organized chaos

I’ve had a taker.  And if you’re a writer, in any capacity, you know if even one person wants to read more of what you’ve written, that’s all it takes.  Not including your own mother, of course. 

On a side note: True to my spazoid nature, I forgot to include the Preface before the intro on my last post of this series.  I’ll just include it here before chapter one.  Thanks for reading! 

Preface

(copyright cevans 2006)

The Swiss Cheese Conspiracy

These are my memories. They are not complete. They are not the whole truth. But they are always the way I remember them. And how I remember them shaped who I am now.

It’s a running joke and astonishment that I’ve forgotten many an important detail from my past; distant and two weeks ago. After all, I’m turning only thirty this year. Many blame it on my children.

“Your brain cells slipped out of your birth canal with your kids.”

Nice mental picture.

Or here’s a good one. “It’s probably good you blocked some things out. It’s a protection mechanism.”

So I’ve gotten into the habit of calling my lovely brain The Swiss Cheese. Some memories I can see clearly. Some I see partially. Some have their legs stuck in the cheesy middles and dangle down from time to time to taunt me. And some just couldn’t take the smell and passed out.

Then again, maybe it is a conspiracy. Maybe my mind is more like a Master Editor who has left me with a low budget documentary. The kind where the sequences are out of order in a non-sensical yet artsy way. And after these bits and pieces come together, I hope to find a treasure amidst the tangled mess of my brain. If you read ahead, you are indeed brave. And I thank you.

Most Eleven Year Old Boys Aren’t Ready For Love

Every summer the lake hosted a myriad of campers. I, being mostly introverted at school, somehow came out of my funk in respect to meeting the people we hosted. Chalk it up to the home court advantage. On my turf, I was cool, suave, and loved by the masses. Of course, everyone thought Kristi was the little social bug, but I recall a sharp contrast between my school self and my lake self.

Some of the first kids I met upon moving there were a family of three boys. All close in age to me and my siblings. Not every kid I met down there became a fool proof playmate. We had the normal scraps with camping bullies and the like. Curtis, Greg and Michael would become a perennial part of my summers.

Recently I found an old cassette tape. It’s bright green paper jumped out at me from the sack where it lay. I knew instantly it was the tape that me and the boys made one summer afternoon. Greg, the middle boy in their family had brought a kid’s tape recorder complete with microphone, and we filled that tape up with all kinds of nonsense. It opens with the First Annual Comedian Contest, where the boys exhibited their dorkhood for all posterity. Following that is some kind of newscast peppered with a few inappropriate remarks that I would lynch my own kids for saying. And in between is

Yours Truly singing every commercial known to man at the top of my lungs. When I listen to that, to this day I am embarrassed to know I was such a nerd. We’re talking about something that happened over twenty years ago, so you’d think I’d be able to listen to myself being a nerd in peaceful remembrance or something.

All that to say, the tape of our young, southern accented voices popped feeling-laced memories into my mind, bringing back stuff I haven’t thought of for years. If I was a nerd back then, so was Curtis, the oldest of the boys. If he was any older than me, it was only by a year. He may have been a year younger, who knows. When I met the boys, we had just moved to the lake and I would’ve been in third grade. In my memories, though, Curtis is ten or eleven. And so am I. Here is your typical scrawny eleven year old boy, mousy brown hair, big eighties glasses, favorite song: “Proud to be An American” by Lee Greenwood. He might’ve even had one of those elastic straps attaching the glasses to himself around the back of his head. What he lacked in looks, he made up for in personality, as far as I was concerned.

We shared one of the strongest bonds any two people can share, laughter. He made me laugh and he laughed at my material. I don’t know what his dad did for the company, but they came down several times of a summer, and sometimes for a couple weeks at a time. I can’t imagine what his parents must’ve thought of me. I’d see them coming down the road and head over to their favorite camping spot, and they’d barely had time to hitch their camper to the water supply and there I was wanting them to play. I guess what was so unusual about that was that contrast I mentioned earlier. At school, I rarely talked to anyone I didn’t already know, and sometimes even the people I did know.

We filled our days with swimming, fishing, putting on shows, exploring, trying to

shake my little sister and his little brothers, and who knows what else. It wasn’t what we did that mattered, just that we were hanging out. Those were some of the best days of my childhood. And then I had to go and mess it up.

I was approaching the age of puppy love, and in fact had crushed on a couple boys at school, not that they or anyone else would’ve known it. But somehow, mysteriously, Curtis had remained a tried and true friend for longer than usual when I think on it. I don’t know the exact moment it happened, but it was the school season and the campers had all left for the fall and winter months. Curtis and I must’ve exchanged addresses because I remember writing a letter to him. Whether suddenly or gradually, I fell hard for Curtis in his absence. I poured my angst out in that letter to him and might’ve even asked him to “go with me” the term used to declare boyfriend/girlfriend hood. Hey, it was the eighties. Go women!

I waited a couple months for a response. Nothing. Why wasn’t one of my best friends in the world writing me back? Didn’t he know this was life and death? Was he not ready to take our relationship to the next logical level? Didn’t he care about the simmering ulcer forming in my gut over the future of my love life? Come on man, yes or no, just answer me! I must’ve convinced my step dad to look up their phone number because the next step in my diabolical plan was to force Curtis to respond. For a shy kid, I could be pushy when the situation demanded it.

I don’t know who answered the phone at their end, but when Curtis got on the line I asked him if he’d gotten the letter. Yes, he had. And then he started acting all squirrelly claiming something about his mom not really liking that letter and he needed to go. Well.

I would have to wait the entire rest of the school year to be over before I would see Curtis again. My feelings were the same, but mixed with anxiety over what he thought of me in this new light. The day came. When their camper moseyed down the road and parked, I made myself wait fifteen whole minutes to run over there. Torture. Curtis came out of the camper with the meanest look I had ever seen on his face. He told me under no circumstances did he want to play with me. He took off running to some

destination in the park and I took off after him like some kind of deranged lover in a movie. I peppered him with questions as I chased him. I begged his forgiveness for my forward letter. I pleaded with him to forget about it so we could just play. He ran like a scared little rabbit, darting here and there to keep away from my pursuit.

This is the part where my memory gets fuzzy. I seriously doubt I made any progress with him on this day. I must’ve finally gave up and tried again the next day, and maybe the next. All I know is that we were friends again. It was never the same, though. I’d broken the innocent bond we shared. I wonder at times, if I’d lived there any longer, if he’d ever reach the age where he could reciprocate my feelings. I just got there before him. I probably scared the tar right out of him. I probably ticked his mother off, being of the old fashioned southern persuasion that she was. And he was probably a momma’s boy to some extent, and didn’t want her to be angry.

So I learned that all those movies I had seen where the boy and girl came of age and fell for one another were a load of crap. And when it all came down to it, eleven year old boys just aren’t ready for love.