HOME SWEET HOME: BEHIND THE PAYLO SUPERMARKET

Photo: Parents, Tippy, and Skitch (left)
Cindy and Skitch (right)

THEN:


    When I was 12 years old my family moved off of our grand mountain and into town. I did not want to go. I did not want to be a "city slicker," or to leave my woodsy paradise, or to change schools (even though I was rather mistreated at the school I attended.) The home on the mountain had squeezed so tightly into my heart that even 35 years later, as I write this, there is no place on this Earth that I would rather be! My soul longs for it. What would I give for a drink of water from the spring, for the swing that was practically a trapeze, for the sound of a friend's truck crawling up that rutted road, for a good book on Peaceful Rock, or a walk through the pine grove? What would I give for the sound of rain on that tin roof, or crickets surrounding me while I drift off to sleep, or for a moment safely ensconced inside the back bedroom with my Holly Hobby doll while snow drifts down like cold white fairies? But the home in town, behind the Paylo Supermarket, would be where most of my sleeping dreams settled. Beneath those crooked ceilings and surrounded by those crooked walls, I still have conversations with the dead and the living. I raise my sons there, over and over again, feeling their small bodies climb up into my lap, brushing their hair from their foreheads, kissing their cheeks. I would never get over my mountain home, but something about the home behind the Paylo would stay with me forever as well.

     Mom and Sandi insisted on the move. They said they'd had enough of the isolation. I knew they were worried there would come another day when the snow covered our road up and made it hard to get home, like the late, dark evening when my Pop had ran up the mountain to get the horse. He hooked our dear Flame to an old car hood (taken, I believe, from my beloved International truck/playhouse.) Then Dad and Flame pulled my sister up in the thigh deep snow all the way safely to the house. Having one leg shorter than the other and being overweight made her trip home a lot riskier than ours, and I could feel the tension in the air as everyone hustled to get Sandi home before frostbite could set in. Mom and Sandi also said they were concerned we would need food or supplies, or a doctor and be unable to get off the mountain. Mother said, "I'm not spending another winter on this hill!" And that was that. I lived behind the Paylo with them until I met and eventually married Greg. He would be my first husband and the father of my children. He enlisted in the army and we made our own home near a military base in Louisiana. Eventually, I lived in the House Behind the Paylo again as an adult, several years later, for a while with Greg and our sons, and again for a while after my divorce. By that time, Mom, Dad, and Sandi had moved to another home, the Paylo had been converted to a video store, and both my adopted uncle, Crit and my mom's brother, Uncle Jr. had passed away while living there. The house behind the Paylo was alive with sounds that we could never explain, and it was every bit as crooked as the one my pop had built on the mountain. When we first moved in, it was a twisting home with no doors for any room in the house except the bathroom. You would go in the front room, walk straight through the kitchen, straight through the bedroom my parents shared, then would wind your way around my parents bed to the back of Mom and Dad's room. There you would go through a smallish bedroom that my dad's best friend Crit and my mom's brother Jr. shared. The last bedroom in the home was Sandi's and mine and after that you wound back around and came to the bathroom. The bathroom had a tub with running cold water but not hot and no commode at all. We kept a chamber pot in there and only the ladies used it and they only at night. During the day, we all used the outdoor toilet and even during the night the men did. The house had low tilted ceilings, especially in the bedroom I shared with Sandi. One cousin, Wesley, would run into the light bulb that hung in the middle of that room and burst it out in a flash of blue light and sparks. He did this on more than one occasion. A section that ran along the length of the house, including the bathroom and my uncles' room, had been built on later and was much straighter than the other section of the home. Each of the larger rooms had a straight part at the back and an angled part for the rest of the room. Eventually, my dad unblocked a door between his bedroom and ours that had been covered with plywood, and that turned the house back into a shot gun house. You no longer had to weave around and go through my uncles' room to get to my room. Dad also moved the living room into his and Mom's bedroom and the bedroom into the living room area. You could then stand in front of the large picture window in the front room (now his and Mother's bedroom) and see out the very back window of the house. You could see and even speak to someone sitting on the back bed in the room I shared with Sandi, which was her bed. The bathroom still had the only inside door in the home and only the bathroom, my uncles' room, and a walk in closet that was sometimes used as a small bedroom was off center and not viewable from the front room. It was a fabulous old shot gun house!

