There are very few inanimate objects that I really care much about. I’ve had a few things that I’ve really liked a lot, but for the most part, I am not that attached to ‘stuff’.
In college, I bought my first car with my own money, a teal green, hail-damaged Chevy Cavalier for $4500, “The Cav”. I drove it for 8 years, and then donated it to the Salvation Army when it was time to grow up and drive something that was perhaps not, uh, teal. I cried when I gave it away, not because I would miss the car per se, but because of the memories that I had of every event it had taken me to throughout my twenties.
I have a few books that I treasure, but could probably live without.
Initially, after my mom died, I selfishly hoarded everything of hers, afraid to let go. Eventually though, as I healed, I found the few items that meant the most, the spice cabinet she always cooked from, her journals, my great grandmother’s china, and got rid of the excess that I didn’t need.
While things matter in everyday life, I know that I would be OK in a fire or other disaster as long as I had Mike and my dog and my cat. In the end, material things just aren’t that important. Except one thing. One thing that isn’t even mine.
Unlike any other kids we knew, when my sisters and I were young, we had a real live jukebox at my dad’s house. My dad had randomly come into it in his youth and had the wherewithal to hang on to it. My sisters and I were the lucky beneficiaries. Now, this wasn’t one of those pretty jukeboxes that you might see at a diner with the rainbow-colored lights arching over the bright, shiny, spherical window. This was simply a machine to play music. It was big and heavy and awkward and boxy with sharp corners and squeaky parts. While the chrome could take on a nice shine, you would never look at it and say, “Wow, what a beautiful jukebox!” In fact, most people looked at it, sitting stoically in its spot of honor in the family room, and said “What is that?” Still, no one else had one, and that made us feel cool.
If you looked in the window of our jukebox, there were about ten “rows” of about ten slots each. Each slot held a one-by-three inch piece of paper, A-side song written at the top, B-side song on the bottom, artist in the middle. Each little paper coincided with a 45 RPM record hidden deep down in the guts of the machine that you could miraculously bring to the needle by selecting the right combination of buttons. The buttons resembled small, pink piano keys, half with letters and half with numbers. At one point in its long life, the number one key on the jukebox had come off and been replaced with an extra seven key; it was an imperfection that seemed to make it perfect for our family. After you made your selection and pressed the keys, they would hold down for a moment making a sound like a drumroll, then they would pop back up with satisfying bing. The wheel full of records would begin turning noisily until it came to your selection, and then a metal arm would grab the the record and squeakily bring it to its home on the turntable. If you were about six or seven years old, you were the perfect height to peer through the glass and watch all of this occur. It was better than cartoons.
My dad generously gave us each our own row, and we could put whatever songs we wanted on it. We were allowed to pick from his collection of thousands of 45s, or we could go to Sound Warehouse down the street and spend our allowance on the newest songs that the 80's had to offer. He gave each of our rows catchy alliterative names, Amy’s Anthems, Cara’s Classics, etc. so that our taste in music was prominently on display for any friends or guests. Amy’s Anthems usually consisted of songs in the Twisted Sister and Quiet Riot genre, while mine tended to be her more mellow castoffs from the pre-rocker years, The Go-Gos and Rick Springfield. For years, we would hear a song in public and say something like” Oh, I love this song, I want it for my row” and anyone outside of our immediate family would think we were very odd.
You had to be twelve to turn on the jukebox. It was a house rule because the knob was fragile and in a precarious spot, and my little sister and I had managed to knock it off enough times to have the rule instated. It was decided that twelve was the magical age that brought with it the maturity and responsibility required to operate the switch.
Many times I would venture down to my older sister’s bedroom to see if she would come up and turn it on for me so that I could listen to music while I colored. Being careful to avoid eye contact with Gene Simmons and his tongue seeming to protrude from her wall, I would tap quietly on her door. “Uh, Amy? Uh, hi, I was just wondering if you could maybe---”
“GET OUT OF MY ROOM!” she would scream, completely aghast that I had dared to interrupt her in the middle of her very important work writing down song lyrics in a pink notebook.
She would narrow her eyes at me, sigh, and then turn her attention back to her boombox, pressing the rewind button for the eighty-seventh time. I would trudge back upstairs. The fun would have to wait. And man, was it fun. Even Amy would get into it sometimes, and we would all take turns playing songs for each other, singing into brushes and spoons, dancing like there was nary a care in the world.
Because of the jukebox, I learned to love every kind of music. I loved the old stuff from the 40’s and 50’s that my dad would play from his row, and I loved watching the green apple spin around while simultaneously experiencing a tiny bit of the sixties through the Beatles. I rocked out to jazz with my dad, fell in love with Stevie Wonder at a very early age, and thought Frank Sinatra was the best before my friends even knew who he was. While my friends were obsessed with Michael Jackson, I was listening to Motown. On top of the old, I saved up for the new ones too. To this day, I know every 80’s and early 90’s one-hit-wonder, not to mention every word to Islands in the Stream by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. We wailed Purple Rain until we were hoarse, clutching the edge of the jukebox for support. I actually have Runaway by Slade in my iPod rotation right now; not many people remember that one, but we played it until it broke in half.
Anytime I hear an old song on the radio, Satisfaction, Hey Jude, Sir Duke, New York New York, in my mind I am instantly barefoot in my dad’s family room, singing and dancing and being a kid, watching my dad and sisters do the same. I think that is why people love music. It’s pure nostalgia in five minute increments.
