fade, “drip drip drop little April showers….” and the darkness would move on, like a drifter bored with the scenery of the town. She loved these showers. The quick, violent bursts of rain, the melodic rhythm on the hot tin roof, and most of all, the smell. The smell of the rain as it brought life and rejuvenated the grass. The smell of the grass as it stretched and glistened, offering back the rain droplets as they danced on the tips and sparkled in the fresh clear sunshine.

She could not help herself. As the timpani faded, she knew this was her chance. She knew they would come. She ran. She ran through the trailer, the entire home quaking in her wake, and flung open the door. She could hear them. They had beaten her there and her job, as it were, was now infinitely more difficult without her planned element of surprise. Slowly she crept through the shadows the sun provided against the side of the trailer. As she neared the corner and her eyes squinted against the glare of the sun off the wetness of the grass, her hand slowly and deliberately tightened around her weapon of choice. This net was her only ally is this fight. She may not have the element of surprise, but she still had the upper hand.

They were, after all, just dragonflies.

Kindergarten

I think I've finally pinpointed where my neuroses began, where all of the obsessive/compulsive, need to be liked, afraid to confront because I might hurt someone else's feelings BS came from.

I've been working on this book, "Rememberies: Memoirs of a Farm Girl," chronicling the oddness of my childhood, and it's brought up some pretty interesting "rememberies........."

There I sat, chin cupped in hand, tears streaming down my dirt-smudged face, staring at the solitary crack of light. The sound of sneakers squeaking against the freshly waxed linoleum floor faded and the click of the door left me with only deafening, maddening silence and that solitary crack of light.

This was one of those moments. One of those telltale moments wherein the I knew that from this point on, everything in life would follow this pattern. Like the raven staring at you through the window of your office building, taunting you with his shrieks, you know that something is about to happen or that this same thing - the thing that's happening to you right now - will replay itself throughout the rest of your life. Starting with this incident, from this day on, no matter what the situation, I would always be the one to take the fall. Not necessarily the one to get caught or the one to be wrong, but the one to take the fall.

I lived in a small town on the shores of a large lake. There was one stop light for the whole town, one small family owned grocery store, no McDonald's, unfathomable numbers of illegal migrant workers and orange groves and sugar cane fields as far as they eye could see. I was five, attending the only school in town, and my teacher was a large, colored woman named Ms. Bess. Now, it was the early 80’s and the 70's were still trying desperately to stay alive; all this to say, Ms. Bess had an afro worthy of an entire colony of elves or gnomes or whatever else a classroom full of five year olds could have imagined. She wore polyester pants and shirts, usually with paisley or some other hideous print and there was a definite gap between her two front teeth.

Maybe it was because the town was so small or maybe it was just the times, but Ms. Bess had the distinct authority to be judge, jury and executioner within the realm of her classroom. Nestled in the chalk tray she had a yardstick; which of course looked so much longer than 3 feet when she waved it around, threatening to take anyone who stepped out of line into the bathroom and teach them how to count the hard way.

I was bored. Endless coloring and the cold, hard mat on the floor for "nap time," generic red juice in a paper cup and Punky Brewster sneakers filled my weekdays. The kids all sat at round tables and there was this boy, this goofy looking boy with the bad haircut and glasses that were too big for his freckled face, named Frankie that sat across from me. On this fateful day, Frankie was as bored as I was and desperately searched for a distraction.

"Hey," he whispered across the table. "I wanna show you something. Look under the table." Now, lest you think the I was entirely naïve, under the table was where we also kept our backpacks, so I thought his request entirely uninteresting. He was pulled something out for me to see, but it did not come out of his backpack.

We both giggled; we were five. I had only one sister and had never seen anything like what he had before. “Draw it.”

“What?” I laughed. Had I heard him right? He couldn’t possibly want me to…

“Draw it. I double dog dare you.”

I could not resist the dare and so I drew. It was yellow construction paper. I put my index finger down flat against the paper and traced around it with a fat, brown crayon.

“That’s not right,” he hissed across the table, insulted at my attempt to portray his masculinity. I pondered for a moment and then selected a pink crayon from the box. I carefully and meticulously put a single, pink dot on the middle of the tip and triumphantly pushed the paper across the table to him. Sure, it resembled something that belonged more to a dog than a boy, but the dare had been completed. A plump, brown hand slapped angrily down on the paper before it ever had the chance to reach its intended, and giant white eyes bored through the me.

“This sumthin’ you did?” Ms. Bess asked in her way.

I swallowed hard, but said nothing. Nothing was all the excuse Ms. Bess needed. In an instant, I was yanked out of my chair by one plump, brown hand as I watched the other hand wave the yardstick around. As I stumbled and tripped behind the oversized teacher, the collective, "oooooh" of the class could be heard just as the door to the bathroom clicked closed. What went on inside that bathroom, only Ms. Bess and I knew. Sure, there could be heard the sounds of crying, begging and threatening. I could be heard saying that I wanted to call my mom; said if the teacher hit me, my dad would kill the teacher or something like that. I was scared. Ms. Bess was very big and very intimidating and the smell of sweat and Jeri-curl filled the bathroom and nauseated me. I must have been convincing because I never did get hit with that stick, but I was drug out of the bathroom and thrown into the "jail."

The jail was in a little room off the classroom. On one wall there was a small refrigerator and an old, chipped coffee pot sitting on top. On the other wall, a single counter top rested on top of two tall filing cabinets, and there were two smaller filing cabinets underneath the middle section. Ms. Bess heaved and pulled and strained until she got that middle filing cabinet out from under the counter top. I was then thrown, discarded, into the space the cabinet had occupied and the teacher heaved and pushed until that filing cabinet was completely blocking me into the tiny little space. The darkness closed in on me, even as my mind told me the walls were doing the same. I began to panic as tears flowed down my dirt-smudged face I shook without control. There was only a thin crack of light where the top of the filing cabinet did not meet up with the counter top. I stared at that crack of light, terrified as I heard the tinkling of the bell that sat on top of Ms. Bess' desk, signaling the beginning of recess. I heard the other children’s shoes squeaking against the linoleum and then marching out the door, and then, silence. I sat in complete, deafening silence and utter darkness for more than an hour. When I heard the sounds of tired feet trudging back through the door, I rejoiced, thinking that surely I would be let out. I sat there, in the dark, waiting, anticipating; I listened to the teaching and the scraping of chairs as kids fidgeted, the giggles and the whispers and then, the bell. At this point, I was certain Ms. Bess had forgotten about me, certain that if I didn't act fast I would sit there in the dark forever, or at least until the next kid got thrown into jail. I kicked and banged against the file cabinet with everything I had, but barely able to move in the cramped space.

"Let me out of here....I'm telling my mommy on you! Let me out! Let me out!” I clawed at the cold, unyielding metal, my fingernails tore. I screamed over and over, but no one could hear me above the clamor of the end of day. No one.

I don't remember ever actually being let out, but I must have been because I am here today. What I do remember is my mother, hero, queen of all mothers, marching into Ms. Bess' room the next day, raising hell and telling that teacher that of she ever laid a hand on me......things would be done that I can't repeat. The principal was brought in. The jail was pointed out. The man in the ugly tie and polyester pants just shrugged and said, "That's her way." More yelling and gesturing from my mother. There was a loose and insincere promise that neither the jail nor the yardstick would be used in the future and my mother and I turned and went home. I don't remember another thing about that awful school or its horrible staff. But I now realize, that this was all just God's way of giving me a sneak peek at how screwed I really was. To quote the very funny Patton Oswalt, I think I'll just sit back now and eat my "failure pile in a sadness bowl" and watch the game!