sunday, bloody sunday

i spent yesterday afternoon curled up on the couch in front of a fire, watching NFL playoff games. (starring in the NFC divisional play-offs: my chicago bears!)

this weekend was one of the coldest so far this winter in kc. and as i watched the game and the ice and sleet fell, there was a constant crawl across the bottom of the screen detailing all the area cancellations due to weather. one thing i noticed was all the church closings...there were a lot of them! and it made me think about sundays past and all the sunday school classes i was all but drug to, kicking and screaming...

now, it wasn't so much the sunday school classes i was opposed to as it was the dresses i was forced to don to attend them. every sunday my grandmother went to sunday school. and every sunday i was made to go with her---usually she and her sister, aunt georgia. sunday school began at 9:30am followed by church at 10:45, at the bronaugh christian church (est 1895).

one good thing---we rarely stayed for church. so at least i could be home, the dress could be off and i could be back in my t-shirt and blue jeans well before noon! but this dress thing. seriously. i HATED them. not only did my grandmother force me to wear dresses, she forced me to wear dresses that either she or aunt georgia made for me! oh yeah, homemade dresses. who am i, laura ingalls?!?

they made me polyester, long-sleeved dresses for winter and swiss polka dot sleeveless dresses for spring and summer. and heaven forbid it be easter, because then my dress would be accompanied by a hat or a bonnet! i was expected to wear these dresses with turned down, lacy socks (excuse me, stockings) and shiny black mary jane-type shoes.

this may not have been so bad, had it been 1913 and not 1975. but i never quite understood (and still don't) why you couldn't worship God while wearing pants.

i'm a wheel

when you live in the middle of nowhere, few things are more important than some---ANY---form of transportation.

i started out with a really old, repainted tricycle. it was one of the jumbo trikes, and a little too big at first. it was flat red, and the handle bars and wheels had been spray painted silver. it was a pretty cool trike, but lack of masking had produced a severe pseudo-chrome overspray on the black tire sidewalls. and, the plastic pedals were long gone, so all you had to work with were the metal stems protruding from the center of the giant front wheel. that wasn't bad, so long as you were wearing shoes. but it hurt like hell if you were barefoot! (and what country kid isn't, all summer long?)

what i REALLLLY wanted was a Green Machine. infinitely cooler than a big wheel. and the saturday morning cartoon commercials...WOW! hordes of kids (boys, mostly) all from the same cul-de-sac! vast concrete vistas, so smooth and perfect for riding fast, spinning out... ahh, what i wouldn't have given to be a part of that!

but outside my front door, things were a little different.

first, no cul-de-sac. we lived just outside the city limits, across the tracks, at the top of a hill, on a dirt road...couldn't be further from a cul-de-sac. my riding space was confined to a concrete sidewalk, running parallel to the house from the front porch steps to the carport---about 20' long and only slightly wider than the rear wheels of the trike. on one side, grass. on the other, a strip of decorative white rocks scattered between the sidewalk and the tin skirt of the trailer. and in the white rocks were evenly-distributed plastic bouquets of abnormally colorful (and later, just before they were replaced, tattered and sun-faded) flowers. if you ran off the sidewalk, which happened about every other trip up or down, you had to hope you landed in the grass. i rode up and down, up and down...but it didn't take long for that to get reallllly boooooring. the other option was to try to ride through the grass, or pedal through the gravel in the driveway---both nearly impossible, and too much work to be called fun. the best you could hope for is once in a very great while, you could talk (a.k.a. hound) grandma and grandpa into moving their cars out of the carport so you could ride on the big concrete slab. sometimes it worked! but usually gale (a.k.a. my father) was either napping, or just didn't want to move his car from behind grandpa's. so no dice.

the other thing was, no other kids. none. the closest one, a boy from my class named joe, lived at the bottom of the hill on the other side of state highway 43. and he didn't even have a trike. so if i did get lucky enough to ride in the carport, i rode in circles...alone and silent. wheeeee!

eventually, things sort of worked out. i never gave up hope that one Christmas morning i would wake up to find that glorious Green Machine under the tree. well, it almost happened. i got a generic big wheel. eh? the same size, the same colors, but no hand brake. and really, what good is it without the hand brake?!? (not that i had anywhere to spin out, but still!)

but had i known what was to follow, i would have never said one bad thing about that tricycle. or the big wheel wanna-be. no, had i known what christmas of 1980 would bring, i would have never said a word. if i'd had any clue that i would have found a powder blue girl's bike, complete with a flowered banana seat and a white plastic basket decorated with bright plastic daisies under the tree, i would not have come out of my room that christmas morning!

there was no way i could ride with joe, on his new, super-cool BMX bike (which quickly replaced my Green Machine fantasy), on something as ridiculous-looking as that damn prissy girl bike! he could jump off ramps and ride through mud---which we always had, living on a dirt road---but i could not. i could make it about 10' before the mud caked up under my chrome fenders and i had to limp the stupid thing home and hose it all out! but i couldn't possibly have a BMX bike! "no," my grandmother repeated, "those are for boys."

sigh.

in the beginning

i moved to bronaugh with my dad and grandparents in 1974, when i was three. we had been living in moundville, a whole 6 miles north of there.

we moved onto a 3-acre spot of land, into a single-wide mobile home. it was white with gold trim and had a corrugated tin "skirt" to keep passersby from seeing the wheels, i guess, and also to keep animals big and small from getting underneath and tearing out the wiring and insulation.

unlike a lot of people in town, our land was not to be farmed. instead, my grandfather had a junk yard, "carpenter salvage," officially. we had engine blocks, car bodies and piles of everything imaginable. some of my favorites were the barrels of rotary dial phones and cast iron bathtubs.

the only bloody nose i've ever had resulted from pounding on one of those tubs with a sledgehammer, when i was about 8. after one particularly hard whallop, a cast iron shard broke off and shot up my right nostril! luckily it fell out (and even more luckily, it didn't lodge in one of my eyeballs), leaving only a scratch...albeit a deep scratch that bled profusely enough for my grandmother to notice and demand an explanation.

why was i pounding on a cast iron bathtub with a sledgehammer? well, there wasn't much else to do in bronaugh...

hometown aerial

and here you have it...bronaugh MO, population 209. that big open spot, right in the middle, was the field behind our house.

test drive

i couldn't be more comfortable than i am right now. two pale ales and a piece of chocolate mousse cake later, i'm nestled in the corner of the couch with my feet crossed and up on the coffee table, a snuggly and sleepy jack russell at my side.

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