Amy has the jukebox now. My dad gave it to her because she is the oldest and apparently being the oldest allows you to steal your sisters’ memories from right beneath them. (In his defense, he has already given me box upon box of valuable sports memorabilia that I treasure. He would want you to know that he is very fair.) My dad said that he was going to will the jukebox to Amy when he died, but then he and my step-mom decided that they didn’t want to move that frickin thing around anymore, so Amy got it about four years ago. It is in her beautiful finished basement in a place of honor.
Whenever I go over there, we break out the wine and play all of the old one hit wonders on the jukebox. We sit on the floor in front of it for hours at a time, tipsy on wine and memories, singing at the top of our lungs into empty-bottle microphones to Paper Lace and Mungo Jerry and other random groups that no one else has ever heard of. These are old-people songs that make us feel young, songs that got us through bad times and created good times. It seems like we can never get enough of it. But eventually, we get tired, and the music starts to die down, and the wine is gone, and everyone else is asleep. Time to pack it in for the night. Then, Jesse’s Girl comes on and we scream like hyenas and start all over again. I feel like I might love that machine, even in all of its inanimateness. The noises it makes, the feel of its keys beneath my fingertips, the faint smells of WD40 and vinyl, the music that floats out of the tinny speakers. Some things can take you back to a time you never want to forget. That's pure nostalgia.
Showing posts with label Growing Up. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Growing Up. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
How I Got My Brain Damage
In honor of my blog’s new name and look, I thought I would share another story from my sister-filled childhood.
There are some childhood behaviors in which I am pretty sure almost every set of siblings engage. Growing up in a family of all girls, there wasn’t as much of the beating each other to a pulp that my boyfriend and his brother are so familiar with. However, we definitely found cruel ways to torture each other. My older sister jumped out and scared me constantly, even making me wet myself once or twice. I paid her back by stealing from her like it was my job, her clothes, her makeup, and even her money, slyly siphoning a couple dollars in change from a huge jar in her bedroom on an almost daily basis throughout my entire junior high career. She figured it all out, of course, and screamed at me, and threatened me, and even shook me around a little bit, but it never really came to blows. Most sisters don’t really beat the shit out of each other like the boys do, at least my sisters and I never really felt compelled to move beyond the minor smacking and hair-pulling. In retrospect, however, the things we did could have easily caused much more damage than the occasional sibling throwdown.
My mom was a nurse on the maternity ward at the biggest hospital in my hometown. She worked the nightshift and spent most of my adolescence completely sleep-deprived. So, while we were pretty good kids, well-behaved in almost every way, we also knew that there were certain things my mom was completely unaware of. Because we were raised by a single working mother, there were certain expectations of us, and we probably spent more time alone than most kids our age. By the time I was ten, I was completely comfortable cooking, cleaning, walking the dog, etc. My little sister is two years younger, and we basically ran the household together whenever we had to. My mom didn’t really have much of a choice, so we did it. Dr. Spock may balk, but honestly, I think it was good for us in a lot of ways. It made us very independent and very confident in ourselves. I promise, I’m not scarred at all.
Following childbirth, many women are prone to passing out. This was the reason that all of the nurses on the ward where my mom worked had these fabulous inventions called ammonia capsules taped to their nametags or to the shoulders of their uniforms. If you’re unfamiliar, basically, an ammonia capsule is today’s version of smelling salts. It is a white paper capsule wrapped in tightly woven gauze and is about the size of the lid to a Bic pen. All a nurse has to do if a patient loses consciousness is bend it with her fingers until it makes a little snapping noise. It turns pink and gets kind of cold, and the shocking smell it emits, especially when placed right beneath the nose, is enough to send anyone running the other direction, even someone who was recently unconscious.
The ammonia capsules were pure evil. And they were everywhere. Laundry was one of my chores, and when I spied several sets of my mom’s pink scrubs in the hamper, I knew I’d hit the jackpot. I would carefully peel back the tape, remove the ammonia capsule from the soft flowery material of my mom’s scrub top, and then I would tuck it into my hiding place. I had an old coffee mug discreetly hidden behind the huge box of Tide with Bleach, and that is where I kept my booty (and of course when ammonia and bleach are mixed it creates something horrible like toxic nerve gas, so this was really smart on my part) I would wait a couple of weeks until I accumulated eight or ten of them, sometimes coming across some extras lying innocently on my mom’s nightstand, and then I would spend a few quiet evenings in my bedroom plotting my attack, or "doing homework" as I called it.
The best was to wait until my sister was sleeping and then snap one quickly, waving it silently beneath her tiny, freckled nostrils. She would awake with a scream, swinging her arms; I learned quickly to duck at the same time I snapped the capsule. Then I would wait until she fell back to sleep, and I would attack again. Sadly, I think my poor sister spent many of her formative years trying not to fall asleep. While all of the other kids were sleeping ten hours a night through their all-important growth spurts, poor little third-grade Courtney was drinking coffee and reading Stephen King in an effort to keep her eyes open. That may explain why I am over six feet while she stands five inches below.
The sleeping trick was fun, but it was also kind of obvious, plus she was getting really crabby, and I felt like she may be on the edge of telling on me. I had to find a new schtick. I’m proud to say that I tried and succeeded at several variations of the ammonia capsule game.
