Snow Crash

When I was 8, my dad got me the coolest present an 8-year-old could ever receive.  He bought me a four-wheeler!

To be fair, I'm fairly certain he bought it mostly for hunting purposes.  That was never a conflict for me, however, because my mom always had me when my dad would go to the Love Shack.

Yes.  He called the hunting cabin "The Love Shack."  It was an odd name for a huge shed filled with aggressively straight men and their beer farts.

Now then, my four-wheeler was amazing.  I could burn my legs on the exposed engine or even flip the entire vehicle on top of myself.  How could an 8 year old not love every moment of that? I never lost that zeal. Especially when I got to ramp it at my favorite spot: The Muddy Mountain.

To understand muddy mountain, we're going to have to go back.  Since the day I was born, my father has been building a two-story house with a loft and basement.  It could be beautiful. He even brought in these Amish hitchhikers to put in a stone and mortar fireplace.  Gorgeous.

Unfortunately, my father took several drinking breaks during construction.  After the siding went up, very little happened to the house. Eventually, the property tax policy changed and lines were redrawn. For these reasons, my father chose to stop construction entirely and leave the home unfinished and unlivable.

In the early phase of construction, though, they had to dig out a foundation.  Normally one would either haul off or repurpose the dirt. My family, however, let me play on it and fall in love with it.

I would climb it, throw clods, and roll down it.  My muddy mountain became so ingrained in my play fantasies that we named it.  As I grew, clearly, I got bored with it. But then, my father bought me, an 8-year-old, an ATV.

I mentioned flipping earlier.  Here's why: I put my life in peril so many times on that pile of dirt that my parents definitely should've had DCFS called on them.  But who would call? The parents who let their children wield guns? My friends had knives on their belts. They were 10! I STILL have no need for a belt knife.

That said, my muddy mountain was not the most dangerous aspect of my four-wheeler activities.  Picture snow. Everything was white (well, white-er). I took full advantage: rolling around, making snow angels, throwing snowballs at the trees that stood as proxy to friends since we lived in the middle of a corn field.  After the initial joy of playing in the snow wore off, however, my dad grew restless.

I’ve never claimed to understand the man, but I imagine he thought, “This kid seems to have a death wish...I can work with that.” Inspired by the lake activity called tubing, my dad tied a rope to the back of my four-wheeler and tied the other end of the rope to an inner tube.  At that point, he sat his youngest son on the tube and started the four-wheeler.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this, but I'm going to lay it all out for you.  At first, it was amazing! I held on tight and zipped across the snow. It was like super sledding.  I reached speeds only achievable in that time and place by putting yourself in danger of going into the lake.  My buddy Joe and I had several close calls seeking just such a thrill.

Eventually, though, the inevitable came, as it does.  At the peak of one of the pulls, my tube went directly into a super avoidable tree which I hit head-first.

This is the point where it’s actually fun to imagine my dad’s inner monologue: “Shit!  Now I’m going to have to pay for college!”

I don't remember it hurting.  I just remember being shaken and confused.  It's this day I always look back on when I wonder how my life would've turned out had I received a higher ACT score.

My dad reacted as dads, big brothers and other known fuck-ups tend to in these situations.  He rushed over, grabbed my shoulders and asked if I was okay. In retrospect, this would’ve been the perfect time to come out.  In reality, I was just so scared that we wouldn’t get to take another ride. As it turns out, after seeing his angelic, sweet boy T-bone an oak with his face, my father finally decided he was no longer willing to whip me across a snowy yard with your SUV.

As for me, I’d totally do it again.

Peanut-Peanut-Peanut Butter

I've never felt comfortable having one uniform set of silverware.  Sure, I'm barely an adult by my own standards. But let's be honest, plenty of people have their shit together by now.

x

Now, let me blame my family.  My father's house didn't just have two sets of mismatched spoons.  There were at least 5 different sets in the same drawer.

Why?

Peanut Butter.

Allow me to set the scene:   It's a 90+-degree day. The lake is like a tepid bath.  I've already almost died at least three times from jumping off the second story of my dad's boat dock.  I'm with every child within three years of my age and we all smell worse than you're probably imagining.

Parents didn't want us anywhere near their air-conditioned homes.  That was avoidable for a while. We had trampolines, electric mini-vehicles, 4-wheelers, slingshots, broken bottles, etc.  We had plenty of entertainment.

Unfortunately, children eventually get hungry.  Luckily, all of the country parents were oddly prescient when it came to our nutritional needs.  The moment I felt that first grumble, I'd see some adult coming out of one of the four homes with kids.  What would the adult have? Peanut butter in one hand and spoons in the other.

We'd  run, joyously to said adult, grab a spoon and dip into that jar.  All of the moisture would leave our mouths as we smacked our lips desperately trying to get the peanut butter from spoon to stomach.

