My Life: The Boy We Called Willie – Part 1 (Installment 3)

Everybody has that best friend when they’re little. When you sift back through Father Time’s hour glass and go looking for memories of when you were young, you inevitably remember your partner in crime.

It’s that one face that pops up the most. Yeah, you know who it is. The person you were intimately familiar with. It was that person who shared hardships with you. It was that person who teased you mercilessly in good fun, but whom you always forgave. It was the person you fought with, wrestled with, argued with, and laughed with. For me, it was Willie, my little brother.

In My Life: The Beginning, Willie, was one of the twins that my mother held. That moment, it was my first introduction to him. I was standing in a doorway watching my mother feed him with a bottle.

I honestly don’t remember any memories of the twins in diapers. He melted and merged into my life and was just suddenly there playing with his toy cars on our warped hardwood floor near the piece of flooring with the triangular hole.

I think I became self-aware the first time my parents let me go outside to play in the snow alone. I was fascinated with the drifting snow, and the foot prints of the birds. I was mesmerized by the feathery pattern in the snow the bird’s made with their wings as they took off. It was simple and beautiful and fantastic. It was my childhood.

I could never stay out in the snow very long when I was little. Nose red and cheeks rosy, I would run my stiff-legged run through the snow from beneath the giant Box Elder that grew outside my parents bedroom window to our front porch. Climbing up the cinder block steps, one at a time, using my hands, I achieved the top step and returned inside to play with Willie, and sometimes, his twin sister, Shelly.

I think I’ll take a moment to explain something about the twins. Willie was a dirty-blonde with extremely curly, bright blue eyes and a lopsided way of smiling that always seemed shy and innocent but arrogant at the same time. Shelly was a tattletale–daddy’s little girl. She had long brown hair, green eyes, and sparse sprinkling of freckles across her nose. I was astounded by them both, but Willie mainly. He was everything I wasn’t. He was handsome, incredibly brave, and fierce–even in the beginning.

Our house was horse-shoe shaped inside. You entered through the front door which was located almost in the center on the front of the house. The living room stretched away to your right where the sunlight streamed through in golden beams of morning light. Dad usually sat at the bar, drinking coffee and picking his guitar. The living room also swept to the left, ending at my parents bedroom door. If you looked straight, you would see two parallel halls that went to the back of the house. The hall on the right had the kitchen open to it and ended in a concrete-floored room as big as the living room. It was where we did the wash. The hall to the left ended at the bathroom door and had bedrooms coming off of it to the left. The closets came off the hall to the right.

Willie would pull his tricycle down by the bathroom and ride it like the boogey-man was chasing him through the house. He would curve around the end of the wall separating the two hallways and hook back into the kitchen, throwing himself sideways from the tricycle at the top of the turn. He would roll across the floor like stunt man–or a stunt toddler. I was too afraid to do that. It looked like it hurt, but he’d get up, flash mom that lopsided smile of his and run over to her so she would hug him and kiss him. And then, he’d do it again.

It was my early childhood, playing near the glowing boxes of sun light on the hardwood floor, chasing glowing motes of dust drifting through the slanted beams, watching my little brother play with toy cars, and listening to my dad pluck his guitar. Occasionally, I’d get in trouble and having a little brother and little sister to blame it on was kind of nice.

Willie and I were nearly inseparable growing up. When it was planting season in the Spring, we’d ride behind the tractor while dad plowed the deep furrows in the two acre garden he grew. We’d ride the disk plows he used to chop up the freshly turned soil. We even rode the rakes he used to remove the grasses from the shredded soil. And then, Willie and I would chase the tractor as dad plowed the final furrow that the seeds would go in.

I actually enjoyed this part even though it was dirty. My dad and the older boys would walk down the rows dropping seeds while Justine, Donnette, the twins and I followed after covering the seeds with dirt, using our feet. The cool soil felt nice on my the bottom of my foot. Cardinals and Robins, and birds that I can not name, flew down to eat the worms my dads plowing had revealed. We’d see rabbits near the fence row in the evenings and deer running across the fields in the morning. Planting season, by far, was my favorite season.

During the summer, Dad would put us to work picking tobacco worms off the tomatoes, potato bugs off the potatoes, and weeds from the garden. The worms that we’d pick off were dropped into a bucket and dumped in the chicken house. Oh, how the chickens went wild. Willie even had a speckled hen that would follow him around during the day, which made it easier for him. He’d pick off a worm and throw it on the ground and the chicken would run over and gobble it down. I was a little jealous of that. I didn’t have a chicken following me around. I really wanted one to follow me around, but no amount of bribery could convince any of the stupid chickens to follow me. By all accounts, and as near as I can reckon, that was officially the first chick my brother ever attracted.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist.

As summer progressed, we would capture grasshoppers and—no, wait, I’m not done with this. I wanted my own chicken. Dale, my older brother, he used to have a Mallard duck that followed him around. Shelly had a kitten that followed her around. My older sisters had boys following them around. My older brothers had the sheriff following them around. Nobody was following me. I really wanted someone to follow me. I even told mom this. She just laughed and said turn around, and there was Willie standing behind me as he always was. She said Willie followed me everywhere I went. It didn’t feel the same as having a chicken, but I took it.

Okay, where was I? Oh, yeah. I was talking about catching grasshoppers. Willie and I, later in the summer, would spend our time catching grasshoppers or digging up worms to use as bait. Dad always stocked the red clay pond with new fish. He mainly stocked it with Perch and Catfish, which I find delicious.

After two years of fishing in that pond, Willie and I figured out that the tiny frogs around it made much better bait than the grasshoppers and worms. So, with pant legs rolled up to our knee, we set to work catching frogs. It did not go well at first, but we eventually got the hang of it. The biggest fish in the pond was an old catfish I had nicknamed, Nathan. We had seen it once and dad even caught it a couple of times but always let it go for some reason we could never fathom.

We enjoyed fishing, and we enjoyed eating the fish dad cooked.

Oh, I should mention something peculiar about my family. Dad did almost all the cooking in the family. Mom didn’t cook. Well, she did, but it was less of a spoon stirring role and more of kitchen manager thing. She told the older kids what to add, when to stir, and when to remove it, and she did this from her seat on the bench beside the table.

