Jet Ski

It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school.  I had just spent the night with my friend--we'll call her Katie--at her grandparents' lake house.  Our friend Lisa, who had always been inseparable from Katie, had recently moved away, and this sleepover was clearly a test to see if I was potential New Best Friend material.

So far, I was botching it pretty badly.

"Lisa always used to change the CD while I was driving," Katie announced during the 45-minute trip to the lake, so I stretched my arm awkwardly in front of her face and rummaged through her visor-mounted CD case.  

"Oh," she said when the CD I picked started playing, "I guess that's okay."

After a fitful night on the upstairs couch "where Lisa always used to sleep," I slipped downstairs shortly after daybreak, careful not to wake Katie, who was burrowed in her own bedroom.  

"Why didn't you wake me up?" she demanded when she emerged several hours later, looking refreshed and well-rested.  "Lisa always used to wake me up."

Now Katie wanted to go jet skiing on the lake.  I had never ridden a jet ski before, and I was immediately alarmed by the lack of anything to hold onto whatsoever.  In the driver's seat, Katie had the handles and foot pedals to anchor her; riding behind her, I had no grips, no straps, no footholds.  

"Are you sure this is safe?" I asked.

"It's fine," Katie shrugged, already revving the engine.  "Lisa used to ride back there all the time."

This was likely my final chance to squeeze some magic memories out of this awkward, exhausting weekend.  Katie would know if this was really dangerous, I assured myself.  I mean, she has a jet ski license.  

We careened away from the pier and into the open water.

It took a full thirty seconds for me to yell "SSSTTOOOOPPP!" as my arms flailed uselessly behind me and my ankles lost their ineffectual grip on the hard plastic seat.  

The roar of the engine died away.  Katie cast a cursory glance over her shoulder as the jet ski bobbed in the water.  "WHAT." 

"I'm falling off."

"Just grip my waist," she barked, and we sped away once more, now with my hands resting hesitantly on the sides of Katie's life preserver.

The wind was churning up some impressive waves that day, and Katie's objective was to hit each wave hard enough to send the jet ski briefly flying through the air.  Shortly after we started moving again, a wave slammed against us, and I lost my timid grip on Katie's life vest.  I barely had time to process what was happening as I flew through the air in a graceful arc.

I hit the surface with a giant, full-body slap, then tumbled head-over-heels underwater at breakneck speed.  My field of vision consisted of swirling water and streams of bubbles.  I had no idea which way was was up or which way was down.  Not that it mattered, since I couldn't feel any part of my body.  I'm actually a pretty good swimmer, but it's impossible to swim when you literally have no control over your limbs.  I was like a floating head caught in the spin cycle of a washing machine.

This is pretty much exactly what was happening in front of my face.

Finally, I lost my momentum, and my life vest buoyed me upward.  I broke the surface of the water, gasping for air.  Katie circled around on the jet ski.  As I floated there, watching her approach, I prepared myself to gracefully accept her apology for dragging me into what was clearly a deathtrap.

At that moment, I realized there were things I absolutely would not do for friendship, and that being flung off the back of a jet ski was one of those things.

I spent the rest of the day watching TV with Katie's grandmother in an air-conditioned room, while Katie rode her jet ski around the lake. I was not invited back to the lake house.

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T is for Theft

Adjusting to the structure and routine of preschool was difficult for me.  I viewed our scheduled activities more as general suggestions.  I zoned out during the pledge of allegiance.  During the hokey pokey, I just stood awkwardly, moving random limbs at intervals.  I took my macaroni art and coloring pages in edgy new directions that were never well received.

The only thing I liked at preschool was free play, when we were unleashed upon huge plastic bins of toys to do whatever we wanted.  Other kids occasionally asked me to play with them, but I couldn't comprehend why anyone would willingly squander their free play time doing what some other kid wanted to do.

I had one aim during free play, and one aim alone:  to find my purple unicorn.  She was the only toy I played with.  At the end of each free play, I tucked her safely in the very back of a bottom drawer where she would patiently await my return.

Then one day, when I reached into the drawer to retrieve my faithful companion, brimming with new imaginary adventures for us to embark upon together, something terrible, unthinkable, had happened.

Some ungrateful heathen had smeared sticky stuff across her proud, graceful torso.

I was outraged.  Clearly, I could not permit such an abomination to happen again.  At the end of free play, amid the commotion of kids returning their sticky, bourgeois toys to their bins, I shoved the purple unicorn in my backpack.

At the end of the day, as soon as our car was safely out of sight of the preschool, I proudly introduced Mom to the newest addition to our family.  She wasn't nearly as impressed by my heroism as I anticipated.

"I couldn't just leave her there!" I said. "Those kids will ruin her.  They got sticky stuff all over her, look."

I don't know if it was the bizarre logic behind my decision, or sheer exasperation, but I got to keep the purple unicorn.  I brought her home and dutifully stowed her away with all my other toys, and then I never played with her again.  I mean, she had sticky stuff all over her.  Gross.