Photo: Sissy Sandi and Skitch

                                   
     My sister and I were used to very little privacy and we knew how to dress and undress underneath our over sized nightgowns. We didn't even bother to hang up a sheet or a curtain over our doorway; It would only get in our way. This was life as we had always known it. Did other people have their own bedrooms? Did other homes have doors? Did the people in other homes not troop through each other's bedrooms to get to the bathroom or to their own bedroom? Although, I must confess that many times I wished for a door that would keep the sounds out. I never quite became accustomed to reading when my environment was noisy and now Sandi and I had a television in our room. With her watching one television, Dad watching another, and mother listening to Christian music on the radio in her room, I felt trapped by all the noise. In the summer, during the day hours, I spent a lot of time reading outside. At night you'd get eaten alive by mosquitoes if you took a light out to read by, or you'd freeze if it was too cold for bugs. I would drag an extension cord into the walk in closet in my room and plug up a lamp. Sometimes I would listen to my own radio, mostly to the rock music of the 80s. Joan Jett and The Blackhearts, Loverboy, and The Steve Miller Band would keep me company. I remember lying in the floor, falling in love with Steve Forbert's Romeo's Tune, as I took a break from pouring over Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. I remember curling up on a cot in the closet while listening to Abracadabra by the Steve Miller Band. Music demanded my full attention. Books demanded my full attention. I didn't do well with both at the same time, and I still don't. Sometimes I would turn my radio off, hold my fingers in my ears to drown out the other radio and two televisions, and try to read. It was torturous and led to my being up late at night and sleeping most of the day away whenever possible. Only the big box fan seemed to make a sound that drowned out the other noises and yet allowed me to read.


  I felt cramped with town and stuffed in the new home. I missed my mountain. I missed the quiet of my shady pine grove, of Peaceful Rock, and my swing. I had been able to read in our back bedroom and Dad and Sandi had shared the same t.v. in the living room. I hadn't been the least bit worried about medical emergencies. Though I had been rushed off to the hospital when I had meningitis and again when I was stung by a hornet and my throat closed up, I was convinced I had never even seen a "medical emergency" in my whole long life, and I had become pretty sure they existed only on the television in shows like "Emergency" and "Quincy M.D." or they were for all those "other people" in the world. I had no concept of the fact that my own life had been on the line a couple of times up on that mountain. And besides, we were all going to live forever anyway! Yes, I had loved my home, but moving was an adventure, they were determined, and Dad went along with it. So, Bob's your uncle and now we were townies. It wasn't much of a town, granted, but it was certainly culture shock after having 32 acres to myself for the last four very important years of my childhood. Suddenly, we could hear the sounds of autos most of the day and occasionally at night. When before, any sound of a vehicle was cause for great excitement because if you could hear a truck coming it was probably still a mile or two away and crawling steadily and determinedly up the mountain, almost certainly coming to see you. People didn't "accidentally" wander up our steep and rutted road. They came with deliberation and usually they were the dearest of friends or family. Now vehicles were noise not excitement. People came up in our yard on a daily basis and a trip to the store meant a two minute walk to the supermarket that was just below and in front of our home, not a trip to town that would include riding on the hood of the truck all the way out of the holler (hollow). Mother talked about how much safer she felt, but I disagreed. I told her, "I'm more afraid of humans than bears." But humans were comfort to her and (unless family or dear friends) they were largely an aggravation to me, and even more so after I walked into a murder scene at the Paylo. I became even more convinced that it had been and was safer on my mountain. Still, I loved my new school and my circle of friends did broaden out and began to include many of our new neighbors.


     Pop spoiled me and took me to school the first few days, but when I did ride the bus, imagine my surprise to find my favorite new classmate already on there! Nancy not only rode my bus but she lived in a home that was less than a four minute walk from my house. A trip even my mom would allow me to make, if only briefly. Mostly, I would go up and ask Nancy if she could come to my house to play or do homework together. Her parents were usually okay with her visiting me. She had an older brother named Ricky that often rode bikes with us. And bikes! Oh, the joy of a bike! Lila had taught me to ride on the strip job up from the crooked house on our mountain, but now I had a nice long residential road to ride up and down, and up and down, dozens of times a day. Sometimes it was great to ride my bike alone and sometimes it was great to have friends to go along with me. When riding my bike, I would often find myself singing, "I want to ride my bicycle," with great joy and abandonment. Freddy Mercury would have been proud to hear me blast it out into the summer wind! "I don't believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein, or Superman. All I wanna do is BICYCLE!"

     My friends and I also played King of the Hill and other games on the piles of smashed up cardboard boxes that the store kept in their back parking lot, which was right below my house. Sometimes those stacks would be so high we could navigate our way up to the flat tar roof of the supermarket, but we only went up there briefly and when we were sure no one was looking. We didn't want to press our luck, and we were fairly certain my parents or anyone from the store would yell us down if they caught us up there. The store managers did not like for us to play on the boxes at all and I felt sure they would have some sort of fit if they caught us on top of their store. Looking back, I know they were afraid we would fall and crack open our head or snag our skin on the wires that held the bales of cardboard together and they might find themselves paying costly medical bills - or more! But then, it was so much fun that we chanced their wrath on a near daily basis. Once, Nancy and I grabbed two big boxes that had not yet been "broken down" and were still in box form. We got underneath them and crawled all the way around the store on our hands and knees, chuckling at what a sight we must be to any casual observer. It was hot and there were tiny gravels on the pavement that cut into our knees and the palms of our hands. Every now and then I had to raise my box just a tad and peek out to make sure we were still on course for the front door. We sure they wouldn't let us crawl through the store to get a pop and a pack of watermelon gum, and that was the main objective of the mission. So, when we reached the doors to the store, we counted to three and threw the boxes off with a flourish.  We looked around grinning, expecting a crowd of befuddled townsfolk. We found, to our horror, that the only one really looking was a town cop named Phillip. Phillip was not only a police officer but he was the father of a boy named Buddy that Nancy and I both had enormous crushes on. What a way to impress your hoped for boyfriends dad, we told each other, but we soon got over the scandal of it and giggled up the store isles on the way to get our Cokes.


