Funky Chunk

There are a few beatings that stand out clearly in my memory. This is one of them.

Sometimes my grandmother would get so over-zealous in her slapping and punching, she'd have to latch on with her talons to one of my arms to keep from falling over. One of those times, as I fell to the floor, she dug in to my arm with her nails. I fell anyway. She nearly fell on top of me. She just kicked me a few times, wiped her flabby arm across her spittle-ridden mouth, and staggered away. But this time, when I fell, her nails had torn skin off my arm.

When I went to the bathroom to wash my wounds, to my horror, I found my missing flesh in the bathroom sink. My grandmother had washed up before me. When I mentioned my sickening story to her, she simply smiled.

I'm glad she's dead.

To this day, you can still see a small scar on my left forearm from that incident.

In Spades

It's really too bad my mom isn't able to be a blogger. She'd whoop my stories. She's got me beat in spades...

While I was attending one of the oodles of kindergartens I attended as a lad, my mother dropped me by my grandparents to visit my sister just before Christmas. Don, the man I dubbed Aflack, and my mother seem to have had some business to tend to. It was convenient to live me in the charge of someone else. Especially being that I enjoyed my sister's company, and she mine.

I believe it was December 8th, a Saturday...? I could figure out the year I suppose. Or I could just call my mom... Nah! Anyways, a cop comes to our door. I don't recall the flow of that particular grapevine. I was hiding from the cops, as trained. I think it was: grandfather, grandmother, sister, then me. The scene was familiar. As my grandfather knelt down beside me, my sister laid her hand on my back and my grandmother softened her eyes. I burst into tears.

My mother had been sitting in the front seat of a Chevy Nova. On her right, Aflack. On her left, the drunken owner of the car. On top of them? The trailer of an 18 wheeler. Thank God it was parked. The driver, as Don, suffered no injuries worth mentioning. My mom, on the other hand, had been crushed between the two men when the car slammed its side into the truck. Nobody had been wearing seat belts. In effect, my mom was a packet of ketchup in a wayward child's fist.
Her hips were shattered. To this day, she can barely run, and has internal problems she refuses to speak of.

Open Up

I remember this time, when I was overwhelmed with emotion (who knows why), and my grandmother grabbed my shoulders using all the kindness she could muster, saying: "You shouldn't keep all that bottled in, you need to open up, talk to people."

Obviously I listened. I can't shut up. I've seriously considered piercing my tongue just to remind me to keep my mouth shut.

Similarly, she forced me to cry as a child. Not to say I didn't cry when I was being beat, but other than that, I guess I had hardened myself somewhere along the line. There was this time, I feel it makes a mockery of love and endearment, when my grandmother acted out some historic legend. Some king, or emperor, known to be a hardened veteran, cried as his city burned. His aide grabbed a glass tube and kindly scooped the tears off his leaders cheek, and saved them as a memento of the overwhelming emotion of the situation.

As a single, hot tear traced down my cheek, she told me this, scooping my tear into a glass.

I regained my emotions over time. Only to lose them again with the toilings of marriage. I don't cry for serious things. I don't cry for my dead (save for my friend Larry). I do cry at the end of many movies. And touching commercials.

Candy Cane

I hear they banned candy canes in the penal system. Any guesses as to why?

Around Christmas time, when my sister and I were young, after the tree was up and decorated we had this ritual. We'd each grab a candy cane off one of the branches, throw our butts onto the couch beside one another, and race towards a needle point. The first of us to achieve an uber-needle point on the end of our candy cane would shove it into the others arm! Usually the triceps area. The tip would nearly always break off, so we'd continue on this way, back and forth, until the candy canes were finished.

Funny, we'd only use the traditional red-and-white peppermint canes. Never the green-and-purple, or brownish ones of fruity, butterscotch or root beer flavor.

Towels

I always find myself folding towels a certain way on laundry day: my grandmother's way. Fold the towel width-wise twice, then tri-fold to finish. I've never known anyone else to fold towels this way.

And it never fails. I always find myself folding them that way. But I hate her. I hate her memory. I long for when I can forget her. Either by joining her in Death, or by being freed by the loving-kindness of God.

Until then, I fold every towel twice. Once her way, then anyway but hers.

Raptors

We lived with our grandparents in California on an acre-and-a-half of land. It had a front yard with grass and various bushes, a ranch-style house, two backyards with grass and cane as a windbreak, a chicken coop, and a chunk of desert. We had elm trees and fruit trees scattered around too.

The chicken coop housed ducks with the chickens. We had to keep the geese we had separate because geese, they make GREAT junkyard dogs: vigilant, sneaky, loud, and VICIOUS. They'd kill the chickens and ducks if otherwise.

My sister had to go to the Emergency Room when she was about 10 after the geese were done with her. She was feeding the foul alone and the geese surrounded her on her way back from the chicken coop. One decided to bite her on her stomach. It shook its head and beat with its majestic wings. She had a terrifying bloody bruise on her belly and purple bruising all down her ribs.

Years later the geese surrounded me. I punched the leader in the head. It bobbled right back up like one of those sand-weighted clown punching bags you have as a kid. It bit me anyway, but I think it was too phased by the punch to beat me.

My mom got attacked once also. She was crawling around under a car she had stowed out there. Worrying about black widows, she overlooked the geese. She ended up with three nasty purple welts on her inner thighs all said and done!