He unscrews a light bulb, hands it down, "Fix this, would ya?" he says.Īt 7 am I leave carrying an overburdened bag stuffed with a uniform and waitstaff training books. The manager, just two years ahead of me in school and locally famous for organizing punk shows at TT's Hotspot calls me over to where he's standing on a ladder. I talk too loud, give myself away to customers who shouldn't be listening, turn red, laugh it off. Friends from school hang out till 4 am choking the smoking section with quotes from Monty Python and Nietzsche, sucking down coffee creamers and bending spoons into neckties. I have a job at Perkins picking up after everyone else. I'm 18, not getting ready to go off for college. "What should we do today?" I ask, honestly befuddled at the openness of our schedules.
These kids don't scoff at the drive, I've been hauling them every-which where since they popped their little heads out and blinked at the wide world. Give me any random day with the scent of campfire on the air and I'll pack up a bag of food and two wild girls faster than you can say, "Raccoons have rabies." It was the marshmallows for me, I'm sure of it, marshmallows and a campfire and Dad probably breaking a hundred State Park regulations coaxing the raccoons from trees, enticing them with sweets.
I'd put all of my childhood into one of those camping trips if I could, just fold it up and stamp it down. My earliest memory: a tiny wooden chair with a hole and a tin pot waiting outside our huge yellow canvas tent, a morning of bribery, a trick to get me to sit and let it all hang out. Once a year, maybe twice, our family went camping. When I finally went to school I found out the other kids had parents who took them places on weekends and summer vacations, small adventures to lakes, boat rides, flying model airplanes over empty fields of clover.
HAIKI BUCKLE SANDAL BORN FULL
By 5:30 I was hiding under the stairs expecting Dad to walk in with a pocket full of butterscotch candies, his work shoes scuffing the floor. The neighborhood waited out its days in silence.Īs if we were the only people left anywhere, Ma and I were home. "Outside," she'd say, "Go play outside." And I'd scuttle off with my little plastic picnic basket heaping with little plastic plates and little plastic spoons. My childhood was spent at home watching Ma scrub the kitchen floor, down on her knees, buffing out the smallest scuff from black-bottom shoes. I follow my children down sidewalks let them pick up sticks to poke the ground, fill miniature pockets with stones, roll in the sand, and stamp dusty feet. It's this part of summer, the late season quell, that brings peace of reflection. We become restive, smitten by the outside, romanced by adventure. I cannot stay home day in and out cleaning bathtubs and hanging clothes to dry.
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