I was known for my prowess in jumping out from the dark bathroom into the hallway with a freshly snapped capsule as she was walking by. A quick hand to the face, and it was over.
Once, I held a little capsule in my hands and cupped them together. I told her I had caught a butterfly and she absolutely must see it. She bought it, and she actually gagged. I couldn’t have been happier.
Courtney was a smart kid, though, and eventually she caught on to me and found my Cup’o’ Capsules. She got pretty good with the ammonia capsule games herself and we spent two solid years torturing each other with these little medical marvels.
Eventually my mom found out. It was funny, because by the time she caught on, the thrill of the game had totally worn off, and neither of us had touched an ammonia capsule for almost a year. I think she must have found my stale stash collecting dust in the laundry room. She sat us down and proceeded with a very somber lecture about how the ammonia capsules were not toys and were very dangerous, and multiple exposures could cause permanent damage to a person’s nasal passage and even to her brain. She told us she was disappointed in us, and needed to be able to count on us to take care of each other. We apologized to her and promised that we wouldn’t play with the dreaded ammonia capsules ever again. And we kept to our word. Mostly. There was still the occasional ammonia attack as we grew up. I think it’s because nothing we’d encountered before or since could bring such a look of shock and horror and disgust to someone’s face. When you hold the ammonia capsule in your hand, you hold a lot of power.
After my mom’s lecture, and throughout my life I have been plagued with occasional scary thoughts about the damage my sister and I inflicted on each other’s brain function. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the reason I can’t do math and she can’t spell to save her life is very closely related to overexposure to ammonia during childhood. I’d be willing to bet it’s right up there with lead paint, and my college algebra professor would probably second that. Before the ammonia torture, I’m pretty sure we were both MENSA-bound, and now we must settle for this mediocrity that we’re left with, struggling desperately to function in mainstream society.
I’m sure that if Social Services knew what we were up to, my mom could have gotten in a lot of trouble. I mean, her children were chasing each other through the house armed with abrasive chemicals; I think they tend to frown on that. I definitely do not know any other brothers and sisters who did anything that ridiculous as kids, and I'm positive my sister would freak if she caught her two little ones into something like that. But you know what? It is one of my favorite, most hilarious memories of growing up with my sister, and we still laugh about it all the time.
We are so deranged. It must be all of that ammonia.
There are some childhood behaviors in which I am pretty sure almost every set of siblings engage. Growing up in a family of all girls, there wasn’t as much of the beating each other to a pulp that my boyfriend and his brother are so familiar with. However, we definitely found cruel ways to torture each other. My older sister jumped out and scared me constantly, even making me wet myself once or twice. I paid her back by stealing from her like it was my job, her clothes, her makeup, and even her money, slyly siphoning a couple dollars in change from a huge jar in her bedroom on an almost daily basis throughout my entire junior high career. She figured it all out, of course, and screamed at me, and threatened me, and even shook me around a little bit, but it never really came to blows. Most sisters don’t really beat the shit out of each other like the boys do, at least my sisters and I never really felt compelled to move beyond the minor smacking and hair-pulling. In retrospect, however, the things we did could have easily caused much more damage than the occasional sibling throwdown.
My mom was a nurse on the maternity ward at the biggest hospital in my hometown. She worked the nightshift and spent most of my adolescence completely sleep-deprived. So, while we were pretty good kids, well-behaved in almost every way, we also knew that there were certain things my mom was completely unaware of. Because we were raised by a single working mother, there were certain expectations of us, and we probably spent more time alone than most kids our age. By the time I was ten, I was completely comfortable cooking, cleaning, walking the dog, etc. My little sister is two years younger, and we basically ran the household together whenever we had to. My mom didn’t really have much of a choice, so we did it. Dr. Spock may balk, but honestly, I think it was good for us in a lot of ways. It made us very independent and very confident in ourselves. I promise, I’m not scarred at all.
Following childbirth, many women are prone to passing out. This was the reason that all of the nurses on the ward where my mom worked had these fabulous inventions called ammonia capsules taped to their nametags or to the shoulders of their uniforms. If you’re unfamiliar, basically, an ammonia capsule is today’s version of smelling salts. It is a white paper capsule wrapped in tightly woven gauze and is about the size of the lid to a Bic pen. All a nurse has to do if a patient loses consciousness is bend it with her fingers until it makes a little snapping noise. It turns pink and gets kind of cold, and the shocking smell it emits, especially when placed right beneath the nose, is enough to send anyone running the other direction, even someone who was recently unconscious.
The ammonia capsules were pure evil. And they were everywhere. Laundry was one of my chores, and when I spied several sets of my mom’s pink scrubs in the hamper, I knew I’d hit the jackpot. I would carefully peel back the tape, remove the ammonia capsule from the soft flowery material of my mom’s scrub top, and then I would tuck it into my hiding place. I had an old coffee mug discreetly hidden behind the huge box of Tide with Bleach, and that is where I kept my booty (and of course when ammonia and bleach are mixed it creates something horrible like toxic nerve gas, so this was really smart on my part) I would wait a couple of weeks until I accumulated eight or ten of them, sometimes coming across some extras lying innocently on my mom’s nightstand, and then I would spend a few quiet evenings in my bedroom plotting my attack, or "doing homework" as I called it.