Mom, always sat at the kitchen table with a Harlequin Romance novel in one hand, an ice cold Pepsi sweating in a glass nearby, and a Bel-air cigarette burning in the ash tray. Sometimes, it was a word search or a crossword she was perusing instead of a trashy novel.

As I said a moment ago, we enjoyed catching the fish right up until the time our dad taught us how to scale them, cut their heads off, and gut them. A lot of the romance went out of the sport after that, but stubbornly, we would still catch them. We turned it into a game of who could convince dad to clean them for us first. One out of every three times, we were able to get dad to clean the fish. He didn’t really seem to mind. I think he even knew about the game.

As the summer came to an end, the harvest was undertaken. My dad grew five separate gardens. He had an herb garden behind the house in which he grew strawberries, tomatoes, and onions. It was complete with a hot bed around which mint grew.

Cherry trees grew at the end of this garden and beyond that was the dill and asparagus patch. Between the house and the barn, a distance of about a foot ball field, grew the garden we simple called The Garden. Across the path from it was another garden referred to as the Chip Pile. The garden was planted where my father’s post mill used to stand. The soil was dark and rich, and the plants grew extremely well there. The next garden was the two acre garden we called the Milo Field. It was the only garden my dad planted Milo in, thus, the name. The final garden required a truck to reach. So, it was understandably called the Truck Patch.

My dad conducted his harvest like it was an orchestra. The young kids, under the supervision of Justine, would harvest The Garden, while mom and Donnette harvested the herb garden. Dad sometimes planted sweet peas and cucumbers in addition to the other crops mentioned before. The strawberries, though, they were harvested earlier in the summer.

Dad, and my older brothers who hadn’t joined the military, would harvest the Chip Pile. The Chip Pile was where dad grew corn, pumpkins, peppers, potatoes, carrots, and peanuts. Oh, how I love peanuts.

Unfortunately, while my siblings got to go off and harvest the Truck Patch and the Milo Field, the twins and I would be stuck with digging up the peanuts and potatoes.

Dad had a wide-toothed fork with thick flat tines that were spaced wide apart the potato fork. We had to stomp it into the ground like it was a shovel beside the mounded potato or peanut plants. From there, one of us would simply pry back on the handle, while the other sibling pulled on the plant which would come free rather easily with potatoes or peanuts dangling from the roots.

We usually let Shelly pick off the peanuts and potatoes and put them in the bucket, while we dug through the hole we’d just made looking for any potatoes or peanuts that hadn’t come out with the plant. We filled up five gallon buckets with our harvested bounty and left them setting in the garden.

After my brothers were through with their harvesting of the other gardens, they would drive through the Chip Pile with the flat bed, loading the five gallon buckets on the truck as they went. The cleaned vegetables were stored in the concrete floored room on the back of the house. It was the room we called the back porch, even though, it wasn’t a porch. Over the course of the next two weeks, mom, dad, and my sisters would can everything and place the freshly canned produce in the pantry. We had a massive pantry on the back porch, filled with hundreds of mason jars at all times.

We harvested the orchards next, divesting the fruit trees of their sweet treats. Willie would climb the tree and drop the apples down to me, which I would catch and put in a bucket that sat in a wagon. When the bucket was full, Shelly would roll it up to the house where they would give her another bucket for us to fill. We picked the apples, the peaches, the plums and the pears. The house smelled glorious at this time of year.

As autumn wore on, it came time to pick up the Walnuts. If you have never picked Walnuts, you have wasted your life. The appeal for us was we could be mean, we could make money, and the adults left us alone. The easiest way to collect Walnuts is to climb the tree and start bouncing on the limbs with everything you got. The Walnuts rain down green hail, staining anything and anyone they hit.

The twins and I would take turns climbing the trees. We’d start shaking the limbs, while the other two would fill the feed sacks with Walnuts. The fun part was waiting until the right moment to shake the tree. If you did it at the right time, your brother and sister would get conked on the head with Walnuts.

Inevitably though, some of the Walnuts would refuse to fall. It was at these times that we would find out who the better rock thrower was. Our goal was to hit the limb and jar the Walnut’s loose. It usually took several tries, a bad word, and a bribe to buy the other two siblings silence to get the stubborn Walnuts to drop. In later years, we figured out that using a weighted rope was way more efficient.

After the Walnuts were picked and taken to the mill, dad would have us take buckets into the woods where we would collect Hickory nuts. Dad enjoyed having hickory nuts in some of the baked goods that he ate. Well, before he lost his teeth, that was what he enjoyed.

The hunting seasons and butchering seasons were the next thing to arrive. I didn’t enjoy this time of year. Willie seemed to.

Our dad would butcher three hogs in the fall. I never got used to that coppery smell of blood everywhere I went, or the image of the metal tub filled with the animals innards. Thankfully, they never made us help them with this.

Deer season was always rewarded with at least a deer a piece for each of my brothers and my dad and mom and sisters. My mom and sisters didn’t hunt, but dad would get a deer tag for each them anyway, which he would fill himself. By the end of the season, we usually had about six to seven deer in the freezer. It’s funny, I never remember dad every butchering one of his cows. He never talked about God, but he was incredibly skinny. Perhaps, he was secretly Hindu. I don’t know. In addition to the other butchering that took place, we would also have to butcher plenty of chickens.

If it is in your power, and the situation calls for you to choose between butchering a chicken and smashing your thumb with a hammer, take the hammer. I hated butchering chickens. It is incredibly smelly work.

Willie really enjoyed killing them, but he didn’t like plucking them afterwards–no one did. Killing a chicken isn’t hard to do, and if it wasn’t because I was taking a life, I probably would have enjoyed it.

Dad would hand us each a narrow board about three feet long, lock us in the chicken house, and tell us to kill a dozen chickens. To kill them, we’d had to chase them down and whack them in the head real hard with the board. They’d flop around for a moment and then lay still.

Dad was much more direct. He simply grabbed the chicken by the head and give it a quick twist with a whipping motion. The result was nearly the same except that the head came off in his hand. The chicken always flopped around after you killed it. Maybe it’s soul had trouble escaping, I don’t know. What I do know is that it was a hideous thing to make a little kid do.

Behind the house, mom would have hot buckets of water ready for us. We had to dip the chickens in the water to soften the skin to make plucking the feathers off easier. The smell of wet chicken is worse than wet dog any day of the week.