     A huge willow tree was on the edge of the back parking lot and I must confess I fell head over hills in love with it. It towered so high It looked gigantic even from my perch on the front porch of our home that was up on a hill. Until the owners of the garage it sat near cut it down, Nancy, Tanya, Ramona and I swung from the branches like Tarzan and Jane. It truly was a gorgeous tree and probably not a little responsible for the love I now have for trees. When they cut it down I was completely heartbroken and cried off and on for weeks after.

     There were two other little boys living up the same holler where Nancy lived and where we rode our bikes. These two boys were Shannon and Brad, and they would sometimes come visit and play games with us. Mostly we tag team wrestled, and usually we kicked their butts. I didn't care that they were much younger than me and that only the oldest boy was bigger than I was. They were tough little guys and thus a challenge for my wrestling abilities. We tried to keep Nancy tagged in with the younger/smaller brother, after all she was younger and smaller than I was, and me with the older brother. So, I whooped the oldest boys butt and Nancy whooped the youngest boys butt and all was right with the universe. Nancy was awesomely cool that way! I didn't often hang around girls that couldn't kick someone's butt. My cousins Ramona and Becky were probably the only exception to that rule, but I'd kick butt for them, so what did it really matter?

    It took me a while to figure out that I liked a sissy looking girl that rode the bus and wore one of those super soft and popular "rabbit coats" that caused everyone to ask if they could rub your arm just to feel the fur. Often, the people with popular clothing items were not so nice. Often, girls that had very pretty salon-cut hair were a bit fragile or even uppity for my liking. She was neither unkind, nor fragile, nor uppity. Her name was Cindy, but like a great book with a common name and a cover that might put off even an avid reader, she grew on me as soon as I looked past the surface. Cindy was no sissy girl. She was feminine and kind but powerful. She would stand up for herself as quickly as she would let you rub that soft coat. After I realized that she was both kind and strong, it didn't take us long to become friends. She lived about the same distance from me that Nancy did but Cindy was in the other direction, up the main road. She and I would go to the skating rink together, eventually we dated guys that were friends, and she stayed the night with me many, many times. (Nancy only stayed overnight once, I do believe.) Cindy thought herself fat but really she was not. She had broad thighs but not really any extra stomach, which to me was the important part. If your stomach wasn't big you just weren't fat in my opinion. She would squeeze herself into jeans so tight they had to be torturous. She had white blond hair and the most vivid, bluest, eyes I'd ever seen. I tried to convince her she was pretty, but I don't think she ever believed me. I pointed out that a lot of boys were interested in her, but even that didn't convince her that she was easy on the eyes. It confounded me, but I should have been more understanding, since I also thought I was fat and yet had plenty of guys interested in dating me. It was that un-flat stomach I had that convinced me. The un-flat stomach that no one ever saw because it so barely existed and even if I was wearing a cut off shirt or a halter top, I held my stomach in constantly and my stomach looked perfectly flat. In reality I was of medium build, not skinny but certainly not fat. But both Cindy and I had deep self esteem issues. To me, Cindy was gorgeous, and sweet, and funny, and fun. We would diet for weeks and then give up and have what we affectionately called "pig out parties". We'd buy bags of chips, and dip, and Little Debbie cakes, and we'd eat as much as we liked. Cindy introduced me to the comics Ziggy and Garfield. She and I would lie side by side for hours reading the same Garfield books and giggling like mad. She taught me to give back rubs and we'd take turns spoiling each other. We even gave back rubs to our friends and cousins. For reasons we vaguely understood, our guy friends and boy cousins were especially interested in the back rubs. She and I walked all over town almost every day, rain, sun, or snow. We went to the movies together and told our parents we were going to the movies when we were actually going to the steak house three towns away. The theater was close enough to walk to, but the skating rink was not. We had to finagle a ride there, and we tried to go every Friday or Saturday night. We did hair and makeup for all our outings and some of our "regular days", but when we went to the skating rink either Ramona, Nancy, or Cindy almost always did my hair and make up and Tanya's too. I just couldn't get good at that girly stuff and neither could my little tomboy niece. We listened to The Eagles, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Dr. Hook, and ACDC (down a little lower on some songs so my family couldn't quite catch the lyrics) while we heated up curling irons and drew dark eyeliner lines on the inside rims of our eyes. We recorded the top 40. We wore leg warmers, neon clothing, and had big hair. We rocked the 80s but good!


