From the Mouth of a Six-Year-Old Boy

“No fair! You guys got cake!” (While looking at our wedding photos)

“This is the worst day ever. We have to go to the cricket store, and plus it smells like hot dogs out here.”

“I don’t like it when you make my hair spiky. It makes me look like a dude and I don't want to be a dude.”

 
(Me) “What's a dude?”

 
“You know, those guys who walk around like dudes and say ‘Hey, dudes, whassuup?’ I do not want to be those guys.”

 

“Mom, it’s okay with me if you faint, but it is NOT okay with me if you die.”

“Dear Heavenly Father, I’m thankful that Mom made that really, really, really, beautiful—well, actually just that kind of beautiful dinner that had couscous and a little bit of salad and those green circle thingies. And I’m thankful we’re not dead yet. And I’m glad no one shot us in the heart . . .”

(Me) “T is pretty easy to write, because it's just two lines.”

“Yeah, but guess what the easiest one in the whole universe is. One, because it’s just one line. Guess what the hardest thing in the whole universe is.”

 
(Me) “Umm, Y?”

 
“Nope. Fighting Bigfoot. But actually that’s not that hard, because I would just knock him over and jump on his stomach and he’d throw up on his own face.”

One More Longish Thing I Wrote for My Class

Next to Christmas, Back-to-School day was always my favorite holiday. Sometime near the end of July, I’d carefully fashion a countdown chart and spend my days willing the torpid summer to end so I could don my sweltering new jeans and enter the hallowed hallway of Sage Creek Elementary.  I couldn’t wait to breathe its heady scent, a perfect blend of permanent marker, rubber kickball, and the smallest hint of sweet teachers’ approval.

But the year I was nine, that first day of school brought an unexpected twist. In the lunchroom, my friend Jessica plopped down on the bench across from me and dropped the bomb: “Did you hear about the kid with the fake eye?”

The what?

“Yeah, that new kid Richard Williams only has one eye. I guess his brother was swinging a pipe around in their backyard and it tore out the kid’s eyeball, and the eyeball rolled across the grass and the dog ate it. So now he has a glass one that he can take out whenever he wants. See, look, he’s showing people!”

My eyes followed her finger to a table across the lunchroom, where a dark-haired boy sat surrounded by a group of—from the sound of things—admirers. His head was bowed and he held something small in his outstretched hand. The enraptured oohs and aahs carried across the noisy room and set my heart hammering.

I suddenly became engrossed in my chicken patty with mashed potatoes and a side of green beans. Was it true? Could eyeballs really fall out? Did the fake kind see just as well? Why would a person want to take out his fake one? Was he scared to look in the mirror now? Would a dog really eat such a thing?

There were so many things I didn’t know right then, as I stared down at my chocolate peanut butter bar that had suddenly lost its allure. But there were two things I knew for sure. First, I could never let Richard Williams—or anyone else—know that I was bone-chillingly terrified of his fake eye. And second, I must never, ever, allow myself to see the hole that was left behind when he popped it out. Because even at that tender age, I knew that there were some things you could never un-see.

I don’t know how it started, this panicky distress that used to rise up in me at the prospect of body parts not being where they belonged. As an even younger girl, I had developed a fierce and secret aversion to the mall after once seeing a legless man there wheeling himself from store to store. A nonsensical fear, perhaps, but one I now see revived in my own three-year-old daughter, who just the other day refused to walk past a headless mannequin torso modeling fashionable scarves.

“It’s scary, Mommy,” she whimpered, backing behind a rack of clothes, imploring me with her wide blue eyes to not make her look, not make her face the horrible incongruity of a body without all its parts, a familiar shape unfinished. I know, baby. Believe me.

And so that wretched disquiet gnawed at me for the rest of the school day and sat in my stomach like a rock as I made my way home. Since I could think of nothing else, I casually mentioned the new kid to my older brother after dinner.

“Oh, him?” he said, not taking his eyes off his Atari game. “Yeah, he’s in my class. He’s cool.”

“So, did you see him take his, um, fake eye out?”

“Yep.” Bleep, bleep, bloop went the Atari.

“What did it look like?”

“An eye.”

“Right, but what did it look like, you know, where his eye used to be?”