Despite the chicken killing, life was fine back then. Willie and I didn’t have a care in the world. We grew, and as we grew, we took on more of the older kids responsibilities. Some of them had dropped out of school and moved out. They’d move back in when things got tough, but they always moved out again.

Mom, I might of mentioned in an earlier writing, sold Tupperware to support our family. It’s one of the reasons she got to sit around while everyone else worked. Dad, since closing the post mill, made his money plowing fields for other farms, bush hogging, and installing fence. He also worked on their equipment. My dad was a welder, mechanic, a builder, a farmer, and resourceful. He often said it isn’t what you have that matters, but your ability to find what you need. He traded labor for services or material goods, he traded cars and farm equipment for livestock, and he sold or traded livestock for whatever he needed. We never wanted for anything. We always at three meals a day. We were always given baths every other day. Each morning, dad would squeeze our cheeks with one hand and rub Castor oil in our hair with the other, then comb our hair. Each evening, mom would greet us as we entered the door and have us give her a hug and tell her about our day. With eleven children to her credit, she had received a lot of macaroni art over the years.

There were a few turbulent times. The night our neighbor found Dale passed out drunk in a ditch three miles outside of town, fleeing a wreck that he’d been a passenger in was one of them. I remember that night well. Dad would pour coffee in him. Dale would cough and spit it out and dad would slap him across the face.

Dale made the mistake of calling mom a bitch in his drunken stupor. Before that night, all I had ever seen as far as a fight went, was wrestling between my brothers. I never saw anyone get hit with a closed fist before. Dale never called mom a bitch again. I don’t know if dad’s punching him temporarily broke through the fog of inebriation, but that punch was the only thing Dale remembered about that night. The guy that had been driving when the car wrecked was Donnette’s boyfriend at the time. Dale had been underage and drunk in the car. To keep everyone out of trouble, he had told Dale to run. Dale had run and made it halfway home before collapsing in the ditch in the freezing winter weather. No one denied that Dale was lucky the neighbor had spotted him. He easily could have died that night.

One guess who my dad went looking for that night after putting my brother to bed. I never heard any details about it, but I heard the guy avoided our family like the plague after that night.

Willie, for all his charm, was a troubled and peculiar kid. I don’t know why it manifested, but one day Willie had an imaginary friend. He said his friend’s name was Zim Zim and that Zim Zim lived under our fridge. Willie played with Zim Zim all the time after that. Out at the barn, he would grab up handfuls of dirt and make a milking motion over an ice cream bucket, explaining to Zim Zim that this was how you milked a cow.

Later on, he added a new friend to his imaginary entourage, a sophisticated pal named Ziggy. Ziggy lived on the Island. The Island was the oasis of grass that grew in the eye of our circular drive.

Willie, Ziggy, and Zim Zim were inseparable. They were as thick as ticks in tall grass. We all saw the humor in Willie’s imaginary friends–everyone but dad. It made him angry to hear Willie talking to people that weren’t there. There were a few spankings doled out as a result of Willie’s imagination, but eventually, my little brother stopped talking to the empty air. I’m actually kind of disappointed in that. I don’t know if it was some underlying problem that Willie had or if it was just something he created to make life more entertaining. I don’t know if his imaginary friends were a manifestation of a psychological insecurity or if it was just a game that had gotten out of control. I’ll never know, and I think that my father over-reacted.

In another age, my brother would have been burned at the stake for witch craft. He had an uncanny knack of knowing things before they happened. As a kid, I thought he was psychic, but as an adult, I figure there was probably some easily explainable reason for it. The year our mother took sick, Willie exhibited a level of clairvoyance I have never been able to explain.

We came home from school to find that our mother had collapsed in the left hallway. My mom, she was a big girl, and the paramedics had a hard time getting her out to the ambulance. But when they did, they spirited her away with my father following them in his car.

After a very long night in which we were told nothing, it was discovered that mom had multiple brain tumors. They kept her in the hospital for several days. I think it was a weekend. The older kids were sitting around the table talking. I was admiring dads guitar wondering when my siblings were going to make breakfast. They were all talking about what the tumors meant and what the doctor’s were going to do when Willie woke and came into the living room crying. No–not crying, he was bawling.

Before anyone could move to comfort him, he blurted out that mom was dead. The phone rang ten minutes later, confirming what he had told us. It was dad calling to tell us that mom had died.

I was only nine years old, but I stood there looking at my little brother, trying to figure out how he knew. I didn’t believe it, of course. Mom couldn’t be dead. The next morning though, my brother Dale took me and the twins into town. We hardly ever got to go to town. He took us to a place where we cold shoot pool. He took us for ice cream. He took us to the dollar store and let us buy toys. It was really fun. I mean, how could mom be dead, if I was enjoying myself this much.

The night before the funeral, I finally got to see mom again. She was just laying in the box. The box was nice, but I finally realized that no one had lied. In my nine year old brain, I began to realize what this meant. I began to see past that moment to tomorrow and the next day. Mom was gone. My eyes were hot, and they burned, and I started to cry.

And, Willie laughed.

He pointed at me, he was only eight, and he laughed because I was crying in public. He laughed because he didn’t realize mom would never hold him again. He laughed not understanding that she would never again cradle him, kiss him, tickle his back when he felt bad, or have her hug him from behind and kiss his neck while he squealed with laughter.

Willie laughed. He fucking laughed.

I didn’t cry at the funeral the next day. I didn’t cry for a long time after that. There was a distance that had opened up between me and him. We fought more. There was more competition and less of me defending him when there was trouble. We still played, and we still had fun, but things had changed.

Over the course of the year, a lot of things changed. Everyone, cocooned in their own grief, spread out. We were short with each other. We held grudges that we refused to let go and through it all, dad sat in his chair, drank his coffee, and stared at his guitar. I never saw dad cry after mom’s death. When I asked him if he missed her. He shrugged and told me that mom had always been kind of lazy. I don’t know if he was coping and trying to protect himself by pretending she wasn’t anyone to be missed, or if my dad was just a dick. Either way, it was a horrible thing to tell your nine year old son.

The year mom died, Donnette had met a guy and was wanting to move out. Dad told her no. She was still in high school. Dad told her that he needed her around the house to help out with things since mom was gone. Donnette married the guy to get out of the house even though dad told her that if she did, she wasn’t ever allowed to come back. She married him anyway, and dad kept his word.

