Summit. Jordan. You guys are right!

Let’s play some snookers or pool and have some drinks and enjoy people.

Come one. Come all to Backstage on 37th and Hawthorn Blvd. Saturday August 22nd around 8:30!

Drinks! Peeps! Stories! Balls and sticks and did I mention…Drinks!

From the Random Files: I asked a coworker to pick a season and a year between 1978 and present to see if I could find a random story for a blog. He chose autumn 1984.

I so guess I was 6 at the time. That means I was living in the giant white house in Smithfield. It would have been first grade. I actually have quite a few memories of that house even though we didn’t live there that long.

As I recall; in that house I lost both my front teeth to a corn on the cob at the dinner table. It was the house with a massive weeping willow in the back yard where I built forts and hid behind the curtain of hanging tree limbs. It was the house where I found two baby robins in the backyard and tried to nurse them to adulthood in a cardboard box lined with torn up cloth – as it turns out, Robins can’t survive on just strawberries and cheetos – and they were taken to my Uncle’s house in Idaho to be raised.

It was the house I built my flying balloon box (that story is a summer of 1984 story not fall). The home where I spent the summer making lemonade at the stand out front. It was the driveway where I learned to ride a bike without training wheels and my older brother was jumping up and down shouting “PeddlePeddlePeddle! Don’t stop!” then scooped me up and put me back on my seat to try again when I’d fall. (It’s a good thing I’d already lost my front teeth, because every time I wrecked without training wheels I face planted into my handlebars). In short, it was a great year and a wonderful strange house full of adventures and imagination.

It was also the house, where I first learned about death. I’d never encountered a death with a human being before and I took me years to quantify the meaning of someone not being around anymore.

Aunt Bea.

The house was larger than our previous homes, because my mother had also taken in elderly folk for whom she was caretaking. At first I thought it was strange that my piano lessons were regarded by the old dude in suspenders that looked like my grandpa but wasn’t.

I thought it was odd that old fuddies would sit around and stare all day and weren’t interested at all in the idea of roller-skating on the hardwood floors with me when mom wasn’t looking.

I grew accustomed to head pats, cheek pinches and old people scolding’s. And I found a great deal of comfort in the fact that even when I was terribly ashamed one morning after having wet the bed during a nightmare, Aunt Bea said over breakfast, “Don’t you worry, honey, I wet the bed sometimes too.”

I gave her a toothless grin from over my cheerios and thought, “Wow. Even old people have nightmares. That’s cool.”

Aunt Bea, was not actually my Aunt. We were not related in any way other than the circumstances of living under the same roof and having the same woman fix us breakfast.

I thought it a little strange that Aunt Bea spent so much time watching the front window. And made the mistake once of asking what she was looking at, “I’m waiting for my kids to come get me.” She said.

“Why are they coming to get you?” I wondered.

“To take me home,” she replied.

“But isn’t this your home?” I asked confused.

“Oh, no, honey. I only live here. I want my family to take me back home.” She said and continued to stare out the window.

Aunt Bea got things out of the cupboard for me when I couldn’t reach. Her slender, pale arms seemed to drip skin off all the angular parts of her limbs. Her fluffy white hair and deeply hollowed eyes always made me think of some kind of strange bird that I might see in a zoo or on a nature show. She used to hand me and my younger brother smuggled candy and sneak out of the room before our subsequent sugar-high could cause problems.

I remember one time, Jacer popped a tootsie roll in his mouth before unwrapping it. He chewed and swallowed before either myself or Aunt Bea could say anything and the old woman nearly cackled herself into a coronary.

There were days when the house alarm would sound like, “Aunt Bea got out again! Everyone go look for Aunt Bea!” My siblings would mobilize and go searching but I was too young to be let out on my own so I’d hang out and search the house thinking, “Wow! She’s really good at hide and seek! I wish I could hide as good as Aunt Bea.” I’d even check the cupboards too small for any human being thinking she was just playing a game on us.