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S is for Scary

I was inexplicably scared of many things as a child.  The sound of an air conditioning unit or loudly flushing toilet sent me fleeing in horror, and those were just the normal fears.  Here are a few of the other, less standard things that incited terror in my young heart.

1.  Loved ones wearing costumes (Strangers in costumes? Totally fine)

My grandparents were relatively young when I was born--Meemaw was in her late fifties, and Pappaw was in his mid-sixties.  One night when I was two or three years old, they decided it would be funny to show up at our house dressed as really, really old people, hobbling on canes and speaking in croaky voices.  They whitened their hair and applied makeup to make their faces seem extremely wrinkled.  Mom played along and pretended they were two total strangers.  Meemaw was carrying a baby doll wrapped in a blanket like a real baby, because this was all an elaborate ruse to make me believe this baby had been entrusted to me by two mysterious strangers of the night. 

Mom invited the elderly "strangers" inside, and they approached me as though meeting me for the first time.

Their plan began to unravel when I took one look at them and realized these people were Meemaw and Pappaw, except something was horribly, horribly wrong.  Some evil wizard had sucked away their youth, and apparently their memories as well.  And my stupid mother had let these zombie-grandparents into our home without a second thought.  If I was going to survive, I had to accept that these were no longer the grandparents I loved, but mere empty husks now bent on sucking the youth out of me as well.  As you can imagine, that's a lot for a toddler to process.

If this is your idea of humor, then yes, this night was hilarious.

2.  Babies

Sensing the tension in the room, Meemaw skipped ahead and gave me the doll she had brought me, hoping to distract from the psychotic meltdown I was having.

It was a rubber doll designed to be a reasonable facsimile of a real, sleeping baby, right down to the fact that its eyes were closed.

It took the rest of the night to calm me down, and even then, "calm" is a strong word.  By the time Meemaw and Pappaw left, I had achieved a state of quiet hyperventilation.  Meemaw later painted eyes on the doll so that I would grudgingly play with it.

3.  Costumes again

That wasn't the last of my costume phobia.  When I was a little older, Pappaw wanted to surprise me one Halloween by dressing up as the scarecrow, my favorite character from The Wizard of Oz.  He and Meemaw spent hours on his costume, and when he made his grand entrance into the living room, looking forward to seeing the delight on his sweet granddaughter's face, I shrieked violently and bolted upstairs, where I took sanctuary on the top landing and had to be coaxed down to continue my night of trick-or-treating.

4.  Anything without a face, really

Several years later, Meemaw and Pappaw took a trip through Amish country and brought back an authentic Amish doll for me.  Amish dolls traditionally don't have faces.  At all.  Absolutely no facial features.  An ideal gift for the girl who was horrified of a sleeping baby doll.  Although I didn't panic as badly as I did with the eyeless doll-baby, I was obviously not warming up to the Amish doll.

So, yet again, Meemaw added facial features to the doll to assuage my fears, except this time she sewed them on.  Sorry, Amish people.

5.  Passing vehicles

Like many families, we lived on a street.  It wasn't a particularly busy street, but cars passed our house on a regular basis.  I had been given the standard warning not to approach any strangers in a car and to come inside if an unfamiliar car pulled down the driveway.  I took this to mean all cars were bent on kidnapping and murdering me, so I decided my safest bet was to treat every vehicle like approaching doom.  When I was playing in the yard and heard the approaching roar of a car, I sprinted from wherever I was to the safe area behind the house and crouched there, out of sight, until the sinister sound of the passing car faded into the distance.

On the bright side, I got plenty of exercise, and I was never kidnapped.

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R is for Rated R

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O is for Only Child

People are always surprised to learn I'm an only child.  "Didn't you wish you had siblings growing up?" they ask. 

I never did.  I went through a phase, around age five, when I constantly wished my best friend, Sarah, could be adopted as my sister, but that was less a wish for an actual sibling and more a desire to have a sleepover every night.

Maybe some people would have been lonely or bored growing up without siblings, but I was far too busy playing with my vast collection of toys, sleeping in my enormous bedroom, bathing in my private bathroom, and domineering my parents' undivided attention to really notice.  I was not just my parents' only child, but my maternal grandparents' only grandchild as well.  I was received like a messiah of innocence and joy.

I've only encountered one aspect of adulthood for which being an only child left me wholly unprepared.

Board games.

When you're an only child, you mostly play board games with your courteous, respectful parents.  When you have siblings, board games are a cutthroat competition for dominance and your parents' love, a desperate attempt to defend your fragile sense of self-worth, fraught with gloating and betrayal.

The first time I played a board game with Hubs, who grew up with an older brother, I was nearly reduced to tears.

You could say that I lack the healthy sense of competition and ability to cope with failure that are fostered by childhood sibling rivalries.  You could say that the survival skills taught by sibling relationships prove an invaluable tool throughout adulthood.

Yet somehow, through brazen self-assurance and sheer stubbornness, I have an uncanny ability to negotiate a solution in even the toughest situations.

This is how we play board games in our house now.