My amazing family in that little farm house, which had once stood at thirteen members, had been whittled down to five–dad, Justine, Willie, Shelly, and myself. Gardens were no longer planted. The weeds grew up around the barn and filled the old gardens. The yard was rarely mowed, and the house was rarely cleaned. Dishes often stayed piled up in the sink, and the table was rarely cleaned after meals.

Justine was five years older than me. She played softball at school. She had friends and a social life before mom died. It was ending for her. She had to come home from school each day and help clean the house, prepare the meals, and wash the clothes. She didn’t like this at all. It was late fall the year mom died. Justine hadn’t come home on the bus. She had stayed after school for softball practice ignoring dad’s edict. Dad had called the school and complained, telling the school she was no longer allowed to play softball. She came home in a fury, kicking out the aluminum panel on the bottom of the screen door.

Two days later, Donnette showed up at the house while dad was working out at our uncles house. Justine knew she wasn’t allowed to be there, but her and Justine sat in the driveway in Donnette’s husbands car and talked. They would shoo us away if we came around to listen. After their talk, Donnette left, telling us that she didn’t want to be there when dad got home. There had been bad blood between Donnette and dad since he’d forbidden her to come home again.

It was during school that a strange lady arrived one day. She was dressed formally and stunk of bureaucracy. She tried to explain to me that she was here to take me to my new home. I was conditioned by school to do what my teachers or people in authority told me to do. So, unsure of who she was or why I had to follow her, I obediently trailed along behind her.

It was raining outside. It had been raining all day. She lead me out to her car along with Willie and Shelly. Justine was already sitting in the front seat. We were put in the back. The school bell rang and kids flooded out headed to their buses. Kids we knew stared at us as we sat in the strangers car in the pouring rain. We watched them and drove away wondering what was going on. Justine seemed unfazed and even happy with the circumstances. I looked out the window of this woman’s car and watched everything familiar fade away. I’m not religious, but I’m pretty sure this is how Adam and Eve felt when God kicked them out of Eden.

The strange woman drove us through our small town with its population of 721 people and drove us to a strange house three miles west of town. We were met by older man missing an upper tooth on his right side. He wore red suspenders and had a pot belly and a trucker’s cap. A short robust woman wearing a long jean skirt with her hair done up into a bun stood beside him. They were the strangest looking people I had ever seen. The woman who had abducted us for the state, explained that the man was one of our distant cousins, and the woman was his wife, and then, she told us this was our new home. I didn’t understand that part. We already had a home.

We questioned her of course, but Justine explained that everything was going to be okay. The woman explained to us that living conditions at our old house weren’t proper and that an accusation had been made that required the state to remove us. They called this place with odd man and woman a foster home. I didn’t know what that was.

I looked at Justine suspiciously. She was smiling and shaking the hands of the strange couple, and my nine year old brain solved its first mystery. A sound drew my attention then, and I turned to the twins from which it came. Shelly was scared and shaking and clutching her twins arm. Willie, though, had finally decided to cry. Here, months after our mother’s death, he finally realized that nothing was ever going to be the same again. He finally got it.

I’m sorry to leave off at this point in the story, but I promise, there will be another installment in which I finish the story about Willie and myself. It has been a privilege to tell you my tale. Thank you for reading.

Thank you and good-bye.

My Life: The Games We Played (Installment 2)

Welcome to the wide world of sports–hillbilly sports that is. Since the earliest days of man, since mankind discovered boredom, or since the first cave child fought with the second cave child (possibly over a favorite bone), there has been competition.

If you’ve watched ESPN, you’ve seen some very famous and some very popular sports being played. You’ve seen baseball, fencing, golf, football, racing, and the list goes on. But, if you veer off the main road of viewing, you discover traditional community sports that are played. Most likely, you’ve discovered the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling competition held in England in a city of the same name. As far as sporting events go, it’s pretty straight forward. Contestants line up at the top of a giant hill and race each other to the bottom in pursuit of a giant wheel of cheese that is being rolled down the hill. They often stumble and roll and bounce and get hurt, but they’re enjoying themselves. I think that’s the important part. They’re enjoying themselves.

Every year a new sport is imagined and sometimes two or more of these sports are combined to enhance them both. Skiing and skateboarding were combined into snowboarding, parachuting and hang gliding gave birth to the wing suit, and ping pong and drinking were coupled to create beer pong.

Why do we keep pushing the envelope if there are so many different sports and games out there for us to play? For me and my family, the answer’s simple. We were bored and without resources. As a result, you might want to brace yourself, because things are about to get weird.

I may have mentioned that I had ten brothers and sisters. Between the oldest sibling and the youngest sibling there is a gap of nearly twenty years. In approximately the middle of that range, there is a five year gap between two of the siblings. It’s like the line between the north and the south. It’s an equator. It’s space between the old testament, and the new testament. It’s what separates the older kids from the younger kids in my family. In that space, I lost an older brother. But in my family, before there was drama, there were the games we played. They were fantastic games of epic scope and with all the appeal of the popular sports of today. They were fun to play. They were fun to watch. They caused pain. They left you breathless. They had a measure of danger about them. And, they were loved by all.

You ever climb a tree with seven other kids, set the top of the tree to swaying until it bends over and touches the ground? We did, but that wasn’t the sport. When we all dropped off but one sibling and that tree snapped back to its original position rocketing that last sibling back and forth like he was riding a car antenna, that was the sport. We called that one the kid-a-pult. Luckily, that game didn’t last long. We found a tree that was too tall, and when it bent over into a horseshoe shape, we were too far above the ground to safely drop to the ground. We suffered the humiliation of having to call for help.

To us, there wasn’t anything quite as humiliating as having to hang in a tree upside down like a possum while our cigarette smoking father whittled at the side of the tree trunk with his giant pocket knife.

I’m serious, that knife was huge and before his saving us from ourselves, I often wondered when would having a knife that large ever come in handy. I never wondered about that knife again after that day.

But humiliated as much as we were, it was nearly impossible to deter us. A few of the boys would drag a car hood from the junk yard on the corner of our property over to the neighbors pond during the months when there was snow. We’d drag it to the top of the pond bank and ride it down. It was a huge pond bank, and just in case you think we were sledding, know that on the back side of that pond bank and at the bottom of the hill were loose rocks about the size of our heads. Of course there was snow on the ground, but that mattered little at all due to the incredibly steep angle of the hill.