The best was to wait until my sister was sleeping and then snap one quickly, waving it silently beneath her tiny, freckled nostrils. She would awake with a scream, swinging her arms; I learned quickly to duck at the same time I snapped the capsule. Then I would wait until she fell back to sleep, and I would attack again. Sadly, I think my poor sister spent many of her formative years trying not to fall asleep. While all of the other kids were sleeping ten hours a night through their all-important growth spurts, poor little third-grade Courtney was drinking coffee and reading Stephen King in an effort to keep her eyes open. That may explain why I am over six feet while she stands five inches below.
The sleeping trick was fun, but it was also kind of obvious, plus she was getting really crabby, and I felt like she may be on the edge of telling on me. I had to find a new schtick. I’m proud to say that I tried and succeeded at several variations of the ammonia capsule game.
I was known for my prowess in jumping out from the dark bathroom into the hallway with a freshly snapped capsule as she was walking by. A quick hand to the face, and it was over.
Once, I held a little capsule in my hands and cupped them together. I told her I had caught a butterfly and she absolutely must see it. She bought it, and she actually gagged. I couldn’t have been happier.
Courtney was a smart kid, though, and eventually she caught on to me and found my Cup’o’ Capsules. She got pretty good with the ammonia capsule games herself and we spent two solid years torturing each other with these little medical marvels.
Eventually my mom found out. It was funny, because by the time she caught on, the thrill of the game had totally worn off, and neither of us had touched an ammonia capsule for almost a year. I think she must have found my stale stash collecting dust in the laundry room. She sat us down and proceeded with a very somber lecture about how the ammonia capsules were not toys and were very dangerous, and multiple exposures could cause permanent damage to a person’s nasal passage and even to her brain. She told us she was disappointed in us, and needed to be able to count on us to take care of each other. We apologized to her and promised that we wouldn’t play with the dreaded ammonia capsules ever again. And we kept to our word. Mostly. There was still the occasional ammonia attack as we grew up. I think it’s because nothing we’d encountered before or since could bring such a look of shock and horror and disgust to someone’s face. When you hold the ammonia capsule in your hand, you hold a lot of power.
After my mom’s lecture, and throughout my life I have been plagued with occasional scary thoughts about the damage my sister and I inflicted on each other’s brain function. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the reason I can’t do math and she can’t spell to save her life is very closely related to overexposure to ammonia during childhood. I’d be willing to bet it’s right up there with lead paint, and my college algebra professor would probably second that. Before the ammonia torture, I’m pretty sure we were both MENSA-bound, and now we must settle for this mediocrity that we’re left with, struggling desperately to function in mainstream society.
I’m sure that if Social Services knew what we were up to, my mom could have gotten in a lot of trouble. I mean, her children were chasing each other through the house armed with abrasive chemicals; I think they tend to frown on that. I definitely do not know any other brothers and sisters who did anything that ridiculous as kids, and I'm positive my sister would freak if she caught her two little ones into something like that. But you know what? It is one of my favorite, most hilarious memories of growing up with my sister, and we still laugh about it all the time.
We are so deranged. It must be all of that ammonia.
Monday, October 22, 2007
Closet Monster
As kids, my older sister and I had this game that we liked to play. Truthfully, she was the one who liked to play it, not me. And, if you want to get technical, it wasn’t really a game, but more like a sport where I was the prey, and my older sister, with huge 80’s bangs in symbolic headdress, was the hunter. She would hide in any feasible spot. Behind doors. Under the bed. In the pantry. In the shower stall. Behind the toychest. Any precarious place available, my sister picked it for hiding, and then waited. And she was so patient. She would be completely silent, not even daring to breathe for what must have seemed like hours at a time. Focused, like a crouching tiger in my dark closet, just waiting for the opportunity amidst the dense jungle of frilly dresses and OshKosh overalls. And then it would come. I would meander adorably into my bedroom, carrying my Malibu Barbie by the hair, maybe a box of crayons tucked under my chubby arm if it had been a particularly busy day, and I would sit my little self down on my Strawberry Shortcake comforter and start to play. I must have looked so cute from my sister’s vantage point, my pink cheeks glowing from playing outside in the fall chill, the evening sun pouring through the window causing my blonde pigtails to shine like spun gold, my innocent third grade multiplication homework lying next to me on the bed. It must have killed her to do what came next.
“RAAAAAHHHH!” She would jump out of my closet, a snarling, teenaged Yeti in a black, sleeveless Quiet Riot t-shirt, screeching at the top of her lungs while clearing the six feet of carpet between the closet and the bed in one leap. She was right in my little face, eyes glowing, teeth bared in a maniacal smile, hair standing on end. She reeked of Hubba Bubba, Aqua Net, and Camel Wides, and she scared the shit out of me.
Had this been an isolated incident, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it right now, however, thinking back, there was probably a solid 5 year period where my sister hunted and scared me in this manner at least two or three times a day. Every. Single. Day. I still have nightmares about it; I still can’t stand horror movies or haunted houses, and I still freak out to the point of tears and convulsions when someone jokingly hides from me in the dark.
In what may be a complete miracle in the science of genetics, my sister and I are now very close. I swear this is because I never told on her no matter how much she tortured me, while our youngest sister would go running to mom or dad (still does) at the slightest hint that something was amiss. I’m 30, and my older sister is 36, and just as we still occasionally wrestle over the remote control, or call each other names, she still finds it profoundly amusing to hide around some dark corner and jump out and scare the crap out me. I still scream and hate it, but at the same time, it makes me nostalgic for the days when being frightened by my sister was my biggest problem, when my main worry was whether or not she would catch me borrowing her pink Guess? sweatshirt, and when I always felt completely safe because someone else was in charge of taking care of me, even when my parents weren’t around.
