beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I was a kid, even well into my teens, I didn’t like very many foods.  These days, I eat and enjoy pretty much anything from any part of the world, but it wasn’t always so.  Peas and cole slaw were my two least favorites.  The first grade school I went to had notoriously nasty peas.  I don’t know what they did to them, but I’ve never tasted anything like them either before or since.  It was a Catholic school (despite the fact that my family wasn’t Catholic; that’ll be a story for another day), and one of the nuns would stand over you and force you to finish everything on your plate.  It was nightmarish.

Ironically, the same school had one dish that was a hit with everyone, and we always looked forward to it when it came up on the menu.  It was called Hamburger Gravy Over Rice, and I’ve never seen that anywhere else either.  I somehow talked my mom into making it at home once, but it wasn’t the same.

I’ve grown to like peas, particularly the ones in the pods, but cole slaw still remains elusive to me.  The other day, my friend made some that was delicious, and that reminded me of a story that has become famous in our family.  Not long after Mom and Dad split up, when I was about ten, Dad took Brother and me to ColonelChicken for dinner.  We sat in the ‘terrarium’ room, with the fountain and leafy plants.  I ate my chicken and mashed potatoes, and even my biscuit, but I left the dreaded cup of cole slaw untouched on the table.  ColonelChicken’s was the worst.  Dad told me that we weren’t going to leave until I ate the entire thing.  I balked, and he got angry, so I picked at it and ate it as slowly as possible, washing it down with water as I did so.

The minutes ticked away, and Dad was getting irritated.  “Come on!” he yelled.  “You could eat that whole thing in one bite!”

“No I can’t,” I said, “I’ll gag.”

“Do it,” he said sternly, wrinkling his forehead in the way that signified genuine anger.  “All in one bite.”

“Okay, but I’m gonna spit it out.  It’s so gross!”

“I don’t care.  Eat it.  Now!”

“Okay, but don’t be surprised by what happens.”

I dipped my spork into the cup until I had the entire contents resting on it.  I held my breath and slowly moved the spork to my mouth.  I had to breathe, eventually, and as soon as the smell hit my nostrils, I had to fight back my gag reflex.  Dad was still giving me The Look, so I had no choice but to ease the spork into my mouth.  It was the worst bite of anything that I’d ever tasted.  I chewed a little bit, but I could feel my gag reflex about to happen.  I reached for the water glass, but it was too late.  My body rebelled, and the disgusting bolus (I love the word ‘bolus’, and finally have the opportunity to use it!) exploded from my mouth all over the table and floor.  Dad was furious, and he grabbed a bunch of napkins and cleaned it all up.

“See?  I told you that would happen,” I said, unable to stop myself from laughing.  Dad couldn’t even look at me, he was so mad.  I sat in the chair and laughed as he mopped the floor.

That was the last time I ate the cole slaw at ColonelChicken, and quite possibly the last time Dad ever forced me to eat anything.  I guess he learned, albeit the hard way, that my warnings had merit.

These days, the tables have turned.  I got my mom to eat sushi for the first time two years ago, which is funny because she actually lived in Japan for a couple of years before I was born, but never tried sushi because she was afraid of it.  I told her that was hilarious.  “It’s good enough for them; good enough for you.”  She said that on the air force base, food would sit around for a while, sometimes, and if I’d ever smelled some of the things that were in storage, I’d be afraid of sushi too.  Fair enough.

As a bookend for this story, here is the secret recipe for the cole slaw in question.  I will pass, thank you very much, but please report back to me if you actually make it and enjoy it.

My favorite thing to write about lately seems to be my childhood, between the ages of about eight and eleven.  Not sure why that is, exactly, but it’s interesting to revisit those times from an adult perspective.  Here’s one that’s particularly memorable and funny.