As we rocketed down the hill on that heavy hood, those rocks would jar loose and chase us to the bottom. The sport was the ride down followed by how fast we could get off the hood once it stopped. You did not want to be the person on that sled after it stopped, and you most definitely did not want to be the person who fell off on the way down.

For some reason, none of the girls wanted to play this game. That sport faded away not from a lack of wanting to play it, but with that age gap between us, some of my older brother’s joined the military and other’s out grew it. Me and my little brother weren’t strong enough to drag the car hood back up to the top of the pond bank by ourselves.

I’m getting all nostalgic up in here. There could be tears (There won’t be tears.).

At our elementary school, and I assume it is a field day game played by children at other schools as well, we played a game known as the egg toss. It was where you tossed an egg to an opponent who had to catch it. After each toss and successful catch, the catcher would take a stride backwards and toss it back to his opponent. Eventually, the distance would get so vast that the catcher would be unable to catch it, and they would get splattered with egg yoke.

On our farm, we had a game that involved eggs and Easter and utilized that five year gap between the younger kids and older kids. Firstly, the older kids would hide the Easter eggs for me, my younger siblings and kids from the neighboring farms. Secondly, we would hunt for Easter eggs. Thirdly, we would peal and eat a few of the eggs with a dash of salt. And finally, one of us would scream for help to draw the adults and older kids from the house, and then we’d pepper them with the remaining Easter eggs. It was all fun and games until that one year the adults came out with un-boiled eggs of their own.

You have any idea how much an egg can hurt you when you get hit in the forehead by an older sister on the softball team at school. A lot. It hurts a lot.

Also, you can’t give five kids baths one after the other and expect there to be hot water for all. You can’t wait for the egg yoke to dry in your hair either. The girls among us got to take a shower together, while the boys got sprayed down with a water hose in the yard. We never ambushed the adults with Easter eggs again after that. The air at Easter is still pretty chill, and the water was frigid.

At harvest time, we would go through our gardens, vast tracks that covered the better part of two acres and would pick everything before the first frost. One of the favorite crops to pick was the corn. Everyone would go into the field with buckets and pick the corn, then all the guys would sit down behind the house telling stories, shucking the husk followed by the combing off the corn silk. The girls would then take paring knives, cut away any bad spots and remove the corn from the cob in a ritual that involved things that made me think of witches brewing potions.

When they were done, we’d load the buckets of empty cobs onto the flat bed to feed to the pigs. In the truck on the way to the hog lot, we would have corn cob fights, throwing wet cobs at shirtless male siblings. Oh, how they stung, and oh, how we laughed.

Me and my little brother attempted to create a new sport one year with my sister’s letterman jacket. It was really thick and that was going to be important for this sport. We had a field on our farm, covered with Cedar trees. I don’t care how limber you are or how agile. You can not climb a Cedar tree. They’re too bushy, but they are pretty cushiony if you fall into them. In the middle of a copse of these trees was a hickory tree . . . with a limb.

The limb was higher than the Cedar tree tops. My brother and I would take turns climbing the tree with the letterman jacket on, hide our faces in it since it was so much bigger and dive out into the top of one of those trees. Thankfully, its cushiony goodness made the experience highly enjoyable. I daresay, it was one of my more favorite things to do.

However, we as humans, have that desire to be watched when we’re doing stupid things and so, we hurried back to the house after an hour of Cedar diving to enlist more siblings for the activity.

Did you know that in a Cedar tree there is sap and it oozes from the broken limbs or that it is highly viscous and sticky beyond measure? I did too, but I didn’t think about that when we used the letterman’s jacket my sister had bought with her own money. I did learn something new though–two things actually. The first was that the letterman’s jacket was expensive and you can’t wash sap off of it. Secondly, I learned that I’m not faster than my sister and that I can’t take her in a fist fight . . . cause she bites. Why do they always bite?

After that, older siblings began to move out as they grew older and joined the military or took jobs after high school. Still being so much younger than them, it left the inventing of sporting events up to me and my two younger siblings. We tried the game of batting rocks with sticks. Two broken car windows and that came to an end. We tried archery but after I shot my brother with a blunt arrow on purpose, dad lit me up, and I stopped that pursuit. But, there was a grove of Sassafras trees growing on the corner of our property.

The grove covered roughly an acre and half of land, and the trees all grew about three to four feet apart in all directions. Now, you might be wondering what exactly a Sassafras tree is or even what it looks like and why it might be important to know.

A Sassafras tree is a slender tree about four to six inches in diameter. Some are bigger, of course, but not in our grove. They grew to thick and never gained any girth. They are fairly straight with a slow tapper from the bottom to the top. Their limbs usually get brittle and break off on the lower portions of their trunks, which are fairly limber.

Me and my two siblings would climb them near the edge of the grove. And at a predetermined signal, we would start our trees to swaying. Once we had them swaying, we would grab onto another tree top and then another and so on and so forth. We literally walk through the tree tops in this fashion, racing each other to see who could reach the other side of the grove first. It was a lot of fun, unless you were the one who found the tree with the rotten trunk and had to ride it to the ground like a pole-vaulter.

I am nostalgic now.

You can’t ever think of your past and not be. Even if your childhood was horrible, there were transitions between those atrocities. It is there that your childhood existed. In those moments of not-so-bad. I hated church growing up, but as horrible as the experience was, I remember holding hands with a girl with blue eyes. I remember the Easter brunch held in the basement of the Pentecostal church I was forced to attend by my foster parents. It wasn’t all bad.

I spoke with my mentor last night. I was telling her about a period in my life when I was into producing art. I was trying to explain the difference between an oil pencil and a coloring pencil. I told her that the oil pencil was softer with a higher oil content and that when you color with it, you’re basically spackling the troughs in the grainy texture of the paper. Whereas, with a regular coloring pencil, we are only able to color the tops of the ridges in the grain of paper. The difference in these techniques is that with oil pencils you get a much more uniform coloring as a result, and with the other, you see a lot of the white paper bleeding through. With the coloring pencil, you miss a lot and the coloring is faded.