Of course at the time I was too young to understand that Bea was had senile dementia or that she just wanted to be home with her family. Often times she wasn’t found right away and this caused a great deal of trouble for my mother.

One day, Aunt Bea was home alone with me for some reason and asked if I would go for a walk with her. How was I to know that she wasn’t really allowed to leave the house? I was sometimes allowed to walk down to the 7-11 with an adult and so I said, “Let’s go get some candy!” Since Aunt Bea, was always all about the candy and sweets.

Aunt Bea shuffled down the street in her slippers and robe while I skipped along and told her about my days in first grade and the boy, Spencer that I liked. “Spencer picked a snake up off the playground yesterday. He said it’s a garden snake and he took it home in his pocket. I want a snake really bad. They aren’t dangerous or mean or anything. But it does smell funny.”

“That’s nice, honey,” She said.

We picked up candy at 7-11 and as we walked back to the house, we gorged ourselves on sugar like I hadn’t done in a really long time, but then she really didn’t look well.

“Aunt Bea? Are you okay?” I asked around a twizzler.

“I’m fine, honey. I just miss my children. I’m ready to go home.” Her slippers made a scraping shuffle against the pavement.

I was sad for her and angry at her family. Why didn’t they come get her when she obviously loved them so much? She was wonderful and hugged me all the time and gave me candy and didn’t tell on me when I roller-skated in the house. Who wouldn’t want Aunt Bea?

That night she sat in her chair. She didn’t eat much. She didn’t look well at all.

The next morning I came out for breakfast before school and she wasn’t at the table. It was strange but not totally uncommon. I was halfway through my toast when the paramedics came through the house with a stretcher. They wore blue uniforms and the stretcher had a red wool blanket tied down with what looked like seatbelts.

My mom came in the kitchen with red-swollen eyes. “Stay in here and don’t’ come out.” She said and left me at the table.

I heard her talking to the men in blue uniforms as they went through the house to the sliding back door, “Please try not to wake up the rest of the kids. I don’t think they need to know yet.”

I thought it all really strange. Of course I wasn’t going to stay in the kitchen to eat breakfast when I could be watching cartoons – so I took my cereal and crept into the living room to watch Heman.

I have no idea what time it was when they came back through. “Athena. I told you to stay in the kitchen.”

I startled from my spot on the chair in front of the tube. “Are you ready for school?” She snapped.

“Yes.” I replied as I watched the men come in the back door rolling a gurney with the stretcher on it. They were lifting it up of the step and I saw that a white mass of hair was sticking out from the red wool blanket now bundling a body that was buckled to the gurney. My mother rushed to block my view and my mind was instantly diverted by her challenges, “Did you brush your teeth? No? Brush your teeth. Pick up your bowl. Turn off the TV I want you to leave for school a little early today and you will need to walk yourself today. Don’t stand there move!”

I rushed through my brushing and was secretly elated that I would be able to walk myself to school like a big girl.

At school that day, Spencer confided in me that his parents were forcing him to get rid of the snake and he knew how much I’d liked it; so he asked if I wanted to pick it up after school. Obviously, I could barely sit still all day and as soon as the bell rang and the doors burst open I raced with Spencer to his house. It never actually occurred to me to go home without the snake. It never crossed my mind to tell anyone where I was going.

I was a big girl and went to school by myself, surely I could walk home from Spencer’s alone and with my first new snake.

He lived further away than I thought and I guess it was close to sunset when my sister Pha found me.

I was wandering down the street clutching a mason jar with a garden snake close to my chest and thinking I might actually be lost. I was starting to get scared and worrying that I wouldn’t find my way home when I heard my name being shouted, “ATHENA!!!!! AAAATHHHEEENA!”

With more than a little relief I shouted back, “I’m over here!”

Pha rode up on her ten-speed and I was a little envious at how easy she made it look when I still struggled not to fall over without training wheels.