    Another dear friend I made while living out town was Jimmy. When I first met him, I thought he would make an awesome boyfriend. He was cute. He had brown hair and freckles, and green eyes you could drown in! But more than anything, I liked his attitude. He was almost a boy version of myself. He was kind but he didn't mind letting boys know that if they crossed  him he could blow up on them like a stick of dynamite in a firestorm. He was much more free and open about sexuality than I was and once pulled his penis out in class (a class I was not in) because some girl said he wouldn't. Luckily for him, the teacher did not see. The penis show off episode shocked me a bit, but it didn't kill my romantic interest in him. I laughed it off and figured "boys will be boys" as my mother had told me dozens of times. It was his relationship with a girl named Donna Sue that got Jimmy tucked away into the category of "friend" in my book. I didn't feel that Donna Sue was good enough for him. I didn't find her interesting or especially pretty either, but I conceded that he had his own opinion about things and I let that all be. It was her mistreatment of him and his putting up with it that spoiled my romantic notions of him. He started telling me how mean she was to him and yet he kept dating her, and dating her, and dating her. I lost respect for him and decided I didn't want the kind of boyfriend that would put up with people being mean to him repeatedly. Years later, I found myself putting up with an abusive relationship and, although it was a marriage and I had two children to think of, I began to understand that things are not always black and white. I began to see how that could happen to someone, to pretty much anyone, and I regretted my harsh judgment of his loyalty and love. After Jimmy broke up with her, he asked me to date him but, disillusioned,  I turned him down. In true loyal form, he never wavered in his affection for me. Despite that rejection which I know hurt him very much, he is kind and loving to me to this day. Jimmy was and is loyal if he is anything. He made up his mind that he loved me and he never stopped. He is an Oak, dependable, strong, sheltering. All in all, he was a great friend, and he was the only boy I hung out with that wasn't horribly intimidated by my dad, which I couldn't help but find rather sexy, even if I had decided not to date him. Jimmy smoked, which I told him would stunt his growth. He was already just a little shorter than me. He said he didn't care if he never grew another inch. He was already a man so what did it matter. Once, I was holding his cigarette for him while he stooped and tied his shoe, and my dad drove by. I freaked out!  Jimmy said, "If he noticed and thought it was yours, I'll explain that you were holding it for me. It will be fine." Most of the guys I knew would have left me alone in that situation and I knew it. They were petrified of my Daddy, who made it clear they were not good enough to lick his daughter's boots, let alone hold her hand. Jimmy respected how much my father adored and honored me because he considered me just as worthy as my dad thought I was. And he had grown up with a tough but shaken Vietnam Vet. Jimmy was not easy to intimidate and it was probably impossible to scare him. As it turned out, Dad hadn't seen us at all, but it sure made me feel better to know that Jimmy would calmly sit down and discuss things with my dad in a man to man sort of way instead of running in the other direction. It impressed me a lot. Jim and I took long walks over town. We climbed on top of the high school, sat in the empty school buses, and we squeezed through partially open windows and inside the high school on more than one occasion. We just nosed around, left stupid messages on the chalkboards, and relaxed in the teacher's lounge. My silly young brain thought that it was not illegal to go inside a locked building as long as you didn't steal anything. Little did I know, and how lucky we were that we didn't get caught! When at my home, we liked to wrestle and pretend to do homework. Jimmy was my first kiss (before he dated Donna Sue) and, in many ways, my first love. I know and love him to this day and can proudly say we are still close friends. If push came to shove, we'd shove the hell out of the whole world for each other!

     Our closest neighbors lived across the little holler road from our house, but our home was on the hill and their's was level with the road, the store, and the parking lot. I could look down out of my back yard and into theirs. The family consisted of an elderly man and a woman that is probably a bit younger than he was, definitely in better health than he was. The old man was a Native American and everyone called him Chief. Everyone called the family "The Indians." They had three older sons and two daughters. The daughters biologically belonged to both of the parents and you could see the Native American heritage in both of them, but the three sons were the woman's children from an earlier marriage and did not look Native American. Still, the community called them "The Indian Boys." The girls were a little sharper than the boys, especially the youngest girl, Gloria. She and I played together a few times. We liked each other well enough but never really hit it off to the point where we would seek each other out very quickly. Her big sister was named Crystal. She was quiet and Gloria was not. Both the girls were pretty. The boys were grown men in body. The oldest was John who had dark hair and a mustache, sometimes a trimmed beard. He was a tad heavy and looked like he should own a Harley, dressed like he should own one too, but he didn't. None of the boys could get their driver's license. I think Gloria did learn to drive a vehicle, but I'm pretty sure Crystal never got hers either. Tim was the next oldest son. He had sandy hair and kind eyes. He seemed the sharpest of the boys and he loved to laugh. He understood a lot of the jokes I shot out that went over his brother's heads. Sometimes he had a beard and/or a mustache. And he looked less like a biker and more like a hippie. Joe was the youngest. He was sandy colored like Tim. He was shorter than his brothers and he smiled a lot. He always showed me some glossy photo of his "new girlfriend". Pulled it straight out of Playboy and put it in his wallet. Sometimes I didn't want to see it. Sometimes it was probably from Hustler instead of Playboy. The best you could do though, was pretend to look. He really MUST show you his new girlfriend! One day he noticed my eyes were closed when I looked down at the photo. I learned to look at those photos with unfocused cross-eyes and to mumble, "Yeah, she's pretty." They were all sweet men and they all (though Joe expressed a constant interest in my being his girlfriend) called me "Sissy." There were two other boys that visited the neighborhood off and on, and they spent a lot of time at the Indian's home. Were they cousins to the Indian kids? I don't recall. I do remember that their brother lived in a trailer next door to the Indians. These two boys were brothers. They were both dark in features but so unalike in nature. The oldest one was called Trigger, Lord only knows what his name really was, the years have stolen it from my memory. And one was named Wayne. Wayne was a body builder and a bit of a womanizer. Trigger was vivacious, loud, happy. He rarely dated anyone. It would be decades before I would ask myself, "Was Trigger gay?" The word "gay" only meant happy when I was that young.