I realized that this is a perfect analogy for life. We’re geared by nature to remember most keenly the bad things we encounter. It’s a survival and learning phenomenon in regards to our biology. A child touches a stove, and it’s hot. The child will forever be leery of stoves from then on out. If a woman trusts someone with her heart, and someone else breaks it, she may forever be leery of trusting again.

We can’t live our lives on the higher regions of the texture of our life. We need to travel through the troughs. We need to remember those moments in which life was tolerable–when it was magnificent. Those are the moments in which we truly lived.

Don’t ever look back on your life and say it sucked. Look back and remember that sometimes it didn’t always suck. In fact, make a game of it.

If you lose, nothing changes. If you win, everything changes. It’s a game the whole family can play.

Thank you reader for being the catalyst that motivates me to play this game. Thank you and until next time.

Good-bye.

My Life: The Beginning (Installment 1)

Beginnings are important.

When you get married, how you met your lover and significant other matters, and it factors in to the strength of your bond. Perhaps you met on a blind date and found that you were compatible, or maybe they saved you in some fashion or another, or maybe they tricked you into loving them. How you met can sometimes determine how long your relationship will be.

I only bring up beginnings, because it was my own beginning that I blame for the turbulence in my life.

My earliest memory was of me standing in the doorway of my mother’s bedroom. There was a step down from the living room into hers and to my right was the crib where the twins slept. The twins being the newest additions to our family. They were a year younger than I.

Mom had called for a bottle so that she could feed them.

My sister arrived carrying two of them.

My brother lifted the twins out one-by-one and placed them in my mother’s arms–one twin for each arm. My other sister was in the room as well, but I don’t remember seeing her. I just know that she was there.

My mother looked up, saw me and smiled. She was glowing like the mother of God. And, I have never felt so loved.

I remember working in a restaurant in Perdido Key, Florida after high school and something my boss told me helped me to isolate my earliest memory as my biggest flaw. My employer’s name was Skipper, and Skipper was telling me about his wedding and honeymoon.

He said that when they were married, he had gone all out–pulled out all the stops. They were married in Hawaii. He flew in all of her family to attend, then took her on a honeymoon that lasted one entire month. They had visited the Caribbean, France, Spain, Italy, and several other exotic locales.

He had spent over a hundred thousand dollars on their honeymoon and said it was the worst thing he could have ever done. He said that he could never hope to top that ever again. He knew that there was no going up from that point in their relationship. There was no going back.

I have always had bad luck, and I think it was because I had spent my entire life trying to achieve something that I could never hope to re-imagine–a moment of pure bliss. I’ve felt like a salmon my entire life–constantly fighting the flow of time just to get back to the place where it all started. I’m looking for my Eden.

There was drama before my life began and that drama shaped my earliest childhood and the rest of my life.

When I was younger, I lived on a farm in southern Missouri, in a region known as the Ozarks. The farm was isolated, being miles from the nearest town. I lived on that farm with ten other brothers and sisters–four sisters and six brothers to be exact.

By the time I was born, one of my brother’s had died in an accident, one sister had passed away due to breathing complications just after birth, and my two oldest siblings had moved from home. One of them had joined the Army and the other had joined the Navy.

Left alone on the farm with the rest, it could only be expected that trouble would ensue. We were that family. My uncles used to joke, saying that my brother’s and I could tear up a steal ball-bearing in a sand box. The girl’s turned out to be drama queens and some unbelievable fighters. We were that family.

My father had owned a post mill at one time in his life. My older brother’s worked that mill. It was during the course of this labor that my brother Kirby was killed.

I believe he was thirteen at the time. The typical routine was for them to go into the log woods and cut down trees, cut them into post, load them on the truck, and take them to the mill. At the mill, they used axes to remove the bark from the tree. Usually, they did this by hitting the edge of the post a glancing blow with the hammer head of the axe, smashing the bark away.

I don’t remember seeing them do this, but I often heard stories in later years from them reminiscing about the competitions they use to have where they would compete to see who could make their bark fly the farthest. They didn’t have a lot of those stories though.

Barking the post was evidently the only enjoyable aspect of the business, if you could call it enjoyable. After the posts were barked, my brothers would have to split them into halves or quarters then sharpen them with a chainsaw. After this was accomplished, they loaded the long flat-bed truck with the product and sold them to another mill that treated them with creosote and sold them to farmers throughout the district.

A year or so before I was born, my oldest brother, Robbie, was cutting down a tree. It was a normal routine for him.

Robbie is about eighteen years older than me. He was expected to be responsible, and he was, but he was rarely happy. Whenever my father and mother were absent, it always fell to him to take care of the rest of us. It wasn’t an enviable existence. When he cut down that tree, it didn’t make life any better for him.

I always liked the old movies where the logger shouts–Timber!–at the top of his lungs just before the tree falls. I used to work the log woods. They don’t usually holler that. My brother didn’t.

Kirby was about thirteen. He was blonde and well liked. I only ever saw him in photographs and in them, he always had a crew cut. If you’re unfamiliar with what a crew cut is, it is a lazy hair cut. The barber, my father in this case, takes an electric razor and shaves off all the hair so that what remains is a short uniform layer of hair covering the scalp. All of my brothers, myself included, grew up with this kind of hair cut. It isn’t very flattering.

Kirby was seated upon a stump. Some of my brothers say that he had found a bushel of possum grapes, sweet and extremely tart grapes that grow wild in the woods, and had sat down to eat them. Other’s say he was just being lazy and had slipped away to rest. Whatever the reason for his being there, it was a poor choice.

Robbie cut the tree down, and it fell toward the stump where Kirby sat. The tree wasn’t large, but it didn’t have to be to accomplish serious harm. Robbie shouted for him to get out of the way as it fell, noticing Kirby only after it had begun to lean. Kirby took off running down the hill, but the tree top was tangled with grape vines and caused the tree to spin as it fell. It was spinning toward him.

Everyone said that he should have kept running along the course he’d chosen, but when he saw the tree start to spin, he tried to change direction and tripped on creepers covering the forest floor. He fell to the ground on his stomach, and the tree hit the ground a moment later.

The top of the tree whipped down and across his temple, crushing it. Robbie screamed for dad, and in the next few moments, Kirby was loaded on the truck and the truck was racing down the road trailed by a cloud of dust.

As I mentioned, we lived on an isolated farm. The hospital was over thirty miles away. My brother didn’t make it.