When my parents split up, I became the ten-year-old de facto Man of the House, which meant that sometimes I had to do things that Dad would prevously have been asked to do.  I remember being sent to the store once by Mom to buy some tampons.  She was unable to make the trip herself, for obvious reasons, and my brother was too young, so the task fell to me.  I rode my bike to Wray’s Thriftway and parked it in the bike rack.  As I walked through the aisles, I became increasingly mortified by what I’d been sent to do.  I attempted to distract myself by looking at the candy bars, and I decided to purchase one, in order to make bearable the awkward situation I was preparing to face.  I carried my candy bar and walked quickly to the mysterious tampon aisle.

As I stood there, staring at the huge and confusing array of pastel-colored boxes, I quickly realized that Mom had neglected to tell me anything about which kind to buy.  I knew nothing about them (and I still don’t, let’s face it!) except what I’d seen in advertisements on TV.  I knew that mothers and daughters seemed to talk about them in great detail at the breakfast table (as well as ‘douches’, whatever those were), and that women loved to play tennis while they were using them, but I knew nothing about sizes or materials or shapes or any of that.  I grabbed a box by a brand name that I recognized and made a beeline to the checkout counter, avoiding all eye contact and making sure not to go through the line of any of the checkers that I knew.  I decided on the counter nearest the exit, and I nervously placed my two items on the conveyor belt, candy bar first.

The lady in front of me had about a million items in her cart, and I stood there fidgeting, praying that no one would get behind me in line.  My prayers went unanswered, and a whole family of people appeared behind me.  I turned my back to them and kept my eyes facing the door, where freedom beckoned.  When the woman in front of me was finally finished, the checkout lady saw my tiny Twix bar and huge pink box of tampons and absently asked, “Did you find everything you need?”

I nodded as she scanned my candy bar and placed it on the other end of the counter.  As she scanned the tampons, i blurted out, “Uh—they’re not for me.”

She gave me a polite laugh and said, “No kidding.”  She was in her forties, I think (but kids have no gauge for age; you’re a Kid, then you’re a Teenager, then you’re an Adult, then at some point you become Grandpa), and she certainly didn’t need me to explain the situation, but in my heightened state, I was convinced that she was trying to humiliate me even further when she asked, “Paper or plastic?”

Unaccustomed as I was back then to that innocuous question, I thought she was talking about the tampons, but I finally realized that she was merely inquiring about what kind of bag I wanted to carry the stuff home in.  “Paper,” I said, which was more difficult to carry on my bike, but at least the contents of the bag would be safely hidden.  I paid for the items, zoomed out the door, got on my bike and rode home before anyone else saw me.

In retrospect, I don’t know why that was such a humiliating experience.  It certainly wasn’t weird for the checker until I MADE it weird.  Maybe my mom was uncomfortable asking me, so I internalized that discomfort and was ‘primed’ for the situation to be awkward.  I was years away from being familiar with Hamlet, but his line, “There is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so,” would have been a useful one to keep in mind that day.

I still think of my hilariously asinine statement every time I see tampons in the store.  They’re not for me.  For the record, I’ve bought them a few times since then, and it isn’t awkward at all.  I’m sure that’s because when I was ten, I learned that I don’t need to blurt out that they aren’t mine; everybody already assumes that.

There’s been a lot of dream talk around here lately—Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That—but I’m sure you know by now that means I’ve been in one of those cycles where I’ve been extremely busy and out of town a lot.  I’ve been gone for gigs, and for the Fourth of July weekend, and then I spent the better part of a week at the Oregon coast with Mom and Brother’s Family.  I spent two weekends in a row in Yakima, and actually had a great time, for a change.  There’s lots of stuff to potentially write about, but no time to process and think about it all yet, so in the meantime, I’ve decided to dip back into my childhood for this entry.

This story is about a kid in my fifth-grade class who used to pick on me mercilessly.  I genuinely hated him, in the way that only children are capable of hating each other.  The good news for me at the time was that he was absent from school a lot, and no one seemed to know why.  There were rumors that he was sick, or that his parents traveled all the time, but we never really knew for sure.  I only remember him being in class for a few weeks of fifth grade, and a handful of days of sixth grade before another of his famously long absences.