“Where have you been?! We’re all out looking for you. Mom is so mad. Brett’s on his bike riding all over the neighborhoods and everyone is really upset. Where were you?”

“I went to Spencer’s to get my snake…” I finished lamely. “I told Aunt Bea about it and now I get to show her.” I held the jar out to show off my new pet.

She rolled her eyes and backed up from me. “Aunt Bea is dead.” She hissed. “You were late from school and you killed her.”

I wasn’t sure what that even meant but is sounded bad. And it must be my fault since I didn’t come home after school.

At home I was alternately yelled at hugged, cried on, punished, hugged some more and sent to my room. “We’ll discuss the snake later.” My mother threatened. “Just go to your room?”

So I did. And sat there thinking about what it meant to be dead. I guess it was like when my mom put a cat in a box and buried it in the back yard. That was “dead”. I never saw it but I heard about it. I wondered if Aunt Bea had been hit by a car too, and reasoned that they were going to need a bigger box than a shoe box. I even wondered if they’d put her in the sandbox. After all, I buried some of my favorite things in the sand to keep them safe till I could come back and dig them up again. I pondered all the things I could think of that I remembered from church about death and resurrection and such, but it didn’t seem like a practical application to Aunt Bea. After all, the stuff they tell you at church is just stories, right?

When my mother came in to tell me about Aunt Bea, she met my eyes and explained that Bea wouldn’t be living with us anymore and she’d gone to a better place. I still couldn’t really process what that meant for a couple of years. As far as I knew, my coming home late from school had been the end of Aunt Bea.

It wasn’t till sometime later that I remembered what I’d seen in the morning and realized that Aunt Bea was dead long before I actually left for school to begin with.

In the days after Aunt Bea died, my garden snake was starting to look ill. Like he was slowly getting sicker and he didn’t want to play anymore. I asked my mom what was wrong with him.

“He’s probably sick because he’s in a cage and he’s used to being free. You need to prepare yourself, Athena, he might be too sick to save and he may die.”

I cried about it all night. My snake was going to die like Aunt Bea and be wrapped in red wool blankets and strapped down by seat belts, put in a shoe box and buried in the back yard.

Then next morning I had come to the resolution that I wouldn’t let that happen. I took my snake in his mason jar and I left the house without anyone knowing. I was too afraid to ride my bike with him in the front basket because I didn’t want to hurt him if I wrecked and I knew I likely would so I walked. I walked to a steam a mile or so away. It was a brook that went under the road and into a pasture.

I knew about this place for some reason and it seemed like a good place for a garden snake. I opened the mason jar and poured him out onto a patch of dirt between the water’s edge and the tall grasses of the creek. He was slow to move, but eventually, with a little nudging from my fingers he squirmed away and I sat on the ground and sobbed.

When I got home with the empty jar and my mother was standing outside waiting for me she looked furious again but saw something on my face and rather than scream at me, she ushered me into the kitchen and made me a sandwich.

“I let him go so he wouldn’t get sick and die,” I cried between bites of peanut butter and jelly. “What if he dies anyway and I’m not there to put him in a box?!” “Why did Aunt Bea have to die? She didn’t live in a jar?” “Why didn’t her family want her?”

I don’t recall what my mom said or if she said anything at all. Later that year we moved out of the big white house. I think my mother was done with elderly caretaking. I can only guess it was harder than she expected it to be. Gone were the days of roller-skating in the house and catching grasshoppers for the old folk to hold. Gone were my attempts at hot air ballooning in a box in the back yard.

Gone was a tiny slice of innocence that we all live forever, that we can eat candy all day and not get sick, and that our families will care for us even when we’re old. That was the autumn that I stopped running lemonade stands or feeding cheetos to birds. Spencer and I were no longer friends after I let the snake go, and a few months later I moved to a new school and started all over.

But it wouldn’t be the last time I tried to put a snake in a jar, and it wouldn’t be my last encounter with death or even the loss of innocence.

End Random File: Autumn 1984