              

Photo: Crit, Wes, Big John (bro-in-law) and John Indian

       

     One day John Indian, as he was most often called, came to visit us and he found me working to glue a beloved totem mug back together. Brother Starland from church had made the mug for me when I was nine and in the hospital with Meningitis. His wife Gerry made a beautiful ceramic box for me as well, but, to my utter disappointment, it had been broken not long after I made it home. I treasured that mug too much to let a little jostle off the shelf end it if I could help it. In fact, I still have it today. John came to talk to me, and I decided to put this hands to good use while he was standing around jawing at me. "Here hold this." I said. And then, "Now put a little pressure here." After a bit, he finished talking and said, "You think it's glued now?" I nodded, and he tried to let go. I say "tried" because his fingers were pretty well glued to the mug. John started getting upset and loud. He shook his arm and yelled some unintelligible gibberish that sounded like "Yaaaaaaaahhhhh! Eeeeeeek! Ishhhhhh!." When he shook his arm he yanked me around because I was glued to the mug as well. I tried to tell him how to gently remove his fingers, but he was being so loud he couldn't hear me, and I'd watched one too many Bugs Bunny shows with Dad. I found it delightfully funny that he was flipping out! I started laughing and John started running through the house. Of course, I was trying to keep up so my mug would not be re-broken by either the quick release of my own skin or John's panicked carelessness. I was trying to talk to him and calm him down, but wasn't having much luck for all his yelling and all my laughing. I could not stop. Dad, Mom, Sandi, and Crit all gave us puzzled looks as John dragged me through the shotgun house. He pulled me through my bedroom, though Crit's bedroom, through Mom and Dad's bedroom. In the kitchen, his skin gave way and he was free. He shook his hand, rubbed it as though it were burning, and gave me a dirty look. I think he thought gluing him to that mug had been my evil plan all along, as though I had tricked him. I shook my head and laughed all the way back to my room to put my mug safely back on my dresser.

     The brothers liked to sell and trade in knives and to show off their new acquisitions. I soon learned that they had a superstition about opening and closing a knife. Whoever opened it had to close it or bad luck would befall the knife and whoever closed gave in and closed it. They would hand me an unopened knife to admire I would open it, look it over, tell them what a fine knife it was, and hand it back to them still open. I would then get to watch them pitch a fit because I had not and would not close the knife. Sometimes they would threaten to throw a brand new, expensive knife over the hill and into the deep grasses if I didn't close it. My dad would sit by and snicker while I tortured the poor men. I eventually gave in and closed the knife for them, but there would always be another day and another new knife.

     All three boys had speech impediments and we sometimes struggled to understand them. Tim arrived at the door one day asking to borrow an "uh-un". My dad had answered the door and he scratched his head and asked, "Well, Tim honey, what do you do with one of those things?"

     "You eat it, you blamed fool. You eat it!" That part we understood. Tim was good natured and Dad didn't take the least offense at the name calling or the raised voice. Still, it took several more questions to figure out that Tim was asking for an onion.

     One day, I looked down into their back yard and Gloria was out there with her boyfriend. She was wearing a very pretty white sundress and when I asked about it, she told me it was her prom dress. A few years later, I bought that same dress from her and I was married in it.

     I used to walk all over town. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Cindy, infrequently with Nancy; her mother liked for her to stay in the holler, but mostly, like everything else in the world, I was with Tanya and often Ramona as well. Mother liked for us to check back in at least every hour which meant either dropping a dime in the pay phone and saying, "We're just fine. We're at the Piggly Wiggly... Okay, talk to you in an hour." When we were dimeless, we would dash home as fast as we could go, check in with an adult, and then dash back out town. We were constantly on the look out for coins for the pay phone and pop machine. Lose change was not abandoned long under our couch cushions, and we stuck our fingers in every coin slot we passed. Calling in was so much easier and less time consuming than running back to the house. Usually, when we called, it was Sandi we talked with but we knew Mother would find out if we were late checking in, and late check in calls resulted in not being able to go walking later that day or the next, or possibly for a week! It depended on how annoyed my mother was. She never called it "grounding". She just said, "If you can't be trusted to check in then you can just stay home."

    Once, Tanya and I walked to The White Star Restaurant to get ourselves a real treat, a soft serve ice cream cone. While there we were thrilled to watch a raging storm sweep through town, throwing hail the size of ping pong balls and marbles all over the street while we took our time eating that cold ice cream and looking out the windows with a feeling of safety. The storm brought such a relief from the torrid afternoon, and such a magic show! This was exciting! This was life! The owner of the restaurant let us use his phone to call home and tell my parents we were sheltered from the storm and that we would head back as soon as it blew over. When we went back outside the world had been transformed from a steaming sweat house to a misty magical place. The air was cool and breezy. There were branches down and ice pellets still melting in the sun. We walked home loving the storm, the White Star, and small town life on a sunny summer day.