A few months into the school year, we finally learned what had happened to him.  Our teacher, Mr. G (which, incidentally, stood for ‘Growcock’; I’ve written about him before), brought in a copy of the newspaper and read us a story from the front page about how the boy had died from leukemia.  “What’s loo-keem-uh—what’s that?” someone asked.  Mr. G explained to us that it’s a form of cancer that spreads through the inside of your bones, and that it’s extremely rare in children, but devastating when it does appear.  He went on to read that our classmate’s teenage brother donated some of his own bone marrow to help the boy’s cause and hopefully give him a new lease on life, but two days before he was scheduled to be released from the hospital, he lapsed into a coma and died.  He was eleven years old, as was most of the rest of our class.  We were dumbfounded.  He was dead?  How was that even possible?  I found myself feeling secretly relieved at the news, since When Bad Things Happen To Bad People It’s Good, at least in a kid’s mind.  As far as I was concerned, justice had been served.  I also found myself wishing, in my little heart of hearts, that some of my other tormentors would be similarly dealt with, by God or whoever.

I had forgotten about all of this until my friend reminded me of the boy during my last trip to Yakima.  Somehow he came up in conversation—I’m not entirely sure how—but we were talking about our grade-school teachers, since my friend had just recently run into one of them at the grocery store.  The strange thing (one of the many) about this story is that the boy’s legacy lives on to this day, since he happened to be born into an extremely famous sports family.  They’re so famous, in fact, that I won’t even write his name because it’s unusual and you may very well recognize it.  The dad was a pitching coach, and he’s still alive.  The brother who heroically donated his bone marrow went on to be a major-league pitcher, and since his retirement from baseball, he seems to have recently started a multi-level marketing business in Canada, which is a bit strange.  A third brother went on to be a professional pitcher as well.  Since I don’t follow sports whatsoever, and I haven’t since I was a kid, I had no idea how famous they all are, so I when I typed their names into FamousSearchEngine, I was shocked by how many results came up, and by the fact that almost every article mentioned the boy who had died so tragically from leukemia, all those years ago, and almost every interview featured one of the family members saying how they don’t go a day without thinking of him.  But I knew him, and he was cruel.  He was more than just an abstraction in a news story; more than just a little halo in a hospital room.

Yakima is a town from which very few well-known people hail.  It’s a bit like Canada, in the fact that people who grow up there know the names of every famous Canadian, and they can rattle them all off on cue.  It’s a secret society.  Those of us who grew up Yakima have the same ability to run down the list of famous Yakimaniacs from memory, and we can do that even if you wake us up in the middle of any random night.  My personal favorite is Raymond Carver, the amazing author, but there are a few others, such as comedian Sam Kinison and actor Kyle MacLachlan.  Oleta Adams, who famously sang with Tears For Fears, had my dad as her insurance agent back in the 1970’s. (Incidentally, here’s an awesome live video of Woman in Chains.)  Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson supposedly each owned a ‘getaway’ house somewhere on Scenic Drive, but none of us knew which houses they actually were.  Further down the list are a pair of Olympic gold-medalist skiers who also happen to be twin brothers, and there are a few supernumerary professional football players.  Now, at the very moment I decide to tell this dark and surreal childhood tale, I find out that there’s this legendary baseball family as well.

At this point, I would normally try to find some way to wrap this up in a nice little package, possibly with a ribbon and a bow, and leave it for posterity, but I don’t know that I can do that in this particular instance.  I should, of course, mention that despite my mixed feelings at the time, I hope my former classmate rests in peace, and my heart definitely goes out to the family now, who are clearly still dealing with the grief and the legacy of this thirty-year-old tragedy, which never quite seems to go away.

I just woke from a dream that was unlike all of my previous ones, in that I was a twelve-year-old boy from India.

