|
Crying 16-year-old Buick-girl vs old four-door Ford - Fate Fairies - book version
This entry was posted on 10/4/2011 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
The prevailing wisdom in Janesville for as long as I can remember is that our stop and go lights are in sync. The mantra has been for decades, "Catch one green light and you can get through them all down on Milwaukee Street."
Nothing however, is farther from the truth. Nowadays, the lights are actually set out of sync to slow the flow of cars - "traffic calming." People have bought into the juxtaposed logic - "Wisconsin Logic" - for so long they actually think the lights are still in sync. And, like a well-kept family secret - people get cynical when they finally realize one of the kids came from the milk man so to speak.
I must have been in Fourth Grade or so. Mom and Dad were carting Grandma around in our old four-door Ford one afternoon. She could not drive. This was a periodic ritual. Even fifty or so years ago the stop and go lights in Janesville annoyed me. And, even at nine years old, to add insult to injury, I could tell when people were driving like their..., grandmothers.
My grandma and I were in the back seat as usual. She was going on about some doings in Janesville. She loved Janesville. Grandpa had moved the family there in the 1920s so he could work at the General Motors plant. I would forever be called, "The Plant." He, an infant son, and one of Mom's then teenage sisters, died along the way, just a few years later. And as I already mentioned, my uncles had to finish building the house. I would hear the story a thousand times; so, there is no plausible reason you fair readers can not endure the tale just a couple times or so. Barring a couple aunt and uncle exceptions, the many Irish cousins - my cousins - are just about the only souls from the whole tribe connected to this story..., that are still walking amongst the living. All the boys' names end with a "y" or "ie." Even nowadays as we are all looking down the pike at 60 years old, we will always still be Bobby, Jimmy, Billy, Georgie, Timmy, Jeffy, Matty, Scottie, Larry....
Mom and Dad were in the front seat having one of their usual pleasant chats. Suddenly a car careened over one of Janesville's ubiquitous hills on a street to our right side and slammed on its brakes at the stop sign. The car came inches from lambasting our car in a T-bone wreck. I could see the bumper of the car out my window. It was so close to our car I could see my own reflection in its shiny chrome. Grandma was looking out the other window as she prattled on about something. Mom and Dad were oblivious as the action was over their right shoulders by now. I could see the face of the sixteenish-year-old girl at the wheel of the screeching car. She was crying about something - no doubt what ever it is sixteen-year-old girls cry about.
I remember being so nonchalant about it. Growing up on a dairy farm gives one such a "some you win, some you lose," outlook in life. I already had a touch of that demeanor at nine years old. I did not scream or warn the others in our car. I just thought for a couple seconds and remember saying as if it were yesterday, "God..., I hate Janesville."
Grandma looked truly hurt and began a monologue on how wonderful Janesville had been to her considering they used to live in a shack in Chemung, Illinois. They were so poor, at times she had to shoot pigeons and cook them. Chemung is still a don't-blink-when-you-drive-through kind of place. Grandma is buried there now, that place she talked of so often, within walking distance of the Piscasaw Creek and just west of Harvard. The rest of the way to Grandma's house and then all the way back to Lima Center, I was likewise lectured by my mother on the nuances of thinking before I spoke.
Already by nine years old, I had learned the hard way to just sit and endure my Irish mother's admonishments. She had a captive audience in the back of the old Ford on the ride home, and the scolding would be embellished to an art form.
I never did tell them that we all almost kicked the bucket that afternoon - killed in a gory mess of tangled metal and glass - smashed to bits by a crying sixteen year old in her daddy's big shiny Buick.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