“Like a place without an eye.” Blip, bleep. This was getting me nowhere.

That night I kneeled beside my bed and offered up a heartfelt plea: “Please, Heavenly Father, please bless that I won’t ever have to see Richard Williams’s eye hole.”

Early on in life, I learned an important survival tip: the last thing you want to do is clue boys in that you’re scared of something. Over the next few days I became an expert at avoiding Richard Williams without looking like I was trying to. I ducked into the girls’ bathroom when he and his fan club came down the hall. I gave made-up excuses to my friends when they wanted to attend one of his popular playground demonstrations. I spent way too long fastidiously straightening my knee socks when he unexpectedly came around a corner.

I was starting to feel pretty secure in my newfound skill, until the day a few of us were summoned to the library for the first session of Individualized Math. The moment I walked through the door, my Richard-radar went off. Sure enough, there he stood. Through the high-alert sirens sounding in my ears, I heard Mr. Jacobson begin to read off the seating chart. And in that instant I knew, with more certainty than I’d ever felt, that he would make me sit next to Richard. And of course, he did.

“Hi,” Richard said as I shakily sat down. I murmured a greeting to the table and silently repeated my nightly refrain: “Please don’t let me see, please don’t make me see.”

And then we did our worksheets.

Days passed without incident, and I started to breathe. It turned out he wasn’t constantly taking his eye out in the middle of class. Who knew? I relaxed into math facts and even forgot after a while to pray for deliverance.

 Then one day, a week or so in, Mr. Jacobson stepped out of the library for a minute, leaving us unsupervised. The boy across the table seized the opportunity he must have been waiting for. “Richard!” he hissed. “Hey, take out your eye! C’mon!”

 

I froze. The seconds ticked by and I stared so hard at twelve times eight that I could see its negative when I shut my eyes. I knew that Richard would happily take out his eye any time he got a request. I was done for.

But Richard said no. When the boy persisted, Richard raised his voice a bit. “Shut up, David!”

Silence. Twelve times eight, twelve times eight. David’s pencil went back to scratching on his worksheet. When at long last I dared glance up, Richard was looking at me with both eyes firmly in place. He was smiling.

I suppose my fervent prayers were answered. Richard Williams never did remove his eye when I was close by. After that day I somehow just knew that he wouldn’t. We multiplied and divided our way through Individualized Math, and at the end of the year his family moved away. But I can still see that smile of his, still recall the shock of that moment when it occurred to me that not all boys exist solely to torment girls. Some of them can even be downright decent.

Man, that kid had a nice grin.

A Thing I Wrote for My Memoir Class

It was summer, 1994. I was a bird teetering on the edge of an over-crowded nest. Behind me lay high school graduation, childhood itself, and the comfort of knowing what came next. Before me loomed the great unknown—college. Life away. My flickering excitement at this vague promise of freedom fought against my natural hesitancy in the face of any kind of change. Life was about to become undeniably uncomfortable.

But first, there was summer.

I had a scholarship to pay my tuition, and I planned (and prayed) to find a part-time job on campus to take care of food and other occasional necessities. But if I wanted a roof over my head, I had a matter of weeks to earn my housing money. Fifteen hours a week at ShopKo would not be enough. So I did what any Utah County kid would do in desperate times: I got myself hired on as a cherry sorter at an orchard in Payson.

The job was simple. For as long as the harvest held out, I was to show up at this big white warehouse at the crack of dawn six days a week, put on a heavy plastic apron and a shower cap, and take up my perch at a conveyor belt as bright red cherries by the thousands began to slide past me. So for ten hours a day I sat there, shivering in the spray of the cherry water, deafened by the non-stop groan of the turning metal wheels. I plucked out the cherries that were yellow, the cherries that were rotten or damaged, and the occasional non-cherry item, such as a twig or a dead bird. And that was it.

I was exasperated to find that the cherries didn’t leave me alone at night. My one chance to escape the drudgery of my days, and what did I dream about? Cherries. And more cherries. Marching ever onward as I tossed and turned right up until the cursed buzzing of my alarm clock. And then I dragged myself back for more.

