North Baton Rouge is a thing in my memory. It always exists as I saw it from the school bus windows: blurry, vivid, cozy, somewhat disjointed. A child's brand of lonely, but full of so many strange details -- a constant yell of low-flying aircraft taking off overhead, lightning bug visuals for nightly cicada choruses, nicotine-stained floral curtains petrifying in the kitchen. The Easter egg with the dollar bill in it.
Little weird bits and buts that I only defined much later, collectively, as home.
Drove the length of Plank Road today to visit family in Zachary. I always take that longer route, just to pass near my old neighborhood, my old elementary school, the Piggly-Wiggly with the rancid-smelling meat shelf. I had a strange thought: the bar my dad always ended up in when he needed to hide from us for awhile -- now nothing more than an unlabeled door in the side of a massive, unrelated building next to the Piggly-Wiggly; the Tavern I heard him talk about so often -- was a place I'd likely never see the inside of.
From my old bus route, I've always remembered a boring, squat-looking place -- Skip's Lounge -- on Plank Road, zooming past my line of sight every day. For some reason, today brought me closer to that memory than I've been since third grade -- every afternoon, I'd look at the place and wonder, What on earth could be in that building to make Simone's mom want to spend an entire Friday night there? [Simone once asked to stay the night at my house because her divorced mother was going out to Skip's. Funny, the things that stick to your brain when you're 10, before you understand why anyone would want to drink gross shit and lose basic motor functions every weekend.]
When we lived in Sharon Hills, my dad used to talk about the airport, how it was trying to buy out all the homeowners in the subdivision to expand some runway or another. I guess they never pulled it off, because the subdivision still exists, albeit in a heavily-depreciated form. Our house, 6177 Guynell Drive, still has the rosebushes in the front flowerbed that my mom loved so much. For approximately two weeks per year, she loved cleaning up that flowerbed. My dad kept a big garden in the half-acre backyard -- something his parents taught him to do, if only by example, not instruction. In spring and summer, the kitchen was full of bulging eggplant, fat Better Boy tomatoes, crunchy okra, spicy radishes, and those disgusting, make-kids-think-it's-potatoes-until-they-start-chewing turnips. [Even though I like them now, fuck those turnips.]
I have bright recollections of snapping snap beans on the porch for hours on end, under the unquestioned belief that I was making my dad happy by doing it, even though back then, there wasn't much any of us could do to make dad happy. We couldn't play tackle football, we didn't do well with fishing hooks or worm guts. Dad knew nothing of how to comfort a little girl, crumpled in a heap on the living room floor, weeping because she was going to miss the two-tone Oldsmobile he'd just sold for fifty bucks.
Maybe that's why I tried so hard; maybe that's how Jen got to be so physically aggressive. Maybe that's why Jen acted out so early in her pre-teen years; maybe that's how I entered my lifelong role as a peacemaker. Maybe that's when Jen and I started becoming the people we are today, when there was nothing we could do to make dad enjoy his early years as a father, but we kept trying anyway.
Little weird bits and buts that I only defined much later, collectively, as home.
Drove the length of Plank Road today to visit family in Zachary. I always take that longer route, just to pass near my old neighborhood, my old elementary school, the Piggly-Wiggly with the rancid-smelling meat shelf. I had a strange thought: the bar my dad always ended up in when he needed to hide from us for awhile -- now nothing more than an unlabeled door in the side of a massive, unrelated building next to the Piggly-Wiggly; the Tavern I heard him talk about so often -- was a place I'd likely never see the inside of.
From my old bus route, I've always remembered a boring, squat-looking place -- Skip's Lounge -- on Plank Road, zooming past my line of sight every day. For some reason, today brought me closer to that memory than I've been since third grade -- every afternoon, I'd look at the place and wonder, What on earth could be in that building to make Simone's mom want to spend an entire Friday night there? [Simone once asked to stay the night at my house because her divorced mother was going out to Skip's. Funny, the things that stick to your brain when you're 10, before you understand why anyone would want to drink gross shit and lose basic motor functions every weekend.]
When we lived in Sharon Hills, my dad used to talk about the airport, how it was trying to buy out all the homeowners in the subdivision to expand some runway or another. I guess they never pulled it off, because the subdivision still exists, albeit in a heavily-depreciated form. Our house, 6177 Guynell Drive, still has the rosebushes in the front flowerbed that my mom loved so much. For approximately two weeks per year, she loved cleaning up that flowerbed. My dad kept a big garden in the half-acre backyard -- something his parents taught him to do, if only by example, not instruction. In spring and summer, the kitchen was full of bulging eggplant, fat Better Boy tomatoes, crunchy okra, spicy radishes, and those disgusting, make-kids-think-it's-potatoes-until-they-start-chewing turnips. [Even though I like them now, fuck those turnips.]
I have bright recollections of snapping snap beans on the porch for hours on end, under the unquestioned belief that I was making my dad happy by doing it, even though back then, there wasn't much any of us could do to make dad happy. We couldn't play tackle football, we didn't do well with fishing hooks or worm guts. Dad knew nothing of how to comfort a little girl, crumpled in a heap on the living room floor, weeping because she was going to miss the two-tone Oldsmobile he'd just sold for fifty bucks.
Maybe that's why I tried so hard; maybe that's how Jen got to be so physically aggressive. Maybe that's why Jen acted out so early in her pre-teen years; maybe that's how I entered my lifelong role as a peacemaker. Maybe that's when Jen and I started becoming the people we are today, when there was nothing we could do to make dad enjoy his early years as a father, but we kept trying anyway.