My sister has become one of my favorite people in the world for about a million reasons. The same humor that compelled her, at age 14, to torture me into submission, is what makes her so hilarious today. The Quiet Riot t-shirt is gone, the Hubba-Bubba has been replaced with Altoids, and the enormous bangs have shrunken to a semi-acceptable height, although somehow the AquaNet has maintained a prominent spot on her bathroom counter (she’s into quantity, not quality) So, while my sister continues her devious ways, in lieu of adulthood, I’m going to go to with the flow, remember the good times, and realize what it means to have someone in my family who actually gets me. So she can jump out and scream in my face anytime; just as in childhood, there will always be a part of me, deep down, that thinks that any attention from her is good attention. The only difference is that now, in the heat of the moment, I’ve been known to drop my cocktail.
“RAAAAAHHHH!” She would jump out of my closet, a snarling, teenaged Yeti in a black, sleeveless Quiet Riot t-shirt, screeching at the top of her lungs while clearing the six feet of carpet between the closet and the bed in one leap. She was right in my little face, eyes glowing, teeth bared in a maniacal smile, hair standing on end. She reeked of Hubba Bubba, Aqua Net, and Camel Wides, and she scared the shit out of me.
Had this been an isolated incident, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it right now, however, thinking back, there was probably a solid 5 year period where my sister hunted and scared me in this manner at least two or three times a day. Every. Single. Day. I still have nightmares about it; I still can’t stand horror movies or haunted houses, and I still freak out to the point of tears and convulsions when someone jokingly hides from me in the dark.
In what may be a complete miracle in the science of genetics, my sister and I are now very close. I swear this is because I never told on her no matter how much she tortured me, while our youngest sister would go running to mom or dad (still does) at the slightest hint that something was amiss. I’m 30, and my older sister is 36, and just as we still occasionally wrestle over the remote control, or call each other names, she still finds it profoundly amusing to hide around some dark corner and jump out and scare the crap out me. I still scream and hate it, but at the same time, it makes me nostalgic for the days when being frightened by my sister was my biggest problem, when my main worry was whether or not she would catch me borrowing her pink Guess? sweatshirt, and when I always felt completely safe because someone else was in charge of taking care of me, even when my parents weren’t around.
My sister has become one of my favorite people in the world for about a million reasons. The same humor that compelled her, at age 14, to torture me into submission, is what makes her so hilarious today. The Quiet Riot t-shirt is gone, the Hubba-Bubba has been replaced with Altoids, and the enormous bangs have shrunken to a semi-acceptable height, although somehow the AquaNet has maintained a prominent spot on her bathroom counter (she’s into quantity, not quality) So, while my sister continues her devious ways, in lieu of adulthood, I’m going to go to with the flow, remember the good times, and realize what it means to have someone in my family who actually gets me. So she can jump out and scream in my face anytime; just as in childhood, there will always be a part of me, deep down, that thinks that any attention from her is good attention. The only difference is that now, in the heat of the moment, I’ve been known to drop my cocktail.
Monday, October 1, 2007
A college entrance essay...on a tangent.
I need to shorten this from 8 pages to 1 or 2...*sigh*
When my mother told me several years back about the day with the hermit crabs, it was the first time I viewed her as a person with a life that was distinctly separate from mine. As we become adults, we all realize at some point or another that our parents’ lives have not always been about us, their children. However, my mom was a single mom who raised my sister and I on her own, so I was always convinced that, in a way, we were her reason for living.
My parents divorced when I was five and my sister was three. My mom was just starting college at the time, and she was 28 years old. My older sister, my half-sister, was to live with my father, and so, my younger sister, my mom and I became a team, in it toghether. My sister and I learned quickly how to help run the household. My mom went to nursing school full time, worked full time, and was a full-time mom; I have no idea when she slept. As I got older, I became aware, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that most everything my mom did was to make sure that my sister and I were ok, and that we became good adults. That is why, when she told me over coffee about the day with the hermit crabs, I suddenly saw her in a completely new light.
The day with the hermit crabs began quite innocently. I was eight, and my six-year old sister was a source of constant turmoil in my life. She was always in my business, trying to hang out with me and my severely cool third grade friends, and, from my perspective, spent almost all of her time being a big, huge baby. It was a Saturday, and I was in the middle of writing a very important report for school, the subject of which was my pet hermit crabs. I would be bringing the little guys into school with me on Monday, and so I told my sister that she could help me by filling the sink with water and letting them swim around while I cleaned out their cage and got it ready for the big debut. She was more than happy to oblige, ecstatic anytime I went out of my way to include her.
I took the small plastic terrarium out on the porch to dump it out and hose it down while my sister gingerly placed the three crabs into the makeshift basket she had created with her t-shirt and carried them into the kitchen. She put the stopper in the sink, and began filling it with water. My mother, in the meantime, was sitting in the next room on the couch staring into space; she had been like that for almost an hour and had told us she was studying. Within five minutes, I heard my little sister shrieking with delight. “Wow, Cara!” she called to me “they are getting really frisky today! They’re coming all the way out of their shells. All the way!!”