Were the parents making sure our nutritional needs were being met? Sure.  Did that also shut us up for up to ten minutes? Absolutely!

What happened to the spoons, you ask?  Everything!

They would go into our pockets. They were tools, musical instruments and they served as a ticket to more peanut butter.  Therefore, they inevitably ended up wherever we did (home). Now, don't get me wrong. We certainly lost some of our original spoons this way as well.  Eventually, a statistician could tell you that there was a near-even distribution of spoons between all of our child-bearing neighbors.

This may sound like the same method people use to trick dogs into taking pills.  That’s fine. This particular “neighborhood” loved dogs as much if not more than people.  Being treated like a dog meant we were being treated like the most valued creatures around.

Now a tangent about the neighborhood dogs:

Every single neighbor (with the exception of the house that had 45 cats) had at least one dog.  They all ran around unhindered by kennels or chains. They often slept in the middle of the road that only four adults ever used.

When I was about four, my mom and I took our daily walk to the mailboxes (at the end of the road, but not the sexy Boyz 2 Men version).  On our way, Mama Buns’ dog, Shadow, was sleeping in the middle of the road. We passed him and nothing happened, but just wait.

On the way back, he was still there, but something felt off.  Maybe it was some type of intuition children have, then learn to doubt and suppress.  Maybe my own anxiety actually exacerbated the situation (but that feels so victim blame-y).  Regardless, I told my mom that I thought Shadow was going to bite me.

My mom looked down at the seemingly unconscious dog and told me I was being silly.  I resisted, she doubled-down, and so I tentatively started walking, giving Shadow a wide berth.  Moments later, I was knocked over. I really only remember black fur and pain. Shadow had lost his shit.

I next remember being lowered into a bath of ice water (like that kid from Secret Garden, I think).  I was cold, confused, and starting to form the foundations of a distrust of my mother’s reassurances that everything would be fine (or when she tried to tell me that I loved meatloaf which is the definition of slander).  It was a dark time.

I wasn’t given much time to actually voice any complaints, though, because before I even got a chance to consider getting out of the tub, I was handed the biggest spoonful of peanut butter I had ever seen.

If people question my steel spoons mixed in with my yellow gingham spoons, I probably won't tell them that all of my friends were given peanut butter instead of air conditioning, but know that that's what I mean when I look them in the eye and say, "I'm poor."

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

I was not unlike most children when it came to animals (except for horses…those things are gigantic and horrifying).  I rarely met an animal I didn’t want to bring home and care for until my parents discovered it, saw the level of responsibility I had shown, and allow me to keep it as my pet.  Things never really panned out that way for me, though.

I blame my parents for making me like animals so much.  When I was born, they had two pitbulls, a male and a female.  The girl wouldn’t go anywhere without a blanket with which she would cover herself when she reached her destination.  One of my first memories is sitting on the porch with them walking around me.  Eventually, one got into a fight with a neighbor’s dog and the neighbors made my dad put them down.

There were also about a million cats living under our porch.  Every night, after dinner, my mom would toss out the leftovers “for the kittens.”  While most of them were fully grown, there were always kittens because those incestuous perverts were definitely not fixed.  My dad, however, hated cats and had plenty of methods of population control before I knew that PETA or the ASPCA existed. 

Be cool, dude...

After the divorce, the tiny pride made their way over to our neighbor’s house.  My best friend lived there, but I never liked going there because it smelled horrible.  Honestly, it’s probably for the best that my parents split up, otherwise I would’ve had much higher chances of being the smelly kid.  It’s about time I found an upside considering those jerks insisted on having holidays and birthdays together.  Think about it: I have to constantly explain that my parents are divorced but I never once got two Christmases or two birthdays.  They never competed for my love with gifts or money.  They were clearly the worst.

My first real pet was only mine for about a month.  He was a half-Rottweiler/half-German Shepard puppy.  In what was to become a trend of me picking out terribly unoriginal pet names, I dubbed him Rex.  I loved him more than anyone or anything in my life.  He was always trying to sleep (as puppies do), but when he would get up, I would follow him around the house with a curiosity normally reserved to urchins on a journey to see a dead body out by the train tracks.  That’s right.  I followed him.  I was an only child.

Rex ate everything he could tear into mouth-sized bits.  One time, I watched him eat an old dishrag, vomit it up, and then eat it again.  I was in awe.

A buffet for my first dog

My mother, on the other hand, was not.  She was a single mother working 50+ hours and a new puppy wasn’t really something she was ready to keep alive.  After that one magical, vomit-y month, Rex went to my brother’s best friend’s house.  Hopefully Little Larry gave him a better name.

After Rex, I was devastated.  I didn’t understand why my dog was going to live with someone else.  I had so much love to give.  So many places to watch him walk.  So many things to watch him eat and regurgitate!  This time, my dad took the reins.