     We weren't allowed to ride our bikes anywhere except up the holler, but a group of boys rode their bikes all through town. We called them "The Gang," because they were our small town's answer to big city gangs. They liked to harass us. They would bully us, call us names, steal our snack money, or our snacks if we had taken along something to eat later. They would leave us alone if Jimmy was with us, which rather pissed me off but relieved me as well. I was pretty good at fighting boys off in the singular or even in a two on one situation, but with them there were always at least four guys. It was always Elmer "Fudd", his brother Hobart, with Thomas and his brother Jeff, and sometimes they had other boys with them. Always it was Elmer and Hobart and Jeff that bullied us but they were never opposed by any of their friends and were encouraged by some of them. Only Thomas stood by quietly, but his silence hurt me more than the other boy's hard words or even their blows. Thomas was in my class in school and I liked him pretty well, so I felt especially betrayed by his failure to speak up for us. We tried to avoid them when we could and we quickly learned to seek out crowds, especially crowds with lots of adults that would encourage them to leave us alone. One such day, we ducked inside an arcade called "Mr. Wizard" when we saw The Gang coming. It was not exactly and adult hangout, and those boys must have felt encouraged by the kid friendly atmosphere, because they marched right in and began trying to force us to give them our once-frozen snack cakes and the change we had scraped up for a coke. When I refused, Fudd pushed me hard, and I fell flat of my rear between two pinball machines. To my utter dismay I was shocked by the electricity both going down between the machines and coming back up. I was almost ready to cave when some guy with a baseball cap and curly brown hair came over and asked what in the world was going on. He asked me if I was okay, and when I said I was, he told the boys to leave. They gave him a little bit of lip about it but he was bigger than the biggest of them, he wasn't the least bit intimidated by their numbers, and he did not give an inch. He insisted they leave and so they left. And thus, I met my second husband before I'd even met my first. Tanya and I bought a Coke and sat at one of the tables and ate our snack cakes. We decided to stay home the rest of the day, and we expressed our hopes we could time our trip home to avoid seeing The Gang again. As always, I assured her no one would get by with hurting her, but, though I was sure she knew I'd give my life for her, I was also pretty sure she knew I was not much of a match for all four of those boys. I stole glances at my "hero". He was cute, especially when he smiled, which was often. I wondered if he would be interested in me, but everything about him told me he saw me as a little girl. I was 13 and looked younger; he was 17. Besides, I was more than a little uncomfortable about the fact that I had needed help with those boys. I never wanted to be the damsel in distress. I wanted to rescue my knight in shining armor, for crying out loud! I didn't know then that this guy would not always see me as a little girl, that I would not recognize or remember him the next time I saw him, that I would be married to him for ten years and sit up in bed one morning and ask, "When you were working at Mr. Wizard, did you ever run a gang of bullies out of there because they were picking on two little girls?". Once we were both adults, the four years difference that once seemed so large would seem like nothing at all. We would join our hearts, our lives, and our dysfunctional families, and be each other's heroes forevermore... But I did not know that then.


     Ordinarily, bullies did not get the best of me. It was not long at all before I'd had my share of fights and most of them were with males. I didn't give one whit (as country folks would say) if you had a vagina or a penis. You messed with me and my family, and I'd break bad on you. I did prefer it if my crazy verbal reaction got you to back down (and it usually did with females) but if it didn't, I was not entirely opposed to carrying it to the next level and backing up my crazy threats with crazy actions. In fact, the Irish temper in me sometimes enjoyed it!  I guess my first physical altercation was with the visiting cousin of Chris, a boy who lived by our church. The cousin shot a B.B. pellet at or near Tanya. I gave him one fair warning. "Do NOT point that at my niece! Do NOT shoot that anywhere near her!" He tried again. He thought it might be funny to shoot at her feet and make her dance. He didn't think it was quite as funny when I rubbed his face in the dirt and bit the inside of his thigh as hard as I could when he was squirming off, trying to get away from me. I could tell by his attitude that he was not trying to get away and leave me alone; he was trying to get away and point his B.B. gun at me or at Tanya. Chris danced around the fight as though he were deciding if he should pull me off his cousin or help one of us beat the other one up. By the time the cousin did get away, he limped back to Chris' house trying to hide his tears. I handed the B.B. gun to Chris, told him they were lucky I had not decided to wrap it around the nearest tree, dusted the dirt off my dress, and wiped futilely at the grass stains on my knees. Mom would quarrel at me, but it would be worth every minute of it. I didn't want anyone disrespecting Tanya, let alone shooting at her, and now he knew it, they both knew it. I didn't think he or anyone that had seen the fight would be mean to Tanya again. That thought gave me great pleasure.