* * * * *

I’m in the hallway of a large office building. There is a young girl about nine years old who is either my sister or my sidekick. (I suppose she could be both.) She is Indian like I am, since that’s where the two of us were born.

We decide to explore the building a bit, and we walk through a doorway into an unused part of the building. It seems to have been vacant for quite some time, and there are huge piles of flattened cardboard boxes stacked up and waiting to be recycled. We walk through that room and into the abandoned bathrooms. The only light in this area is provided by the small amount of sunlight that’s able to penetrate the layers of grime on the windows. It’s dim, but we can see clearly enough.

Suddenly, a man climbs in one of the windows and grabs SisterSidekick by the leg. He pulls her toward the window, but she is able to free herself and we both scramble away.

This kind of thing becomes a recurring theme of the dream, and the two of us constantly find ourselves being chased, threatened, held at gunpoint (and even fired upon!), and a few other similar situations that we always manage to extricate ourselves from, or simply talk our way out of. I can never quite decide if we’re part of a television show or not.

Then the dream changes, and I’m suddenly an adult—my real-life American self—riding in a car with a beautiful woman. True to the form of the rest of the dream, she seems to be my captor, and is holding me against my will, although not entirely. She is around thirty years old, very slim, with her dark blonde hair tied into a ponytail. She’s wearing simple jeans and a light blue chambray shirt, but I know that she has various small weapons hidden inside her clothes. I also know that we’re in London, despite the fact that she’s driving on the right-hand side of the road, and on the left-hand side of the car, like we do in America, and like they do pretty much everywhere else except Japan and the remnants of the British Empire.

I look over at my so-called captor while she’s driving, and through her window I notice that we’re driving through an extremely elegant and picturesque old neighborhood. I point out a huge cathedral made of weathered red brick, and mention something to her about how We Certainly Don’t Have Churches Like That Back in the States, but secretly I think to myself that we probably do, especially on the East Coast.

I look around the beautiful neighborhood and blurt out, “I wish we lived here.” She says nothing but gives me a little smile that I’m unable to interpret. “Actually,” I continue, “I wish we could have lived here in the Sixties, back when this was the center of the universe.” Her smile fades ever so slightly, and I realize she’s lost in her own thoughts, not paying me the slightest bit of attention. Despite that fact, I attempt to continue. I start to say, “It seems like everyone back then became famous,” but about halfway through the sentence, she makes a strange gesture with her hand and a dollop of water splashes me in the face, rendering me speechless. I brush myself off and curl my lip into an exasperated grimace as I turn to her and say, “You didn’t have to do that.”

I think to myself that from here, this story can go in one of two directions. If this is the cheesiest romantic adventure story in history, she will turn to me and say, “I didn’t have to do this, either,” and lean over to kiss me. If this is one of those surprising adventure thriller stories, she’ll say the same thing but punch me in the face instead.

It is at this juncture that I seem to be unable to decide which of the dream’s possible trajectories will play itself out. I suspect that the punch will make for a better story, but she’s also very beautiful, and I’d love to kiss her. The two disparate trajectories will forever remain disparate, however, because my brain never does decide which story to follow, so the two of us drive together silently for an inordinate amount of time, at which point I awaken from this incredibly strange dream.

I’ve always been a night owl, but the last week or so has found me in bed much later than usual.  The bad thing about it is. . .well, I guess there isn’t anything inherently bad about it, but it does become a cycle that’s difficult to break from.  My favorite thing about sleeping in that late is that that’s when I usually get some good dreams in, and today was no exception.  I had a couple of short ones, followed by a sprawling one that lasted an hour and a half. I’ll have to paraphrase and condense it a bit, because the story didn’t really unfold until the end.

It started at my last job.  Late in the afternoon, a woman came to my desk to deliver a big pile of paychecks that I was expected to ‘sign and mark’ with a yellow pen that she also gave me.  I told her I could have it done by tomorrow, and she said, “Okay, as long as it’s by one o’clock.”  Not a problem.  She walked away, and I got up to do something else, which is when I discovered that I was in my first Portland apartment.  I took off all of my clothes and crawled into bed.

