Shake-It on a loop...because it's Monday...I think

Middle Class Yard

I was in 5^th grade, and it was the first time I had hung out in the yard of our new house after moving in.  I was there with my two sister-aunts and my brother-uncle. The easiest explanation of this classification would be to say I’m from Alabama, but that’s really just a mean stereotype.  The actual explanation is that my grandmother married a man with two daughters and a son, and since I was living with them, these kids felt like siblings to me.  But technically, being my grandma’s step children, they were my aunts, who were only two years older than me, and uncle, who was actually a year younger than me.  Ah well. It still sounds strangely sordid.  All six of us, two adults and four kids, had spent our first year together cohabitating in a two-bedroom house that could be described generously as 1300 square feet.  That’s before the attic was transformed into two additional bedrooms. And by ‘transformed’ I mean they put two beds up there, and we had to pull the folding wooden stairs down by the string in the hallway ceiling to go to bed.  It’s funny now, but at the time it was a kid’s dream. It was like a tree house.

The new house didn’t have the tree house style, but it was much classier and was smack dab in the middle of middle class. It was brick and had three large bedrooms and an enclosed garage that we made into part bedroom, part den, part office and part storage for fishing clothes (that for some reason we had gobs of). The only way we could afford to buy the place, I believe, was that almost everything we owned was second-hand, garage sale.  All our furniture.  All our clothes. My grandma was a master garage-saler. Saturday mornings we were up with the sun, armed with our classified ads and the well-worn map, and headed to the local military base where there were always plenty of families moving away and selling off their stuff. The furniture was nice. Our clothes were another matter.  I am not kidding when I say I had a bathing suit once from the 1950s. As cool as that might sound now, it wasn’t then. We were teased mercilessly by the middle class neighborhood kids. We learned we didn’t belong in that middle class neighborhood. We didn’t have the clothes to pull it off.

But of course, all that was yet to happen at the time we were hanging out that day in our new yard.  And the fact that we were in our new yard wasn’t what will forever make that day stand out in my mind.  A girl I didn’t know and never met, riding her bike by our house, was the reason that day in the yard is in my head.  We were goofing off there in the yard, and I vaguely remember the girl passing by on her bike. There was a loud thump, someone screaming and a man from across the street running like lightening to the ditch in front of our new house. From what I learned later, the girl on the bike had wobbled a bit just as a car was passing her, the car caught her front tire and launched her into the ditch.  They told us she was alive but wouldn’t let us anywhere near as we waited on the ambulance.  I learned what a compound fracture of the femur was that day.   And I learned, most likely for the first time, what it felt like to care about a complete stranger.

--RemembeRED prompt--  'The first time I __________ed after _________ing'

The Fountain of Youth

Looking up at the sheer, rocky hillside, William gave a vague swipe at the flies eagerly trying to get at the cut on his leg, sending them temporarily back into a holding pattern in the sticky morning air of the forest.  What was this? The fifth time he had quartered this hundred square yards over the past two days?  It didn’t matter.  He was too close to give up.  This year he’d find it.  He checked the compass, eyed the sun, flattened the damp, tattered grid paper against his leg and marked his spot.  Maybe there was something about the hillside that he was missing.  Although it was too steep to climb, William had surveyed it from several places along its length but had found nothing.  He’d never walked the full length though, so that’s what he’d do.  As he plodded along, searching the rocks above him for something he might have missed before, he tried to remember just when he had started believing that the fountain was real.  And after that, when he’d started believing he needed to find it. 

Top Ten Most Influential Moments in My Life Episode Five

Fedoras and Whips and Earth and Picks…and Nat Geo

One idle day when I was middle school age, I was flipping through the TV channels looking for something to watch, and I got interested in a show on the Nat Geo or Discovery channel (don’t know if it was really one of those back then but something like them, at least) about Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii.  I was fascinated by the whole thing…the volcano and all those people and the town discovered immortalized in time!  I wanted to be there…picking and brushing away all the layers of dirt and packed ash…Pompeii was again in the light of day!  Then of course around that same time Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, and I was hooked.  There was no going back.  I wanted to be a paleontologist/archeologist/anthropologist.  Ultimately I didn’t become any of those things (although I did own the necessary equipment for archeology… a Fedora and whip),  but I think that day, watching the story about how Pompeii has slowly been unburied, was a turning point in how I saw myself and what I wanted to do. Hair and clothes and shoes became a lot less interesting and were just a necessary part of the social graces.  I think I started identifying myself a little less as “girl” and more as “person” and that as a “person” there was a whole lot of cool stuff to do and see that didn’t involve matching my fingernail color to my purse.  (This was a big realization for a girl from the south.)  From this point on I remember one of my prized possessions was my small but growing collection of National Geographic.  Then I got to high school and discovered that the library had just about every Nat Geo all the way back to the beginning of Nat Geo…oh man…I hardly ever ate lunch during high school.  I spent almost every lunch period with those old, dusty, disorganized magazines.  I ran across Jane Goodall somewhere in those stacks, and at some point I read In the Shadow of Man, and I was blown away by her courage and insight.  One thing leading to another, I read about Fossey and the gorillas and Galdikas and the orangutans.  They were all chosen to study primates in wild habitats by the Leakey family…the Leakey family that for several generations has uncovered the fossils of human ancestry within Africa.  I didn’t become a primatologist either, but those primatologists and anthropologists were the main reason I ended up with a degree in zoology.  All of it culminated in my fascination with the comparative physiology, anatomy and behavior of animals (that includes human animals and the world we have fashioned for ourselves).  Recently I saw where an old snack bar has been unearthed in Pompeii and now visitors to the ruins will be able to stop in and sample what the city folk might have been munching on there before the big day brought it all to an abrupt end.  In the unearthed snack bar they discovered lovely murals depicting the aesthetics of food.  They found an old coin jar there with what would have been probably two days worth of sales in coin…the money they took in while in complete oblivion to the fact it would all end in two days.  Anyway, they had “snack bars” in Pompeii!  Awesome!  I hope I get to go there someday and at least see it all, even if I chose an eppendorf tube over a rock pick.