     Several years later, when I was in the sixth grade a high school guy named Scott thought it would be fun to pull Tanya's hair. We were on the bus, and she was riding home with me one Friday evening to spend the weekend at my house. I told him, calmly, to stop. He pulled it again. I told him a bit more excitedly to stop or I would "pull you bald headed and see how YOU like it!" He pulled her hair one more time and I loosed the beast. I came over the bus seat on him. I buried both my hands in his hair, and I pulled for all I was worth. He fought me off of him fairly quickly, but not without considerable hair loss. I thought about going in for another pull, but when I saw the tufts of hair I held in my hands I let them fly leisurely out the open bus window and decided to see if that wasn't enough for him. Maybe he didn't need another go 'round, but if he did I was willing to give it to him. My face was pink where he had smacked at me, but I didn't feel a thing. I was still too enraged. Besides, it was clear he'd gotten the worst end of the deal. He sat there for the rest of the bus trip, cussing and pulling loose hair from his head, letting strand after strand of his longish light brown hair fly from his fingers and out the window. The other boys on the bus laughed at him, told him he had been given fair warning, pointed out that he did indeed have some bald spots in his head now. He objected at their laughter. He called me names, but all I cared about was whether or not he had learned to leave Tanya alone. I waited and I watched vigilantly, but he did not touch Tanya again. I noticed that she tossed him a look of amused superiority before getting off the bus, and I was okay with that. She needed to know that she was worth a fight when a fight was called for.

     The bus was always a place for confrontations. Kids felt freer to bully where there was only one adult and that adult was focusing on something else, like the road ahead of us. Often, the bullies I had to deal with on the bus were big high school girls, but not once did I have to fight any of them. They were not mean to Tanya, they kept things on the verbal level, and they did back off when I loosed my own verbal crazy on them. I would say things no sane person would expect from a tiny blond wisp of a girl. On the bus you did not usually shout. Shouting in that environment was a cry for help from the bus driver. First you would respond with threat for threat. If they kept up, you would say something like: "I'll bite off your ear, take it home, keep it under my pillow, and touch it lovingly each night before I go to sleep." Say it so calmly and so quietly that they have to strain a little to catch all the words. Often, they would just sit down and leave you alone, convinced you were madder than a hatter. The people around you would be a little freaked out until they saw how fabulously it worked, saw that you were smiling, figured you for clever instead of crazy. Then all was back to normal for you. On the bus when I lived out town, a big high school girl liked to bully me and a friend of mine from school named April. April and I were not usually "sit together on the bus" friends like Nancy and I were, but we were "you mess with her you're messing with me" friends and the high school bullies found that out quickly enough. There was something thrilling about working as a team with someone else who understood that crazy trumped bully almost every time. April didn't make the same kind of insane threats I did, but she managed to back down many big bullies that tried to intimidate her just with normal "I'll kick your ass!" threats. She was indomitable, and I loved that about her! She got such a kick out of my crazy remarks. I would say, "Sit down and leave her alone or I'll break off your own arm and beat you to death with it." The bully would sit down and April would laugh all the way home. She could jump on that bandwagon too, when needed. Often she carried my threats a step further. "After she breaks off your arm and beats you to death with it I'll piss in your dead, open mouth and I'll wrap that arm up and keep it until Mother's Day, then send the stinky thing to your stinky mom." Yeah, we were soon considered too crazy to mess with and that was fine with both of us!

     Despite my craziness, I went to Awana on Sunday nights like a good little Christian. I got to see Buddy there and he was my biggest childhood crush. For three years I thought he was the end all be all of boydom. Once, I was being dropped off from Awana and was climbing out of a jeep when a boy named Greg, that had picked on me all the way home, thought it would be really funny to kick me out of the jeep. I almost plowed up the gravel with my nose, and I completely lost my temper! In front of the astounded eyes of the church "Brother" that was driving the jeep, I dived back into the vehicle, knocked Greg off the tire he was sitting on, and pummeled his face repeatedly with my fists. He was too shocked to fight back, and Buddy told me later that everyone "cracked up" after I was pulled off of him and the jeep had traveled on down the road. Buddy said the Brother mentioned that some people didn't respond well to being teased. The rest of them laughed, but Greg did not find it very funny. Well, neither did I, but he didn't pick on me again. Which was the hoped for result.

    On August 1, 1981 MTV launched their channel and changed the way we all looked at music. I was sitting in front of the television when the first video played. It was the Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star from 1979. It is impossible to explain to people that watch the bogus channel now, how cool this channel was in those first years. For one thing, 80s music was almost all good, and it flowed out of MTV 24/7, and it filled our days and our minds with not only sounds but images that spurred imagination. This was a time when John Lennon was still in the top hits, and bands and musicians like ABBA, Barbara Streisand, Neil Diamond, and Diana Ross might play right before a more contemporary artist like Foreigner, Journey, and Air Supply, and right after a disco song from The Bee Gee's or a country crossover like The Oak Ridge Boys' Elvira. My family could occasionally afford to rent a VCR and a couple of movies. My boyfriend had an Atari. Life was rolling with hitherto fore unknown technology and I had decided that all the sci-fi novels I'd read were prophecies. The 80s were hip, new, exciting, and yet as comfortable as your favorite pillow. They were amazing, and I am glad I did not miss them!