A guy I knew in Yakima came into my room just then (we’ll call him Michael, since that’s his name) with his girlfriend, and he was holding a small gun.  He made a gesture for his girlfriend to get in bed too, so she took off her clothes and slid in next to me.  Each of us put an arm around the other, and Michael sat down on a chair along the wall next to the night stand.  He raised his arm just enough to point the gun in my direction.  “I need your car,” he said.

“What?  Why?”  I turned my head to look at him.  His girlfriend shifted a little bit, and I slid my hand down her back.

“I just need it.”

“You’re stealing my car?”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s a piece of shit.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“No, really.  if you’re gonna steal a car, you should steal something good.”  He lowered the gun, and I continued.  “What happened to you?  We used to be friends, hanging out and stuff.  I don’t get it.  Do you need a ride somewhere?  You don’t have to do all this, I can just. . .give you a ride.”

“Okay,” he said, sheepishly.

His girlfriend got up and stood around naked for a while before she got dressed again.  I stayed in bed and tried to figure out what to do next.  The two of them left the room, and a handful of people appeared and started milling around in my bedroom.  They were both men and women, all professionally dressed, and one woman had her young son with her.  The woman and her son sat on my bed, and I wondered how to get up without just being naked in front of everyone.  I decided that it didn’t matter, so I got up nonchalantly and put on my clothes.  My cat brushed against my leg repeatedly, which made dressing difficult.  Mom, Stepdad and Brother appeared, and told me it was time to get ready for the party.

“It’s a Christmas party,” Mom said.

“Why are we going to a Christmas party in April?” I asked.  “I mean June.”

“It’s more of a halfway-to-Christmas party,” she replied.  “Some people have a halfway-to-St.-Patrick’s-Day party, we have this.”

“Well, crap, if I’d known it was gonna be a Christmas party, I would’ve finished up my stuff at work.  I’m not too excited about a Christmas party in September.  I mean June.”

“You don’t need to go if you have things to do, I just thought it would be fun.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll come, just let me pack first.”  I started to throw a few things into a suitcase.  The walls of the room sort of dematerialized, and my furniture was now sitting on a perfectly manicured lawn next to a nondescript one-story stone building.  By this time, I had sensed that the unknown people were military personnel, and Stepdad was very agitated by their presence.  He and the rest of my family members left to go the party, and one of the military people came to talk to me.

“Good thing you’re a troop,” she said.  “If you weren’t, we’d have to search all your belongings.”

“But I’m not,” I said.  “A ‘troop’ or whatever.”

“What?”

“Yeah.  I’m not a troop.”

She looked dismayed.  A couple of the others heard what I’d said, and they came over to offer her some assistance.  “But how did you get in here, if you’re not military?”

“What do you mean?  I LIVE here.  I’ve been here for a week, and this military stuff just. . .appeared.”

She turned toward the others with a grimace.  “Let’s get to work,” she told them, “we have a lot of stuff to get through.”  They walked to my dresser and peered inside.  Each drawer was filled with a huge number of small gifts and trinkets, except one, which had underwear and socks in it.  Two of them started rifling through the trinkets, and the others went to explore other parts of what had, until recently, been my apartment.

One of them, a Hispanic man around thirty years old, took me aside and escorted me toward a parking garage in the building.  He asked me a bunch of nonsensical questions that I can’t recall, but then he asked, “Why do you hate relationships?”

“What?”

“Why do you think relationships suck?”

“I don’t; I totally want to be in one.”

He gave me a look of disbelief, and shook his head.  “Just be honest.”

“I am.  I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Gimme a break.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, and I don’t see what this has to do with anything.”

He grabbed my arm and walked me briskly toward the door to the building.  Great, I thought, I’m about to be more thoroughly interrogated.

And then I woke up.