Ruff (yes, I named him Ruff…because that was the noise he made.  I already explained that I wasn’t good at this.  I’m done apologizing.), was a golden lab.  When I was at my dad’s, he and I did everything together.  He even grew to my height in only a few short months.  By that point, he could go swimming with me.  He even learned how to rescue people who were drowning.  Unfortunately, he never really knew the difference between drowning and regular swimming.  Also, his rescue method consisted of pushing you under the water and scratching the hell out of you.

His tail literally never stopped wagging.  For instance, one night, while Dad was playing darts with me in the garage, Ruff stood too close to the wood-burning stove and burnt his tail on the one section that kept hitting the stove.  I don’t mean to insinuate that he just singed his hair.  He had a hairless scar on that part of his tail for the rest of his life.  Ruff was not the smartest dog, but he was mine.

Ruff’s brother lived next door for a couple of years.  Those two did NOT get along.  They would get into full-blown fights while I stood and watched in horror.  I would’ve run and separated them, but I never got to know Ruff’s brother and I’ve never trusted strange dogs.  That’s my mom’s fault.

Ruff's asshole brother...Look at him, clearly instigating.

Before my parents’ divorce (so age four or younger), my mom and I would walk to the mailbox if the weather was nice.  In the country, all of the mailboxes for everyone on the road are at the beginning of the road.  We lived on the opposite end.  This was more involved than simply walking to the end of the driveway. 

On the day that stole my dog trust, a neighbor’s dog, Shadow, was lying in the middle of the road.  Since only three cars regularly used that road, this wasn’t odd or dangerous.  On the way to the mailbox, Shadow was asleep and I walked right past him.  On the way back, however, something felt different.  I slowed and my mom walked past him.  I stopped a few feet back and told my mom I was scared to walk past him.  I looked in her eyes and told her I thought he was going to bite me.  I still don’t know how I knew this.  Maybe he was quietly growling.  Maybe I’m a pet psychic.  Maybe my fear caused it (though I’ve always found that to be a dickish assumption…very victim blame-y).

Conjecture aside, my mom told me Shadow was asleep and to walk.  She told me I would be fine.  I took a few reluctant steps and Shadow made his move.  I was rolling around in a ball of black fur and pain.  I don’t remember much else until my mom set me into an ice bath.  I still think of Shadow when I see someone in a movie get set into an ice bath (especially The Secret Garden).

Therefore, Ruff was on his own until I could go get my dad.

One day, while in the garage that my dad used for both recreation and work (he had tons of printing equipment in there.  I think he did some side printing jobs while he was working at Graphics Packaging.  I’m not sure, and at this point, I’m too afraid to ask.  Anyway, this is a huge garage.  It’s detached and made for two cars.  There are also two rooms in the back.  One was an office and the other had another garage door big enough for a compact car.) I heard a mew coming from the back.  That was odd because that’s where I kept my ATV.  I was nine years old by this point and spent a fair amount of time at my dad’s just wandering around.  I went into the back to investigate, but couldn’t locate the sound.  Then, I heard it again.  It seemed like it was coming from the rafters near the door I had just come in.  I walked to the door and looked up just as I heard a shuffling.  I held out my hands just in time for a tiny gray kitten to fall into them.  It was like magic.  I don't even know why I held out my hands.  I didn't see anything fall.  I just caught a kitten that materialized out of thin air.  Like a boss.

Since cats falling from the ceiling was new territory for me, I ran and got my dad.  He found three more nestled on top of a thick, wooden door frame.  The momma cat was nowhere to be found.  He got a box and set them in there, but they were so little that we couldn’t get them to drink milk out of a bowl and their mom never came back. When I went back to my mom’s, miraculously, the kittens came along for the ride.  My mom set them up a little nest with an old stuffed animal for them to cuddle.  She managed to get them to drink out of a dropper for a while, but it wasn’t incredibly successful.  One day, they weren’t there when I got home.  I didn’t get a chance to think of names.  That was actually probably better for them.

My mom was over pets for a long time after that.  Then came Christmas when I was twelve.  My mom walked into the house with her best friend, Lisa.  They looked really happy, the way people look around small children that must be instinctual because it seems reflexive.  Lisa sat down next to me and put her brown, leather purse in between us.  My mom said I had a surprise and it was in the purse.  I could see something white sticking out of both ends.  Beanie Babies were really popular during this time, so I started to sum up the energy to pretend to love it when Lisa yelled, “Hurry up before it pees in my purse!”

I lifted the flap and saw a tiny, white Maltese puppy looking back at me.  I was definitely excited because I always wanted a pet at my mom’s house, but she was so little.  I was always tall for my age and I wasn’t the most graceful child.  I was worried I’d break her.  I treated that pup like a Faberge Egg.  I also took my time naming her because by this point, I was smart enough to realize I’m terrible at naming animals.  Eventually, my mom got tired of me “dragging my feet” on the subject and named her Stephie.  She thought that “Stevie and Stephie” would be super cute.  The feeling you’re squirming around with right now is an amalgamation of pity, discomfort and maybe just a dash of endearment depending on how affected you are.

