I have to wear a cocktail dress. Have you ever done that?
Nope. I wore my wedding dress & last year I wore a formal.
Hmm...I've never even shopped for a cocktail dress. I don't think I can walk in heels either.
Wear ballet slippers. That's what I wear.
The Devil went down to Georgia
and he was looking for a soul to steal
He was in a bind
'Cause he was way behind
And he was willin' to make a deal...
The school cafeteria is bustling in the early hours of the morning.
And if you care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you.
Everyone has their job to do and some folks just walk around carrying a sheet of paper while others are shuffling mass quantities of this & that here and there preparing for the daily influx of 100's of hungry kids.
I take your bet, you're gonna regret cause I the best there's ever been.
The government dictates the borders of what will be fed & the lunch ladies have to stay within those borders to provide a proper diet for the children. And should a child not have lunch money for so many days...cheese sandwich
Just sit right in that chair right there
And let me show you how it's done
Some folks laughed & others' stared in disgust, but she broke loose and she shook her fanny & twisted her hips, stomped her feet & clapped her hands. Charlie Daniels squeaked out on the little radio & for the moment, the cafeteria floor became Georgia clay & the paper holder became a chicken running from the Devil & one little lunch lady became Johnny.
Johnny said, Devil just come on back
If you ever wanna try again
I done told you once you son of a bitch
I'm the best there's ever been
And he played Fire on the Mountain
Run boys, run
The devil's in the House of the Rising Sun
Chicken in a bread pan picken' out dough
Granny does your dog bite
No child, no
Later in the day, she smuggled a cookie into the pocket of the man whose real name is Johnny & she bit her tongue while a young, boy new to the school, was told he could only have a cheese sandwich. As his eyes swelled with tears, she started shoveling food...green beans, corn, pizza all onto an unrung plate. The paper-holder paced with her paper, chicken lips flapping about rules & regulations. And the cafeteria lady with a fiddle made of gold took that cheese sandwich & those teary eyes & replaced them with hugs, love & a plate full of green beans, pizza & trust.
Granny does your dog bite
No child, no
~ Charlie Daniels Band
Sometimes it's about quality, not quantity. 1000 cheese sandwiches could never compete with that scoop of green beans, that slice of pizza.
When I was a little girl, I most often got to wear wonderful hand-me-downs from my older brother before passing them on down to my youngest brother. It was quite appropriate for a tom-girl who hated wearing tops of any type anyway.
I wore a lot of wranglers, peanut pants and corduroys.
As I grew taller & older, I came to be of the size that I could acquire the hand-me-downs of my oldest two sisters. My favorite of these hand-me-downs came from Kimbies, who wore them through the mid-seventies...leaving evidence of busted ink pens in the back pockets, before passing them on to Curty boy.
Curty Boy wore them through the early eighties, spilling battery acid along the thighs & crotch, then busting out the knees along the way.
When I acquired them, I transformed them into cut-offs. In the early nineties, I used replacement guitar strapping to save them from completely falling apart. It has now been about ten years since I have had the nerve to throw them in the washing machine. I just don't think they could hold up to one more rinse cycle, one more tumble ... they have done good to hold up for over thirty years of this clan.
Last week a new, old pair of hand-me-down Levis' made the transformation from blue jeans to cut-offs. Today, I'd like to pay tribute to Kim's Hand-Me-Down Levi's...
*Kim's hand-me-down Levi's
Worn by all of us
Handed down three times
white, worn and tattered
three generations old, but thats never mattered
Kim's Hand-me-down Levi's
handed on down in the order we were born
a little bit older and a little more worn
easily found, but not easily torn
Kim's hand-me-down Levis' worn by Kim, Curt & me
And sometimes I can see Kims' hand-me-down Levis
Kind of in me.
*Originally written by me, back in 1993...the year of the guitar strap. This poem has been posted before on another blog, but seems to be calling to me today...peace/love people.
Robbie.
The only person I have ever said 'I hate you' to in a emotional fit.
Gawd, I loved her... following her from watermelon patch to kitchen and garage, to the fi
shing spot under the banana tree.
Robbie helped to teach me a lot of things ...
how to spot fresh soil and how to make fishing poles,
when to say Thank You, Your Welcome & God Bless You and
the wheres and whens of spitting.
Until it was the end of her day, I would follow that little old woman around.
And then, I would follow her to the faded sedan that blew blue smoke when it came to fetch her.
I guess Robbie was a good sixty or seventy years older than me.
She'd say to my mother, 'I dont know wut you gonna do wit dat chile...she got duh Devha in hur.'
;) Now with a developed ID & ego, I guess this is the same thing that my mother now calls 'spit,' the
cops now call 'passion,' my girlfriend calls 'conviction' or just the part that my brother calls the pitbull in me.
When particularly rotten, Robbie would lead me to the bathroom.
'You got duh Devha in ya chile, you bedda spit dat devil 'n out!'
I would spit & spit & spit into that toilet.
'I don't see any devil!' I would defiantly proclaim.
'Awwwdnow, you caint see 'em, but he's inya... keep own spittin chile.'
She'd flush
that toilet & I would spit, always looking for that little devil in me to go plunging into the water.
I confided in Singleton & Kimbies that I never did see that devil get flushed.
Yup.
I was convinced that he had taken root somewhere in the world inside me.
They confirmed my beliefs, yup gotta spit that devil out.