     When I was 15, my cousin Wesley came to live with us. He was 24 and Sandi was 27, but he seemed nearly my age and Sandi seemed nearly Mom's. It was awesome having someone in the home that would listen to rock music with me and sit up until the wee hours of the morning talking. Wes worked at Long John Silver's and would bring home the food they told him to throw away at night. Every evening was a late night feast of fish, and chips, and chicken. Then he went to work at Hardee's and the feasts stopped. At that time, Hardee's pretty much made it as you ordered it. This was about the time I quit school and two things influenced me to do so: Wesley and a book called "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn". A lady named Liz had helped my daddy get disability due to his stomach issues and she quickly became a dear friend of the family. She loved us all and we loved her too. She said she was inspired by the fact that every year at Christmas, Daddy would find some way to give Sandi and me 50.00 each and we would spend it on presents for the rest of the family. She said most girls she knew would have gone out and bought a new coat or a good pair of shoes. She loved the fact that I was a reader and she gave me a copy of the book "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" saying she thought the main character, Francie, was a lot like me. To this day that is my favorite book (other than the Bible). But I did take too much note of the fact that Francie quit school to make money for her family, and when Wes began to urge me to quit school and get a job where he worked I did just that... Well, the first part of it. It turned out it was harder for a 15 year old kid to get a job at a local restaurant where 30 year olds were standing in line for work so they could feed their family. Instead, I wound up with a job babysitting and making eight measly dollars a day, which, even in those days, was so puny Dad would not touch any of it and insisted I keep it for spending money. One day, I marched into the local newspaper office and sold the editor on the idea of an advice column named "Ask Aunt Gabby". I enlisted the aid of my sisters to help me run it. For this we were paid 50.00 a week and I could keep my babysitting job as well. But when, week after week, we had to make up all our own letters I grew discouraged. In several weeks we received maybe four letters, not enough to fill one column, let alone the five or six columns we had published. I told the editor to just forget it. Looking back, I do wish I'd been more tenacious. I think the letters might have started coming in after a month or so more, and I wish I'd stuck with it just as long as the editor would allow. When I was not working I stayed up all night reading and soaking in the quiet of the house with only the box fan droning on, and I slept until nearly three the next day. The entire family found that odd, but they allowed it. I had always had insomnia so it did not surprise them too much, but for me it was more about the quiet, the alone time than anything else.

      Pets and wild animals were much more scarce in town. Daddy came home with a puppy that was part wiener dog (Dachshund) and part Feist. He was short haired and a pretty honey color. He had one white spot on the tip of his tail, and so I named him Tippy. Daddy thought it was awfully funny when I "spanked" Tippy for leaving the yard, but soon enough I had him trained to stay out of the road. I had been so concerned he would get killed by an automobile. Tippy would "sing" when I played the harmonica (which I only knew how to make noise with.) And if you went outside and called him, ignoring the fact that he was underfoot, he would howl like a banshee. He  was the sweetest and funniest little dog. Once I read "Every dog is a lion at home," by H. G. Bohn and, I knew that Bohn had once known at least one dog like Tippy, fearless in his own territory. But it was probably that same fearlessness that brought on his demise many years later. I was grown, married, and living on my own when Tippy was found dead near the garden. Dad said he had probably been in a fight with one of the big dogs in the neighborhood. Tippy never did figure out that he was a small dog.

     Of cats I had a few: Princess Paddypaws was a long haired gray and white cat, very elegant and regal. She had babies that grew up and looked a lot like her. Dad could not really tell one from the other. He told me one day that "one of those gray cats" had jumped up on John Indian's bare back for woolling them roughly on the head repeatedly every time he came up to visit. John got scratched up pretty good and tried to get Pop to punish the cat, but Pop, through his laughter, told John he should not have annoyed the animal in the first place. Briefly, oh too briefly, I had a sweet little black and white kitten I named Abadaba. He was to be my assistant in a magic show, but he did not live long enough for us to get the hat trick down. Lord Amber was named after a character in an Andre Norton sci-fi book called "The Crystal Gryphon". That cat had orange and white hair and, like the character in the book, amber eyes. Once he "gifted" me with a live green snake while I was lying on a blanket in the yard trying hard to get a tan on my shiny white skin. He looked at me with unveiled disgust as I froze and let the reptile slither off my blanket and away into the grass around the hedges.

     Another pet I had while living there was Angel, a pigeon, but she was more of a friend and less of a pet. I nursed her back to health after finding her unable to fly. I then set her free. Angel liked the warmth of the house and would hang around outside in a cabinet on the porch. She waited until I came out to go to the bathroom or bring in wood for the wood stove. Then she would fly over, land on my shoulder, and ride me back inside. I would keep her hidden from mother for a bit, but once discovered, she would have to go outside again and the game would start all over from the beginning. Eventually, spring came and she discovered that there were a bunch of other pigeons at a store a few miles away, and she took up residence with them. Soon, she was too wild to come to me anymore, but I was happy that she was happy and free. I had a poster that said, "If you love something set it free. If it comes back to you it is yours. If it does not it never was." I knew that, for a time, Angel and I had belonged to each other, but that ultimately we were both free and had our own lives to live. Still, she remained forever dear to my heart.

     And so did that spooky, old, crooked home Behind the Paylo Supermarket...