Sometimes I see things beside the road.

Posted on February 18, 2011 by S.
I’m actually more interested in the three ugly girls.
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Bookends

Posted on February 18, 2011 by S.

My friend’s dad died last night.

He had been dying for two years, and she had been with him the whole time, taking care of him, while we, her friends, stood by and watched.

It has not been an easy two years for my friend, nor for her dad, nor would it have been for her mom.

I have known my friend since college, back when the earth was cooling.

We were so very young then.

Sometimes we go for ten years without seeing each other, and when we do again, it’s just like your parents said (and you thought they were being silly): you haven’t changed a bit.

We run into each other’s arms and hang on for dear life, and though the years have added tiny lines to the corners of our eyes and not-so-tiny pounds to our rear ends, we are still as young as we were then.

Today my heart aches for her, and I send up a little prayer, and in my mind’s eye, she is traipsing around in sweat pants and pearls, organizing, a fuzzy navel in an opaque cup, too young still for such a job.

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Poop

Posted on February 17, 2011 by S.

Surely there’s a less obvious way to carry your dog’s poop around with you than in a plastic grocery bag?

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Road Rage

Posted on February 16, 2011 by S.

I do not have road rage.

I have parking lot rage.

If you get a little slip of paper under your windshield wiper that says, “Quit parking like an asshole,” I probably put it there.

It makes me nuts when people park so close to my car that I can’t get in it without getting my clothes dirty. And yes, I should get my car washed (or wash it my own self) more frequently, but that’s not the point.

There are two lines right there on the pavement to park between, and you know that the car you’re parking beside didn’t get there by itself, so somebody’s got to get back in it to move it. If your excuse is that it’s So Big, then get a smaller car. What are you hauling in that thing, anyway? People who really haul things are capable of parking practically anything, you know.

I’m also infuriated by people who come out of the store or the doctor’s office or the restaurant and get in their cars and…do nothing. I don’t know what they’re doing in their cars, but they’re not leaving in them. Once you’ve left the establishment and stowed things in the trunk and secured any children, animals, and elderly people in their seats, your business is concluded, and you need to come up off that spot. It should not take two minutes to vacate, and while you might not have anything else planned for the day, I sure do.

See how all those cars are parked on the diagonal going that way? That means you’re only supposed to drive that way, right down the middle, not on either side, and when you see cars pulling out, you let them do it, because they can’t see around the tails of the cars and trucks around them as well as you can see them. And if you’re waiting for that person who’s going to get out of that spot in a timely fashion, you turn your blinker on, see, and the people behind you know you’re not just twiddling your thumbs.

If you’re a pedestrian in the parking lot, you don’t walk in the way of traffic, because you don’t know those people – they don’t give a rat’s hiney about you and they are not paying attention and they have places to get to and they will run you right over, right before being all sorry about it.

I had a tiny little skin cancerette removed from under my nose, and it’s a rich source of blood vessels there. I can feel the blood pulsing there right now, this has got me so het up.

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Trash

Posted on February 15, 2011 by S.

Where I grew up, in rural Georgia, it was a 15-minute trip to get to town. Town-town, where you’d get your hair cut or buy a pair of shoes or real groceries or underpants, not Rentz, where you might run if you needed to get a smallish check cashed, or you needed a dozen eggs to make a cake, or you were pining for a Coca-Cola or some Pet ice cream.

We lived with my grandmother (Grandmother or Grandmama, not Granny, heaven forbid), and I was with her constantly if I wasn’t in school. My grandmother would have died before she’d have left the house without getting dressed, and she’d have sooner sprouted wings and flown before taking anybody to town with her who wasn’t shined up, too.

To get to town, we drove up 441, and it was impossible not to drive past the home of a particular family of indeterminate means. I should say their means were indeterminate to me, just as ours were. I thought we were filthy rich because in every direction you could look from our house, it all belonged to relatives.

This particular home was sided with shingles of some description and was the type with steep-pitched tin roof with a deep front porch supported by a post at either end, and one on either side of the steps. Between the posts was a shelf made of 2×8 pieces of lumber, a place to set your drink down, were you to be outside cooling off, as you likely were to be, as air conditioning was not widespread in the 70s.

Living in this home was a woman my mother told me was a washerwoman. She didn’t tell me anything else, though I constantly asked. This washerwoman had a penchant for sitting in her mean little rocker with the missing rockers, her feet thrown up on that shelf, her dress pulled up around her thighs.

When I went to town with Grandmother, as we passed by that house, she would hold her foot down hard on the gas, a death grip on the steering wheel, and stare straight ahead, saying, every time, “Just like a slattery.”

I finally worked up the nerve to ask her what a slattery was, and she merely replied, “Something you will never be.”

Posted in 441, Grandmother, Rural Georgia, Slattery, Trash | 1 Comment