And then told me about the water rats.
The ones that come up the pipes & suddenly appear in the toilet when you are right there... but when you still can't see them.
These evil little creatures that come to bite little girls who 
spit, but don't spit the devil out, right in the ass.
Living on a lake, I am sure that I have seen the water rats outside before & the thought of those beady eyed, knobbly tailed beasts coming up the commode to bite me in the ass was all too believable to me.
Stranger things have happened in this world.
Although, I have yet to be bit in the ass by a water rat and
I have yet to see the devil,
I still spit.
I guess that it's just the devil in me.
Lookin
g like a platinum Jacqi O'Nassis with her sixties stylish hat on, Momma ushered me out the front door with Kimbies & Curty Boy.
'Don't let her off the porch, Kim'
With cow-patty eyes as big as the moon, Curty-boy bellowed up 'What about me Momma?'
'You can go down there,' and she points to the circular drive at the base of the steps, 'but don't you put one big toe past that sidewalk. You'll get hit by a drunk driver.'
'I wanna go down there too.'
'No honey, your'e not going down there.... Kim, I mean it, she's not to go down there. She'll run into the road.'
She pulled the mammoth front doors shut & scurried inside to prep for her afternoon party.
Concrete and brick. Columns. In the shadows & on the front porch.
Curtyboy ran into the grassy section between the sidewalk and the driveway. He had a waffle bat & a ball & he was laughing.
Kimbies sat on the brick steps, her long brown hair neatly parted on the side and hanging over her left shoulder.
'I'm cold.'
'It's not cold out, Paige'
'It's cold here.'
Kimbies gets up & spins around, then smiles, 'You're in the shadows, Paige. Here, come over here.'
She leads me to my dictated corner of the world.
The corner that sits between two columns and to the far right of the porch.
The corner that has a slice of the days sunshine tapping on it.
The corner where the brick is warm. (I have always wanted more than just a tiny little slice)
'Better?'
'Yea'
Kimbies goes back to her look-out tower at the top of the wide steps.
Curtyboy is running, laughing, calling out to her.
I sit down & the brick lined concrete is no good for me.
The bricks are rough & the concrete is cold. I stand back up.
I look out at the expansive world before me.
Kimbies is chasing Curtyboy's ball. I sure would like to chase that ball.
A bird is whistling but I cannot see him & I so want to see him whistle.
The grass is greener when it's in the sunshine & I really want to sit in the sun dried grass.
A car purrs by like a gentle lion & I want to jump in that purring car & go where-ever they go .
I walk away from my slice & towards the steps.
Kimbies calls out 'Paige you stay right there. You heard Mom. Stay on that porch!'
'OK'
I look down and I can see life just below me.
An entire army, a colony, a city of life...nestled right t
here beneath the shrubs that surround the porch, the steps & the house.
Bugs. Crawling bugs. Flying bugs.
Groups of bugs & bugs going solo.
Black bugs, orange bugs, red bugs & more black bugs.
I squat, firmly resting my rump on my heels. I stare & my knees become a platter for me to rest my chin upon.
A ladybug is crawling & suddenly takes flight, landing on a leaf nearby. I want her. I want her to crawl on me. I want her to be a part of my world up her on the cold concrete.
I reach, reach, reach but she is just too far away.
I look up at Kimbies & Curtyboy. More laughter & running.
Well, they can have the bright green grass & that big dumb ball.
I have these bugs.
I make it down the steps unseen and then, through the pinestraw mulch & behind the
shrubs I wonder Where did my ladybug go?
"Payyyy-aaage! Keeeee-yummmm! Where is she?! Where did she go?!"
I looked up & could see the top of that net-lined hat.
'Here I am.'
'I told you to stay on this porch Paige!'
'But...'
'No buts child, get up here & you stay on this porch & Kim, for dawgs' sake, watch her!'
'Yes Ma'am. C'mon up here, Paige'
Kimbies snaked her long legs through the shrubs to pluck me from the mildewy dirt. Batting cobwebs from before her face she exclaimed 'Why on earth would you want to be down here anyway?'
'I dunno, it's where my friends are and they wouldn't come up to there to see me cuz it's too cold up there.'
'What friends?'
'Um, the ladybug & the ants & daddy longlegs & stuff.'
'C'mon Paige, I see a friend that's waiting for you up in the sunshine.'
'Huh? Where? Who?'
'Come along now'
Kimbies, my big sister...not my biggest sister, but my big sister, takes me by the hand. I can see the sunshine makes her brown hair look not only brown but also a sparkly red, orange, yellow, gold & bronze. I love the sun. She leads me through the shrubs and back up the brick steps.
She points to a miniture armadillo on centipede legs and says 'Look, he was coming to see you.'
'What is it?'
'It's c
alled a roly-poly.'
I crouched down, again bootie to my heels & chin to my knees. . . perfectly happy in my little corner of the world in my little slice of sunshine with my new friends.
Friends... you never can tell what form they'll take or where you may find them.
This is one of only two memories from the house I was born in. Blount Street. We moved from there when I was two. Some folks say that memories don't go back that far, but I think not. Having talked about first memories with perhaps over 100 people over the past 20 years, I have found that girls/women seem to have memories that reach further back than the menfolk.
Nope ... it's not the double-mint twins. It's the face of love... before and after and forever-ever, ever
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