Congenial-speak #4

Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

The living room is suffocating with sun trying to illumine things. I quickly round the corned to the kitchen, leaving it to drown until the house wakes. I pad across the blue linoleum clad in the deep green pair of “camping” shorts I got as a gift. They had a loop on the waist for a flashlight and a metal clip to attach things like a canteen? I felt big and ready to meet my first napless day in a while. Apple Jacks fell in a bowl, milk surrounds with liquid white sound, and I eat them in silence. I let them sit in my mouth and fill with milk before I bite down. Puffy Jacks float aimless in the bowl commanding the sink. I've opened the drape and shade of the window. It pours sun across the Formica table of a breakfast nook. Outside I watched birds swallow worms painfully of the dilapidated, aged birdhouse that was like a friendly ornithological spire in our backyard. Hung like a constant chore, a fruited falsie, a branched shedder of slim allowance money, a crab apple tree cast shadows on the house. I could not climb it. I had no interest in getting high. Unsecured elevation scared me. It was a fear I discovered on a trip to my grandparents Bronx apartment the Previous summer. Impulsive and one to test the limits of my leash on life, I scamper up the steps of the Statue of Liberty. Unsatisfied at the crown, I wanted to go up to the cat-walk in the torch. Ever since then I knew my limitations, my irrational fears, the open air gyroscopes that point away from earth, the dizzying hatches that wait 10 feet off the ground.

I stand on our back door steps to consider my options. My shorts are new and pleated with utility devices, or the capacity to hold them. To my right plumes the lilac bushes that grow behind a doghouse my dad built for our aged black lab, Bingo. Artwork hides within it wall like hieroglyphics. My sister and I crayoned our way to obscure interior design fame. It is also a clubhouse, more of a hideout, a shelter in which my friend and I chat with girls. A brown picket fence encompasses the yard with an only gate at the bottom off a slight slope to the garage. Dull noise ruminates from the house. I imagine its prompts. My mom preparing coffee and the tuning MPR on the radio. Or my dad saving the drowning living room and letting the sun have its way with our house, fetching the paper from the front step and snapping it in one movement as he falls back in a pea-green rocking chair. He puts his tan moccasin slippers on the white hassock. He waits for his eggs and toast. My mom dose not rush to do anything. It is not even close to Edith Bunker doing things Archie expects. My dad is lucky my mom gets him something Saturday morning. During the week he often eats “daddy cakes” before work. This is about the bottom of the nutrition scale of breakfasts. In the absence of time and/or inclination I watch him devour Hostess cakes, drink from the Polk-a-dot milk container and lick the dull side of a knife. I see the curtain ruffle behind me and the image of my mom followed by my sister. The time is wasting and I run down to the gate. Smells of pine and the resting pace of our maroon station wagon ferret out the dark garage.

“Morning Michael.”

“Morning Mr. Myer.”

Our jolly neighbor across the alley is portly. His door is up and he stick his head out from a silver trailer, an RV monstrosity the pull up north to a cabin somewhat close to ours.

“Going to your cabin much this summer, Michael?”

“I guess we might,” I ponder. I think of the long two-hour car rides with our dog drooling over the seat into a viscous puddle in the tiny wells of the indented pattern on the seat cover. I imagine the line my sister gets cross if I advance my hands or feet. I say the names of Albany and Yellowstone, Nashville and England that might be the pre or suffixes in geography games my Mom begins to pass time. I smile. “Yeah, definitely. We are going a lot more. You?”

“We still have to get up there to put in the dock. Our lake is very weedy.”

Decisions must be made. Underneath license plates from all over America, from the 60s, rusty half-visible numbered plates prisoners probably made, are my blue and white bike and a scooter. My dad constructed the scooter with two orange crates, a doul, a 2 x 4 and a single roller skate. The scooter offers the more interesting ride. Items to be carried need to find homes in one of the crates. No one knows that I have them. I conceal them on the go. I can also carry any necessary implements on the utility latches on my camping shorts. Batman has a utility belt. It prepares him for an eventuality life might throw at him, like climbing the side of a building at a 90 degree angle or using his net to drop on all the baddies in Gotham.

I select the scooter on a roller skate, half on the front and half in back. Nothing seems to need to go in my roomy compartments yet, so I hope I acquire things during the day, like ice cream bars our toads, flashlights for night riding or whistles for the evening games. I say goodbye to our neighbor and glance in the window of the girl next door. The small rocks of the alley are slow going and it's a measured mission to the end, to asphalt and pavement that lets my wheels turn freely, to the street I own.