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M is for Marbles

Each time Meemaw and Pappaw visited us--which was often, since they lived ten minutes away--Pappaw brought me a palm-sized bag of marbles, wrapped in stretchy plastic netting.  Together, we poured each bag into a large, clear glass jug.  I watched them trickle over the other marbles, clinking against the glass.  When we moved, the weight of the nearly-full jug had left permanent indentations in the living room carpet.

It was July 1999, just after my eleventh birthday.  We packed all our belongings into a lumbering yellow rental truck and made a six-hour trek from the white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast to the gentle plateaus of the Appalachian foothills.  We arrived at our new rental house late in the afternoon, already exhausted before we even began the task of unloading the truck.  We were elated when two neighbors walked over and offered to help.

We gathered around the truck.  Someone lowered the metal ramp and lifted the door with a deep rumble like thunder. 

And with a gentle, steady hiss, like an enormous wave washing over us, hundreds of marbles poured over the ramp, bouncing onto the gravel driveway.  We stood in silence as they collected at our feet.  Each time all the marbles seemed to finally trickle out of the truck, a new tide would swell from the dark recesses of boxes and furniture and gush across the ramp.

When we moved out of the rental house eight months later, we were still finding marbles embedded in the gravel, sometimes whole, sometimes crushed, the occasional glinting reminder of those years spent pouring tiny bags of marbles into a jug.

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K is for Kickball

Once upon a time, I loved PE--back when PE consisted of innocent games like tag, and jump rope, and four square.  But in sixth grade, I developed a burning hatred for PE that smolders within me to this day.

It's not that I didn't want to exercise.  I would've done a million jumping jacks if that was what they wanted.  No, I hated PE because all we ever did was play kickball.

We had two gym teachers.  One was tiny and alarmingly muscular; the other was morbidly obese.  At the beginning of each class, they led us through ten minutes of cursory sit-ups and toe-touches, then divided us into teams and barked, "Kickball today!" before adjourning to the other side of the gym for a 50-minute conversation.

Every kid at this school knew all the rules and regulations of kickball by instinct, except me.  It took me two months just to get a general sense of what was considered good and what was considered bad, and even then, I spent most of my time near the back of the gym, with no idea who was winning or losing, hoping with every fiber of my being that the ball wouldn't come toward me.

That ball was my arch nemesis.

In kickball, if you catch your opponent's ball before it hits the ground, they're automatically out.

But from an evolutionary perspective, if an object the size of your head is hurtling toward you, your immediate instinct is not to stand there with your arms spread wide.  Your immediate instinct is to cover your head and flee.

I could not bring myself to catch that ball.  Not once.

My teammates hated me.

But that's okay, because if the earth is ever pelted with blazing asteroids, I will have a distinct advantage.

So in the long run, I win.

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The Sleepover

Tiffany's sleepover began with typical sleepover antics, and we were already deep in the midst of a frenetic, candy-fueled rampage when someone said, "Let's go outside!"

I was following the small pack of girls scampering into the night when whumf, the solid ground upon which my tiny feet had been galloping moments earlier suddenly vanished.

I had fallen into a small gap between the back door and the deck's edge.

I wasn't hurt.  For a fleeting moment, I thought I could wrench myself free before anyone noticed.

But my leg wouldn't budge.  Besides, I was already too late.  Eight-year-olds have extraordinarily keen senses.  Their ears prick up at the first sign of misfortune.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mrs. Tiffany's Mom rushed outside and examined my leg.  I can only imagine what she must have been thinking at that moment.

I sat helplessly as the girls crowded around me, fascinated.  At that moment, a strange calm washed over me.  My sobs subsided.  What was happening to me was so bizarre, so entirely unexpected and unprecedented, it had exceeded my mental and emotional capacities entirely. 

At first, the girls pelted me with eager questions.

Then they became overly solicitous, as though they were competing to determine who could be most attentive to my needs.

Then, sensing that no one was in immediate mortal peril, they got bored.

 

The sleepover resumed inside, at first in a subdued, deferential tone, until the girls simply could not contain their natural eight-year-old mirth any longer.  After a while, the indifferent voices of the Spice Girls blared from the living room, mingled with tiny stomps and gleeful shrieks, while Mrs. Tiffany's Mom and I sat in the dim glow of the porch light, waiting for her boyfriend to bring his truck.

Eventually, the boyfriend arrived and, after an agonizing period of fiddling and calculating, fastened his rear fender to one of the deck posts with a rope.  The girls gathered quietly in the doorway as his engine roared and his tires squealed in the mud.

 

To my astonishment, the deck really did lurch incrementally forward, just enough to free my leg.

I was led like a war hero into the master bedroom.  Parents' bedrooms are the forbidden paradise of sleepovers, and I felt like a pauper in a palace as I washed the small cut on my leg in the garden tub.  Tiffany's mom insisted I lie down for a while in her water bed.  The girls lined up to pay their bedside respects before being ushered to their sleeping bags on Tiffany's bedroom floor.  And the sleepover was done.  As I sloshed gently under the blankets, I contemplated the enormity of the night's events.

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