This didn’t seem quite right to me because in my vast experience as a hermit crab owner over the prior two years, I had never seen one of them come all the way out of its shell. They were called hermit crabs for the very reason that they carried their little homes on their backs, never to vacate, and so I knew that something must be off. I set down the plastic box, haphazardly sprinkling blue and pink rocks on the ground, and went inside where I found my little sister perched on the kitchen stepstool with her pigtails askew. The stepstool was a purchase made by my mother to allow us to reach high enough to put dishes away, a dreaded chore, however, this day my sister was using it to maintain a bird’s eye view of the goings on in the sink. She was peering down into the water, her face alight with excitement and wonder; she beckoned me over with both hands, not moving her eyes from the sight below.
I ran over, and sure enough, there were my pet hermit crabs in all of their naked glory, shells left behind; soft, curled underbellies exposed. My sister and I chattered loudly back and forth standing shoulder to shoulder on the stool, enraptured by the Discovery Channel-worthy vision in front of us. We called our mom. “Mom! Come here, you’ve got to see this”
Nothing.
No answer.
“Mom! Come check this out. The crabs are going crazy”
Nothing.
No answer.
“MOM!! The crabs are ALL THE WAY out of their shells”
“Huh?” My mom walked into the kitchen, not looking quite like herself. “Are you guys ok? What’s going on with the hermit crabs?”
“They came all the way out of their shells!!” my sister said, and then pointed to the sink, basking in the I-told-you-so-ness of the moment.
My mom strode over to us in a half-run and looked into the sink. Her eyes got as big as ours were for a second, and then her adult logic and wisdom kicked in and she placed her hand in the water, quickly drawing it back, and then plunging it in again, scooping up our frisky pets and laying them on a dishtowel on the counter.
“You guys, this water is boiling hot! You’re cooking the crabs!”
I was instantly angry with my sister and began yelling at her, telling her how stupid she was. My mother was examining the crabs, while my sister started to cry. Seeing her tears, I started to cry, too, sure that my precious little pets were going to die. Then my mom started to cry, and she grabbed us both in a bear hug off of the stepstool, our feet dangling. We all stood there in the kitchen crying for several minutes. My sister and I exchanged glances through my mom’s arms, wondering if she was angry or sad, or maybe just a little bit crazy and if it was all because of us and the crab mess we had created. My sister patted my mother’s elbow as if patting a good dog on the head and murmured, “It’s ok, Mommy, it’s ok”
After we all calmed down, and following a brief family discussion of hermit crab etiquette, my mom helped us clean out the rest of the terrarium. We put our little friends back in their home and hoped they would make it. Miraculously, they did, one of them living for an additional four years, which I assume is unprecedented in the hermit crab world. I finished writing my report in perfect cursive, sitting next to my mom at the kitchen table while she wrote a paper of her own, clacking away on an electric typewriter, a huge cup of coffee in front of her, and her “study-music”, the flute stylings of Jean-Pierre Rampal floating softly out of the second-hand stereo. I gave my big hermit crab presentation that Monday, bringing down the house if I recall correctly. My mother turned in her paper, too.
Life went on, and I barely ever thought about the day with the hermit crabs again, until, at the age of 23, I decided to drop out of college and take a job opportunity I had been given with a financial company in Denver. I was disenchanted with school and figured this was my ticket out of Colorado Springs, my big chance to start being a real adult. My mother, upon hearing of this decision, invited me for coffee to discuss my impending life changes. I went, dreading the lecture that was sure to ensue.
My mom and I talked and laughed the way we always did and then she got serious. “Do you remember the day with the hermit crabs?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes, which, for both of us, was the same as looking into a mirror.
“Which one?” I asked nonchalantly, recalling with a smile several incidents involving the now infamous crabs. The time we lost one in the house for several days, only to find it clamped on to the cat’s tail. The multiple times my sister and I would place the crabs in each other’s beds in order to invoke a scream. PETA would probably frown on all of these hermit crab misadventures, but we were children tasked with the duty of helping to raise ourselves, and those crabs, along with the cat and the dog were a vital part of our upbringing and the teaching of responsibility.
“The day Courtney tried to boil the crabs in the sink,” my mom said, waking me from my childhood daydreams.
I laughed. “Of course I remember.”
I laughed some more, but my mom looked slightly somber.
“That was the day I was going to give up”
She told me the story of the day with the hermit crabs from her point of view. She had a paper to write, a big paper on the subject of something very intricate in the genre of biochemistry. It was due Monday, and she hadn’t even started. She was so, so tired. She couldn’t take it anymore; it was just too much. The little kids, the horribly difficult classes, the full-time job working nights in the X-ray lab. She was just going to quit. Maybe she could become a waitress, or get a permanent position in the lab, but there was just no way she could go on like this, exhausted and drained.
But then we snapped her out of it. Screaming about the hermit crabs in all of our childish drama, my sister and I brought my mom back down from her emotional ledge. It was her job to come in and rescue us from our six- and eight-year-old mistakes, and she did it. She saved the day, and saved the crabs, and saved my little sister from what would have surely been a lifetime racked with the guilt that comes with being a crab-murderess. My mom took care of it, and suddenly, for reasons she still did not understand, she could imagine going on, which she did. The next year, my mother graduated with honors from a top nursing school and went on to have a career that anyone would be proud of. At her nursing school it was tradition that each graduate walk down the aisle with a significant other, or a parent who helped them through. My mother walked down the aisle in her nursing cap, eyes gleaming, flanked by two little girls. We assumed that it was all for us.