During these sticky cherry-filled weeks I held on to my ShopKo job, so every few evenings I’d leave the orchard, drive to Spanish Fork, cram down a Big Mac, and moonlight as a cashier for a few hours. One night I was scheduled to work until the store closed. I stood in the employee bathroom before my shift, trying to unflatten my hair and massage away the long, straight dent that the rubber shower cap had left across my forehead. I attempted to touch up my makeup but soon found that the eyeliner had melted as it sat in the back seat of my dilapidated 1986 Chevy Chevette in the orchard parking lot.

I tied on my red ShopKo apron and signed myself on to my register, where the next few hours plodded by in a flow of crabby customers, sweaty dollar bills, and the whir and slam of the register drawer. 

Then finally, finally, I was free. The store closed. I trudged my weary body out into the hot dark night and plopped onto the worn-out fabric of the Chevette’s driver’s seat, savoring the silence. That is, until that silence extended past the first futile turn of my key, and the second, and the third, and even past the pounding of my fist against the dashboard when I knew that I was stranded. Alone. The most alone that I had been all that solitary day.

I went back and banged on ShopKo’s doors so the few remaining employees would let me in to use the phone. My dad’s voice was tired. I knew he would not relish getting dressed again and driving a town away to face yet another vehicular failure. Twenty minutes later his big white work truck was parked next to me and he was bent over under the hood of my mutinous pile of nuts and bolts, muttering and looking for who even knew what.

I stood there in the parking lot, fading. The roar of the conveyor belt still echoed in my head as the sweltering night air pressed in around me. My dad was in the driver’s seat now, and his voice broke through the whirring in my ears, explicating the workings of the standard transmission and the proper way to pop a clutch and start her up, and listen, Amy, you’ll need to know this in the future so you can do it on your own. I didn’t care. The tears started and my vision fogged and I hugged myself as the Chevette sputtered back to pathetic life. I didn’t care.

The engine meekly chugged and I cried. And then my dad was there, and my face was on his chest. His strong arms pulled me in as his work-rough hands patted my back a little awkwardly. The cars raced by on the nearby freeway, and there we stood together.

“Tough day, Aim?” I could only nod as a fresh wave of tears soaked his shirt and I struggled to keep my shoulders steady. This felt new to me, standing in this spot. Achingly new, this space inside his arms, this spilling of feeling onto someone else. This sense of moments sliding past, unplucked and irretrievable.

Dad cleared his throat. “Your, uh, headlights aren’t working. I’ll have to mess with those tomorrow. But just drive slowly and I’ll be right behind you. My lights will be enough.”

That night the cherries would once again haunt my dreams. Before the darkness had all lifted, the belts would start up once more and legions of cherries would fill my daylight hours. And a few short weeks later, I would leave it all behind and enter the mystery of my future. But right then, as I carefully eased my ancient car down the backstreets of town, with melted makeup running down my cheeks and the warmth of my dad’s arms still sheltering me, I forgot about all of it. I just looked straight ahead and let his light carry me home.

Well, This Is New

I suppose I'm a bit of a Luddite. I've always been among the last to embrace any part of the onslaught of technological advances.

Back in the day, my dad gave me a coin to play the Pac-Man arcade in a gas station (wait, did they have those in gas stations?) and I burned through that little chomper’s multiple lives so decisively I can still see the look of shocked amusement on my dad’s face. I was never much for video games after that.

In college in the mid ’90s, the only use I saw for computers was to type and print my papers. I was aware of an “internet,” but I was foggy about the point of it. I remember my brother explaining to me that companies could have a website, and people could look at that website to find out more about them. But why? I thought it was just a geek thing.

In 2001, in an uncharacteristic splurge to celebrate my post-college employment, I bought a cellphone and signed up for a plan. In the practical daylight of the next morning, however, the whole thing felt extravagant and unnecessary. I took it back.

To this day I don’t own a smart phone. Why pay for that kind of coverage when I kind of hate communicating with people anyway? I didn’t own any type of touch-screen device until the last few months, when I was forced to buy a tablet for my new church calling to teach teenagers in Sunday School. (Dang kids and their constant phone use, am I right? What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned manual?)

So it should come as no surprise that I waited until approximately 6.5 years after blogs stopped being cool to start one of my own. But I’ve got words in me, and I’ve found recently that life holds a little more luster when I gather them up and plunk them somewhere. So this is where I plan to put them. You can watch if you’d like.