Definitely not my sister, mom!

My worry about breaking Stephie never really went away.  She eventually bonded with my mom far more than she had with me and for that reason, I don’t consider Stephie my dog.  She was always really my mom’s.  She never shed and would always growl/bark/bite if anyone got too close to my mom.  I eventually resented her because she was so loud and yippy.  The only thing I can really say for her at this point is that she kept my mom company when I moved out and went to college.  Now, when I come home to visit, the house still feels empty without her.

Ruff is also gone. My dad has a new golden lab, Brody. He’s just as stupid, but I don’t see the same love in his eyes.  I refuse to swim in that particular lake anymore, so I have no idea what his lifesaving skills are like.

Getting to grow up surrounded by animals is definitely one of the benefits of growing up in the country.  I’m glad I got to experience it, even if it was only part-time for most of my developmental years.  I’m also glad I eventually wore my mom down and got a dog in town.  This is the same woman who nursed a wounded squirrel back to health in a cage in her trailer with my dad, so she definitely needed to have animals in her life again.  Oh, and don’t worry. The squirrel can definitely be seen in some of their wedding photos. 

Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads.

I didn't know what a side console in a car was called until I was in Driver's Ed.  In my world, that beautiful storage unit where people stash their cd's, spare change and sunglasses always had a second function.

A much nicer mobile home than ours

My parents had lake-front property outside of city limits.  Lake-front now applies to the house my father is still in the process of building (he started shortly after I was born).  He still lives in the yellow trailer my childhood friends called "The Twinkie."  The pseudo-house now mostly just blocks the trailer's view of the lake. He claims the reason he won't finish the house now is because his taxes will change drastically.

This prime real estate had its advantages, though.  I developed the skill of hearing a car coming when it was still miles away.  I also learned how to swim and fish at a very young age.  The advantage I never really considered during my childhood, however, was the fact that police were only present if/when someone called them.

I got driving lessons by everyone in my family before my age reached the double digits.  I ramped my ATV off a mound of dirt my dad kept after excavation for the big house, the mound I so lovingly referred to as Muddy Mountain.  A friend's little brother learned how to make bombs online the summer after my senior year in high school; I knew exactly where he could set them off.

Needless to say, traffic safety laws weren't at the forefront of my parents' minds.  I never remember being in a car seat, but to their credit, I've always been monstrously tall for my age.  Whenever I would get fussy and start squirming in the half seat belts that were outlawed from the front of vehicles in the 60's, my parents would bring me to the front of the car.

The Buddy Seat

My ridiculous size as a toddler made sitting on my parents' laps uncomfortable at best.  That's when I would get to sit on "The Buddy Seat."  With TicTacs and pennies jingling and mingling beneath me, I would sit as my father sped down sinuous country roads.  I would even ask to sit there when the front passenger seat was a viable option.  Hitting my head on the roof of a vehicle, after my vision returns, will give me a sense of nostalgia for the days when I was King of the Road with the best seat in the house.

One of my first boyfriends and I made a connection after just such a bump. 

He was a grade below me and I was home for a Halloween party.  It was at the local community college.  My best friend was working there and hosting the party, so we knew it would be a blast.  I went just for her, but then I saw other friends from high school. 

One group of former classmates included Zack.  We had one class together and the only thing I remember about him from that class was that he was tiny and full of frenetic energy.  I thought of him as a chihuahua.  However, Zack was certainly more interesting now because he was wearing a shirt announcing that he was gay.

I was intrigued, but still, not there for him.  His group, though, included some friends I had known since early childhood.  We caught up and when Ashley had to stay back to finish up some details after the party, I left with them.

We were in the back seat of a their Jeep with my friend, Travis, between us.  The driver decided she wanted to "Chase Bambi" which involves driving through harvested fields, literally driving toward the animals most known for killing people with their proclivity for jumping in front of moving vehicles.  The goal wasn't to hit them.  Looking back, it seems like it was a way of getting back at the deer for all of the times they almost killed us.

While in the field, I had one arm gripping the handle above the door and one gripping the seat behind Travis.  As we sped toward what was surely a terrified animal, we hit a huge dip and we were all lifted out of our seats.  Despite the seatbelt I'm pretty sure I was wearing, my head hit the roof.  When we came back down, my hand was in Zach's hand.  It stayed there until we got back to my house.  The relationship lasted a few months and we had some fun, but by the end I was willing to blame the whole thing on the brain damage sustained from that bump.  But perhaps the loving reminder of sitting on the Buddy Seat helped a bit.