My mother paused in her story of the day with the hermit crabs to sip her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of her cup to see if any of this was registering. Then she told me that, while most of what she did in her life was for my sister and I, when she did this one thing, persevering and finishing school, it was all for her. It belonged to her and no one else. She wanted me to have that, too.
I teared up at my mother’s story, and then did the only thing that I could think of, completely ignored her advice, dropped out of college, and started a career like I had already decided to do. In all of her infinite wisdom, she had also raised both of us to be steadfast in our decisions. So I left Colorado Springs and moved to Denver to become a career woman. I have been quite successful, too, but there has always that one thing missing, and this is where you find me now, eight years later, with no children or other excuses to stop me.
I am already getting paid to do something that I love which is to write. I am successful in my work as a financial copywriter, and while I, like many nine-to-five writers, harbor pipe dreams of escaping to the mountains one day to write the great American novel, I find my work fulfilling. It may seem odd to completely change my life when it is all in order and I am happy, but there is something missing. I crave that feeling that my mother described having on her graduation day. I want it more than anything right now, more even than that elusive great American novel.
My mother died in car accident last September. She was only 53. While I know she wasn’t perfect, she was seemingly almost always right. In this case there is no exception. It seems that it took the jolt in my life of losing her to put the wheels in motion, to wake me up to what I’ve been missing. The wheels are finally moving, and I am finally awake. I want to finish my degree. While her memory may be a driving force in my return to school, the degree that I earn will not be for her. It will be bittersweet to achieve my dream of graduating without my mother cheering me on, but this time it will be for me. I won’t quit until I am finished, even if I have to scare a few hermit crabs to get there.
When my mother told me several years back about the day with the hermit crabs, it was the first time I viewed her as a person with a life that was distinctly separate from mine. As we become adults, we all realize at some point or another that our parents’ lives have not always been about us, their children. However, my mom was a single mom who raised my sister and I on her own, so I was always convinced that, in a way, we were her reason for living.
My parents divorced when I was five and my sister was three. My mom was just starting college at the time, and she was 28 years old. My older sister, my half-sister, was to live with my father, and so, my younger sister, my mom and I became a team, in it toghether. My sister and I learned quickly how to help run the household. My mom went to nursing school full time, worked full time, and was a full-time mom; I have no idea when she slept. As I got older, I became aware, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that most everything my mom did was to make sure that my sister and I were ok, and that we became good adults. That is why, when she told me over coffee about the day with the hermit crabs, I suddenly saw her in a completely new light.
The day with the hermit crabs began quite innocently. I was eight, and my six-year old sister was a source of constant turmoil in my life. She was always in my business, trying to hang out with me and my severely cool third grade friends, and, from my perspective, spent almost all of her time being a big, huge baby. It was a Saturday, and I was in the middle of writing a very important report for school, the subject of which was my pet hermit crabs. I would be bringing the little guys into school with me on Monday, and so I told my sister that she could help me by filling the sink with water and letting them swim around while I cleaned out their cage and got it ready for the big debut. She was more than happy to oblige, ecstatic anytime I went out of my way to include her.
I took the small plastic terrarium out on the porch to dump it out and hose it down while my sister gingerly placed the three crabs into the makeshift basket she had created with her t-shirt and carried them into the kitchen. She put the stopper in the sink, and began filling it with water. My mother, in the meantime, was sitting in the next room on the couch staring into space; she had been like that for almost an hour and had told us she was studying. Within five minutes, I heard my little sister shrieking with delight. “Wow, Cara!” she called to me “they are getting really frisky today! They’re coming all the way out of their shells. All the way!!”
This didn’t seem quite right to me because in my vast experience as a hermit crab owner over the prior two years, I had never seen one of them come all the way out of its shell. They were called hermit crabs for the very reason that they carried their little homes on their backs, never to vacate, and so I knew that something must be off. I set down the plastic box, haphazardly sprinkling blue and pink rocks on the ground, and went inside where I found my little sister perched on the kitchen stepstool with her pigtails askew. The stepstool was a purchase made by my mother to allow us to reach high enough to put dishes away, a dreaded chore, however, this day my sister was using it to maintain a bird’s eye view of the goings on in the sink. She was peering down into the water, her face alight with excitement and wonder; she beckoned me over with both hands, not moving her eyes from the sight below.
I ran over, and sure enough, there were my pet hermit crabs in all of their naked glory, shells left behind; soft, curled underbellies exposed. My sister and I chattered loudly back and forth standing shoulder to shoulder on the stool, enraptured by the Discovery Channel-worthy vision in front of us. We called our mom. “Mom! Come here, you’ve got to see this”
Nothing.
No answer.
“Mom! Come check this out. The crabs are going crazy”
Nothing.
No answer.
“MOM!! The crabs are ALL THE WAY out of their shells”
“Huh?” My mom walked into the kitchen, not looking quite like herself. “Are you guys ok? What’s going on with the hermit crabs?”
“They came all the way out of their shells!!” my sister said, and then pointed to the sink, basking in the I-told-you-so-ness of the moment.
My mom strode over to us in a half-run and looked into the sink. Her eyes got as big as ours were for a second, and then her adult logic and wisdom kicked in and she placed her hand in the water, quickly drawing it back, and then plunging it in again, scooping up our frisky pets and laying them on a dishtowel on the counter.
“You guys, this water is boiling hot! You’re cooking the crabs!”