Top 10 Most Influential Moments in My Life Episode Four

Superstition

I was living with my grandma and we had just moved to the home I would live in until the summer after high school graduation. I’m in 5th grade. Me and my 3 current “siblings” pile in the car…my grandma driving…and we head out to my great-grandma’s house on the other side of town to eat dinner. We get less than a mile down the road and my grandma realizes that she’s forgotten something. “It’s bad luck to turn around and go back home…” (this was actually stated out loud at the moment) but we do it anyway. We stay in the car while my grandma hops out to run inside and retrieve the forgotten item. The next thing we realize is that she has tripped over a railroad tie on the edge of the driveway and it turns out that she has broken her arm. I’m not really sure on the details of how some of the subsequent events happened in time, but while she was seeing physicians for her arm, they discovered that she had cancer…non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. My grandma rarely talked about how she was holding up emotionally so I can only say for sure the things I saw and experienced personally. Over the next 7 years…through her rounds of radiation, remission, recurrence, and chemotherapies…I was not so much a child at all but was anything from nurse, cook, maid, friend and sometimes enemy for my grandma. I tended her radiation burns. I watched her hair fall out (the first round of chemo it took a while and she was so sure that by some miracle it wasn’t going to happen and I will never forget walking into her room and seeing her standing there crying, holding her hairbrush full of hair) and I watched her hair grow back (it grew back twice as thick and white as snow). There were obvious moments of hope and obvious moments of despair. And then there was the moment when she called us to the living room and told us she was ready to stop the therapy she had recently started and that she wouldn’t start another. We all sat there staring at the pill bottles in front of her on the tv tray…there were pills left in them she was supposed to take, but they were going to make her very sick and we all knew there was no sense in it at that point. Looking at those bottles at that moment was like sitting there watching a light dim to nothing. In what I remember as an almost real visual sensation, they went from bright potential to dull inertness right before my eyes. Anything she could eat at any time of the day or night…I was likely to be up preparing it. I’ve fried catfish at 2 am and dipped Nilla wafers in almond bark at 6 am. I sat up with her endless nights in her isolation…when she couldn’t be alone…and watched movie after movie…no matter if it was a school night. When I think about it I can still smell in my mind what the hospital rooms smelled like (it’s like a mixture of clean plus skin cells…or how I would imagine skin cells smell) and what my grandma’s bedroom smelled like (the mint of Icy Hot cooked onto a heating pad then cooled to 50 degrees by a window air conditioner plus undertones of waterbed). These are the things I can tell. They are a few of the things that are shareable. There are so many disturbing, sad and horrible things about those years that would be inappropriate to share in a public forum. So… I was about to conclude by saying that it all started with a superstition and a railroad tie because that was always the story of how it all began and it was always put into that context. But it started well before that. We just didn’t know it. Come to think of it, that’s pretty typical of life. Things are usually in the works for a while before we know them. But we always think it makes things easier or that we will find comfort in pinpointing the moment something happened, or the moment something changed, or the moment something started and became inevitable. Which, not so strangely at all, is more than likely exactly what I’m doing with this list of most influential moments. But of course sometimes that pinpoint in time that gives us consolation isn’t found in the moment something started. It can sometimes be found in the moment something ends. My grandma died two months after I graduated high school. Certainly death is easier to accept than dying.

Quotes!!