My aunt Viola once told me that she couldn’t understand why my mother kept having kids. She said she’d even asked her about it. She said my mother told her she just loved babies so much. I think that look she gave me in my earliest of memories wasn’t just mine. I’m sure if my siblings thought about it, they would remember her angelic face blessing them with its radiance as well.

In the after math of my brother’s death, my mother showed a face that none of us had ever seen, and that face looked upon Robbie with scorn and without mercy. Robbie, so far as analogies go, had been kicked out of Eden and discharged from paradise.

Everyone knew it was an accident. None of my siblings ever blamed him for what had happened. My father probably beat him black and blue over it, but no one ever said as much. I was told that my father, before Kirby’s death, was cruel and merciless.

Robbie had been in his senior year of high school when this took place. Upon graduating from school, he immediately enlisted in the Army, leaving all of his stuff behind–never to return for it.

In later years, Robbie did return, but not until my mother had passed away. At a low point one night, he came to my uncle’s farm to speak with our cousin Kelly. He told him that as bad as it had been knowing that he was responsible for Kirby’s death, the truly horrible part was that our mother wouldn’t ever let him forget it.

The funeral was huge and one of the largest that had ever taken place in Oregon county. My father sold his post mill, getting out of that business once and for all. He made his money after that repairing other farmer’s equipment and by buying and selling livestock. The real money coming into the family came from my mother who sold Tupperware. She had turned it into a regular business with one room of the house dedicated to filling orders.

Despite it all, we could never afford to buy my brother a tombstone and for years his grave lay un-marked. A friend of the family and of Kirby’s remedied that problem for us many years later. He had grown up with Kirby, and Kirby had been his best friend. Years later, this friend, Richie Wallace, petitioned our family, asking for permission to put a tombstone on Kirby’s grave. Of course, we agreed.

I made it back to the farm over a decade ago and realized, there is no going back. I knew happiness once–true, unadulterated, bliss–and now I only the memory of it. I wish I was like those people whose first memory was of staring into a blue sky or staring at a pillow with a clown on it.

Skipper was right. There is no going back.

 

 

Well, that’s it for this entry. If you want to see what happens next, follow the post and be patient. After all, this blog is a lot like a two year old–it’s all about me. I’ll try to post a new installment each week. So, until later, good-bye.

Journal Update 1-31-13

I would like to take a moment to recognize somebody. She is a woman whom I’ve never met. She is a woman who is strong, confident, and hilarious. She is the woman responsible for this blog and though I’d like claim that I have her all to myself–I don’t.

The woman’s name is Sarah Denton, and she is what one might call a brain trust.

How did I meet her? Good question.

I wrote a novel for my daughter, and I wanted it to be published. So, I turned to the only writer that I knew–my old college professor, Marideth Sisco.  

Now, there is something you should know about Marideth Sisco. She . . . is fan-tastic.  She is the lead singer of the band Blackberry Winter. Her band was in the independent movie, Winter’s Bone which did tremendous things for the band’s exposure. The movie was also responsible for setting fire to Jennifer Lawrence’s career as well. Look it up. It’s a thing.  

So anyway, I wanted Marideth to read my book and consider it for publishing, or at the very least, give me some pointers. I did what everyone does today to reconnect with people. I looked her up on Facebook and to my relief, she accepted my friend request. 

You ever try talking to someone whose professional life is non-stop chaos? I was able to engage Marideth in a few conversations and build back up some of our former rapport (I think) from the college years.

However, there was this one thorn in my side. She was like a professional football defensive guard (that’s a thing–right?). Every time I tried to engage Marideth in conversation or greet her in the mornings, this little pain in the ass kept popping up saying, “This isn’t Marideth. It’s Sarah.” 

“Who the hell is Sarah?” I thought. I started to investigate. 

I noticed that there was a Sarah who kept popping up in Marideth’s comments. I’m a professional troll. It’s my thing. I will always go for the funny.  I can’t help it. So, I’m chatting this chick up, and I do something bizarre. I send her a friend request as well. 

Oh-my-God, is all I can say. 

It turns out that this is the power behind the thrown. I’m not saying that, Marideth, isn’t . . . fabulous, because you know she is. I’m saying that I found Marideth’s house elf. I found her Dobby. 

Sarah, is Marideth’s assistant. She’s a thousand-armed live-in media-savvy managerial tactician with zero tolerance for bullshit.

And, she is mentoring me. 

Marideth, kept hearing me talk about my book and read the feedback friends and family was posting on my wall and agreed to read the book when I was done editing. I guess her interest was piqued.           

I was almost ready to submit it when I thought, hmm, I wonder what Sarah would think.

After a few nervous inquiries, she agreed to help. She said “send me one paragraph and only one,” and I did.

It was like the Tasmanian Devil got a hold of it. I wasn’t even close to having right, and that was one paragraph. 

I thanked her, then went away and licked my wounds. I was so crestfallen, but then, I realized she’d just saved me from embarrassing myself in front of, Marideth. 

So, instead of posting her number in the in the personal section on Craigslist, I instead thanked her.

I’m saving that email for posterity and as a reminder. 

Time went by, and I charmed Sarah, cause that’s how I do. I make her laugh, she gives me advice, and life becomes tolerant. Well, she went and read one of my poems and thought it was good. After which, she proceeded to beat me over the head like Gollum trying to get Frodo’s ring with the sole purpose of having me start a blog. 

I was nervous. I never thought about starting a blog. It was what hipsters with opinions do in coffee shops while wearing knit caps and sipping over-priced coffee. 

But, I was the roofied date, and she was the party who’d just spent a fortune on dinner. It was gonna happen. I was going to start a blog, because you just don’t say no to Sarah. Well, you do say no if it’s Sarah Lee. Her snack cakes will go straight to your thighs. 

Turns out, she was right–again. You guys really seem to like my poetry. I don’t get it. I like writing it, but I never really liked that field of writing overly much. 

This update, it isn’t to promote one of my writing projects this time. It isn’t to talk about my daughter, my daily routines, or express my opinion on world matters. It’s to thank and acknowledge one of my best friends, and to let her know, that in all the world, right now, she’s what matters. 

She has earned my respect, and my admiration, and if you coffee-sipping hipsters want to know what brilliant looks like, you can find my good friend, Sarah, on her own blog at http://moonmooring.wordpress.com/. 