I was instantly angry with my sister and began yelling at her, telling her how stupid she was. My mother was examining the crabs, while my sister started to cry. Seeing her tears, I started to cry, too, sure that my precious little pets were going to die. Then my mom started to cry, and she grabbed us both in a bear hug off of the stepstool, our feet dangling. We all stood there in the kitchen crying for several minutes. My sister and I exchanged glances through my mom’s arms, wondering if she was angry or sad, or maybe just a little bit crazy and if it was all because of us and the crab mess we had created. My sister patted my mother’s elbow as if patting a good dog on the head and murmured, “It’s ok, Mommy, it’s ok”
After we all calmed down, and following a brief family discussion of hermit crab etiquette, my mom helped us clean out the rest of the terrarium. We put our little friends back in their home and hoped they would make it. Miraculously, they did, one of them living for an additional four years, which I assume is unprecedented in the hermit crab world. I finished writing my report in perfect cursive, sitting next to my mom at the kitchen table while she wrote a paper of her own, clacking away on an electric typewriter, a huge cup of coffee in front of her, and her “study-music”, the flute stylings of Jean-Pierre Rampal floating softly out of the second-hand stereo. I gave my big hermit crab presentation that Monday, bringing down the house if I recall correctly. My mother turned in her paper, too.
Life went on, and I barely ever thought about the day with the hermit crabs again, until, at the age of 23, I decided to drop out of college and take a job opportunity I had been given with a financial company in Denver. I was disenchanted with school and figured this was my ticket out of Colorado Springs, my big chance to start being a real adult. My mother, upon hearing of this decision, invited me for coffee to discuss my impending life changes. I went, dreading the lecture that was sure to ensue.
My mom and I talked and laughed the way we always did and then she got serious. “Do you remember the day with the hermit crabs?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes, which, for both of us, was the same as looking into a mirror.
“Which one?” I asked nonchalantly, recalling with a smile several incidents involving the now infamous crabs. The time we lost one in the house for several days, only to find it clamped on to the cat’s tail. The multiple times my sister and I would place the crabs in each other’s beds in order to invoke a scream. PETA would probably frown on all of these hermit crab misadventures, but we were children tasked with the duty of helping to raise ourselves, and those crabs, along with the cat and the dog were a vital part of our upbringing and the teaching of responsibility.
“The day Courtney tried to boil the crabs in the sink,” my mom said, waking me from my childhood daydreams.
I laughed. “Of course I remember.”
I laughed some more, but my mom looked slightly somber.
“That was the day I was going to give up”
She told me the story of the day with the hermit crabs from her point of view. She had a paper to write, a big paper on the subject of something very intricate in the genre of biochemistry. It was due Monday, and she hadn’t even started. She was so, so tired. She couldn’t take it anymore; it was just too much. The little kids, the horribly difficult classes, the full-time job working nights in the X-ray lab. She was just going to quit. Maybe she could become a waitress, or get a permanent position in the lab, but there was just no way she could go on like this, exhausted and drained.
But then we snapped her out of it. Screaming about the hermit crabs in all of our childish drama, my sister and I brought my mom back down from her emotional ledge. It was her job to come in and rescue us from our six- and eight-year-old mistakes, and she did it. She saved the day, and saved the crabs, and saved my little sister from what would have surely been a lifetime racked with the guilt that comes with being a crab-murderess. My mom took care of it, and suddenly, for reasons she still did not understand, she could imagine going on, which she did. The next year, my mother graduated with honors from a top nursing school and went on to have a career that anyone would be proud of. At her nursing school it was tradition that each graduate walk down the aisle with a significant other, or a parent who helped them through. My mother walked down the aisle in her nursing cap, eyes gleaming, flanked by two little girls. We assumed that it was all for us.
My mother paused in her story of the day with the hermit crabs to sip her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of her cup to see if any of this was registering. Then she told me that, while most of what she did in her life was for my sister and I, when she did this one thing, persevering and finishing school, it was all for her. It belonged to her and no one else. She wanted me to have that, too.
I teared up at my mother’s story, and then did the only thing that I could think of, completely ignored her advice, dropped out of college, and started a career like I had already decided to do. In all of her infinite wisdom, she had also raised both of us to be steadfast in our decisions. So I left Colorado Springs and moved to Denver to become a career woman. I have been quite successful, too, but there has always that one thing missing, and this is where you find me now, eight years later, with no children or other excuses to stop me.
I am already getting paid to do something that I love which is to write. I am successful in my work as a financial copywriter, and while I, like many nine-to-five writers, harbor pipe dreams of escaping to the mountains one day to write the great American novel, I find my work fulfilling. It may seem odd to completely change my life when it is all in order and I am happy, but there is something missing. I crave that feeling that my mother described having on her graduation day. I want it more than anything right now, more even than that elusive great American novel.
My mother died in car accident last September. She was only 53. While I know she wasn’t perfect, she was seemingly almost always right. In this case there is no exception. It seems that it took the jolt in my life of losing her to put the wheels in motion, to wake me up to what I’ve been missing. The wheels are finally moving, and I am finally awake. I want to finish my degree. While her memory may be a driving force in my return to school, the degree that I earn will not be for her. It will be bittersweet to achieve my dream of graduating without my mother cheering me on, but this time it will be for me. I won’t quit until I am finished, even if I have to scare a few hermit crabs to get there.
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