"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do." Henry Ford

"Never hope more than you work." Rita Mae Brown

Top 10 Most Influential Moments in My Life Episode Three

Dog in a Strobe Light

This one is slightly out of order. It should come before I settled down…still while I was ‘the littlest hobo’. But it makes more sense after the previous explanation of my living situation during those early years. So I was living with my aunt and uncle and my two cousins at the time. We just happened to own a small, portable strobe light (I’m not sure why…maybe they were a household staple in the 70s??). So sometimes my aunt would get out the strobe light and turn off all the lights and my cousins and I would dance around in the flashing light (you could vary the speed of the flash too…and create all kinds of effects like slow-mo and fast-mo). We would laugh like crazy at each other’s robotic-appearing movements. My aunt got the idea one strobe-light-night to bring the dog inside for the fun (we had a German shepherd named Lobo). She came walking in with Lobo and he was all excited and hopping around happily wanting to play, and we were rolling on the ground at the sight of that dog all strobed out like the world’s most furry disco dancer. Man that was hilarious. That was seriously about the most happy and carefree I ever felt between the ages of 6 and I’d say…39. There were lots of similar moments when I was living with my aunt. Although I always felt a little like an outsider, living there felt more like what a good childhood and good home were supposed to feel like. We did lots of normal stuff. We had fair chores. We had schedules. We played like maniacs. Got swatted with the fly swatter when we needed it. We walked down the street to Sunday school on Sunday mornings. Did our homework at the table in the afternoon. What it was…and what I think back fondly on…was this small time during my childhood that I felt like I really knew what to expect. I had something I could count on. Rules that made sense. And when there was something unexpected…it was usually something fun and maybe even hilarious like Lobo getting to dance with us in the flashy lights. Things were about to get very serious and a lot less light-hearted, and I didn’t get much more childhood after that. I am grateful every day for my aunt and I love her like a mom.

You can get your own strobe light and have this fun, too.
http://www.amazon.com/Cornet-Strobe-Light-Color-Filter/dp/B003KWNA98/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1303147590&sr=8-8

Top 10 Most Influential Moments in My Life Episode Two

My Early Childhood as a Vagabond Comes to an End

I have this general impression of my life up until about the middle of 5th grade as sort of a traveling circus. You know…set it all up, do business there for a while, tear it all down, set it all up again somewhere else, etc. I have these ethereal images in my mind of me as insubstantial just floating through everyone else’s solid, everyday lives. I count around 8 different elementary schools between 1st and 5th grades…some of those twice (went there, moved away, moved back). Sometimes I was handed off from one home to the next within our family. Sometimes all of us in the home would move to a new spot. Either way, I was all over the place. I remember my white, canopy twin bed sitting in the corners of lots of different rooms. I had lots of different “brothers and sisters”, too…which were actually cousins or oddly enough aunts/uncles who were my age (I won’t even try to explain). Middle of 5th grade I ended up in the home and with the family that I would pretty much be with for the rest of my school days (other than the brother/uncle and sister/aunts slowly dropped like flies under the pressure and went back to live with their birth mom) and ultimately I went from being 1 child of 4 to being 1 semi-adult child of 1 by the end of middle school. Last man standing. The where and who of this permanent settlement ultimately determined probably 75% of my total psychological development. And 95% of the time I see that as negative. But during the 5% of the time that I see the positives about myself that came from that arrangement, I breathe a big sigh of relief because as crumby as it was, it was still 100% better than other likely alternatives. I’m just pulling those numbers out of my hat. I haven’t really quantified it. And actually, I'm not even wearing a hat.

Top 10 Most Influential Moments in My Life Episode One

Being Born

I almost said I was ill conceived, but that implies something was ‘planned’, which I was not. I was the unwitting cause of family turmoil for my entire gestation. Everyone had a different idea about what should be done with me…get rid of me before I could “be”…give me away. There had to be a solution to save face. After 9 months of basking in alternating THC and stress hormones, I was born. I think most everyone liked me better after I was born. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

Dream From When I Was 12

I was in middle school (the age I actually was at the time of the dream) and I was at a water park with a wave pool. The pool didn’t have as much water as it was supposed to have (this happens a lot in my dreams) and the water was murky and the sky was overcast. Everyone seemed strange in how they were behaving and everything felt ominous. There were sawhorses set up all around the pool in a big long line and on each saw horse was a window. The windows were that old type like you see in Florida houses and mobile homes where there is a hand crank and the little horizontal panes all tilt out together or close together. There was a storm coming and all those windows on the sawhorses were in the open position. Somehow I knew that I had to get them all closed before the storm hit. So I was making my way down the line cranking the windows closed as fast as I could. At some point I realized I would never make it and when I don’t then something bad will happen. Finally the storm hits and the world flashes and I’m in a giant dishwasher. I was on the door and I was small enough that I could have fit into the soap dispenser. The door was closing and there was awful murky water in the bottom. I was sliding down towards the water and the idea of that water gave me the feeling of a hell, but I couldn’t really see anything in the water, only hear things that sounded bad. Friends and family members were sliding past and I was trying to grab hold of them and stop them but every one was sliding down into the water. I woke up in the middle of scrambling on the slick door as it closed and went dark.