Thank you Sarah. I love you. I worship you, and I hope you feel the love. 

Stop reading people. Go. Now. Sarah’s waiting for your adoration.

Journal Update 1-20-13

Ahhh!!!!!

 

I hate editing. I’ve almost, and quite nearly, rewritten the entire novel–granted, it’s better but . . . still.

 

The book is coming along quite nicely. It’s fluffy, it’s dark, it’s funny, it’s sad. I’m pretty damn proud of it.

 

I don’t think I mentioned it in any of my post, but I come from a large family. In fact, counting me and my parents, we were a family of thirteen. Yeah. It’s not the luckiest of numbers if you’re the superstitious type.

 

For the most part, our luck as a whole, didn’t do anything to diminish the superstitious belief in the mysticism surrounding that unlucky number. If anything, we enhanced its reputation and infamy. But, I love my retarded siblings, and our family as a whole. This book is a way for me to immortalize them and the little farm we grew up on.

 

The story actually takes place on that farm. The mention of Kirby’s Pond, or trash pile we called the Heap, and even stealing apples off the neighboring farm were all things we did when we were kids. I put them in the book. My brothers and sisters who’ve read the rough draft appeared to enjoy the flow of memories. I won’t know for sure until they try to sue me after it gets published I guess.

 

My daughter has instructed me to “shut up”. I keep reading her excerpts from the story on the weeks that I have her, but she wants to read it from beginning to end after it’s done and is worried that I’m going to ruin it for her.

 

It is the worst kind of torture keeping that promise. If you write, then you know what I’m talking about.

 

That’s my update–three chapters left to edit and the epilogue.

 

Oh. I almost forgot. For you sci-fi nuts out there, my daughter wants to start her own anime comic. She’s obsessed and actually a very capable artist at the age of nine.

“She really has her own style.” That is a quote from her art teacher. She is obsessed with drawing. In fact, I bought her a box of twenty notebooks for Christmas–she’s already filled them up.

 

I’m writing another story right now, as well. I’m using the story to create the world that my daughter will draft her anime story arcs off of. It’s called the Church of Echoes.

 

I’m on the third chapter right now. It’s sprinkled with humor, action, and an interesting shift in the world culture–fossil fuels have run out, an attempt to counter global deforestation and rising pollution has gone horribly wrong–turning the world into a jungle planet, and the space program was completely abandoned, resulting in some bizarre advances in the field of DNA manipulation. It’s going to be an interesting read.

 

Well, cats and kittens, I’m out of coffee and ignoring a phone call. Till next time.

 

Good-bye.

Journal Update 1-17-13

Journal Entry

1/17/13

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Nestled away in the southern-most portions of Missouri and northern Arkansas is a series of hills and winding roads populated with simple down-to-earth people and this area is called the Ozarks.

 

I call this place home.

 

My life has spanned thirty-nine years, one elementary school, two middle schools, four high schools, two junior colleges, one state college, and residences in four separate states. In the beginning, I grew up in the Ozarks. I was a hillbilly, though, truth be told, I liked to preen myself and pretend I was a redneck.

 

There is something to be said for the primitive style of living that accompanies the life of a hillbilly. For instance, living free of technology and the trappings of the paradigms of modern society, I found it easy to believe in the existence of fairies, leprechauns, and elves.

 

I recall finding smallish tunnels through the orchard grass in the remote end of my father’s orchard. I ignored the fact that the tunnels were created by field mice and imagined a tiny community of magical creatures responsible for the spiraling grass avenues. The quiet stealthy crunch of fallen leaves beside the road–It must be fairies. It couldn’t possibly be the slow slither and slide of snake seeking a place to hibernate.

 

This? This was my christening ceremony. I was officially and irrevocably a dreamer from that point on, and it has now become my legacy which I pass on to my daughter.

 

When she was younger, maybe three or four years of age, I began to weave for her fantastic tales of fairies and trolls and elves and pixies, and when that wasn’t enough, I created my own.

 

My daughter’s favorite fairy tale creature was one of my own fabrication. A big-footed, big-bellied, giant-nosed prankster with itty-bitty eyes who lived in the bed springs of every child’s bed.

 

The creature’s name was Carl and he was a Git’chem Got’chem. They were the ultimate pranksters. They were the ones who drew mustaches on you while you slept. They were the ones riding your pets around the house in the middle of the night, but most importantly, they were the ones responsible for ridding your room and your closet of monsters.

 

After my divorce, my daughter developed an acute fear of the dark. Stories about Carl got her over these fears. I would trek into her room every so often and find her on the floor half-way beneath the bed looking for Carl’s home. I couldn’t have her doing this. It was nasty under the bed. I told her if she wanted to find out if Carl really existed, then all she had to do was leave a peppermint on her night stand. You see, Git’chem Got’chems go absolutely crazy for peppermint.

 

Every night, she would leave a peppermint on her night stand before falling asleep. And, unfortunately for me, every night, I would eat that peppermint and leave the empty wrapper for her to find. She literally gushed when she told her friends at school about Carl. The children loved her recanting of my made-up-on-the-spot bedtime stories.

 

We progressed through this and every Halloween, my daughter would dress up as a different kind of a fairy. One year, she was a woodland fairy, while the next year she was a meadow fairy. I would make her wands or carve them and then off we went in search of candy and compliments.

 

Her love affair with my story telling reached an all new high for us last year. When upon exiting our house, we spied search lights racing in a clover pattern on a cloud bank overhead (A marketing gimmick no doubt for one of the stores near the mall.). My daughter pointed up to them and asked me what they were. Without missing a beat, I told her that they were moon fairies flying about the clouds. The look on her face as she watched the lights above was simply angelic.

 

So, now she’s growing up. She’s nine now, and though her interests have changed, she still enjoys these stories and looks forward to each one.

 

So, what’s a father to do?

 

Well, I wrote a book to immortalize her favorite characters. I’m currently in the middle of editing it. My daughter  has read excerpts from it and is eagerly waiting for me to finish it. She’s made me promise not to tell her anymore about it until the book is done and ready to read.

 

She doesn’t know it, but I’m halfway through with the second book already.

 

I’ll try to post a new journal entry each week with updates on the progress of my novel. The working title is “The Beauty of a Trap.”