Easter was a pretty big deal in my family growing up. It wasn’t always a new dress for me or a new leisure suit for my brother. But it was always an egg hunt. And it was always a basket full of things that were just slightly off beat—like bathing suits and beach towels and boxes of raisins and candy on clearance.

It was. Always.

Until Easter 1985, when I skipped down the stairs after pulling on my church dress, rounded the corner into the kitchen and gazed down into the family room at the hearth where my Easter basket…

wasn’t.

There was no Easter basket.

Where was my Easter basket?

“Mom, where’s my Easter basket?” I asked. “Today’s Easter, right?” My mother looked up from her breakfast, wearing a look of genuine surprise.

“Well, yes, but I didn’t do Easter baskets this year,” she answered. My mouth flopped open on its hinges.

“Why in the world not?” My mind began racing with the excuses she might have that were even marginally acceptable. She’d had a mild stroke. She’d been detained at the border trying to come across with deluxe Mexican chocolate. My grandmother was hospitalized suddenly and my mother had spent the night tending to her because the nurses were all on strike. My father was missing and she’d been posting flyers on every signpost in the city of Tallahassee.

“Because I just figured you were both too old now.”

That was not on my list of acceptable excuses. And what does “you were both too old now” mean unless you are a twin? I was not and am not a twin. My older brother got TWO MORE Easter baskets than I did, because he somehow skirted the Age Appropriate Police. Why was he not too old at 14 in 1983 when he was the age I am now?

I walked down the three stairs into our sunken family room and sat down on the couch like a girl who’d just been dumped. My mother was thinking through it.

“I’m sorry you are disappointed. I had no idea,” she said.

“It’s fine,” I replied, though it wasn’t fine.

I went about my morning with a dirge playing in my head and then climbed in the car to head to church. The church thing was not any different. This was our regular Sunday routine. Today had become a regular Sunday.

When we drove up the long church driveway, my dad dropped my mom at the door and then drove into the dirt parking lot to let the rest of us out. Our friend, Jean, had pulled into a spot moments before us and was standing at her car, with the passenger door open.

I got out and grabbed my bible.

“Hey!” She called. “Both of you come over here. I have something for you!” My eyes widened. What could this be? I walked over to her little gray Celica and she pulled two 12” solid chocolate bunnies out of her front passenger seat, one for me and one for my brother.

“Happy Easter!” she said, smiling. Happy Easter, indeed!

“Happy Easter!” we replied, grinning as our dreams began to reinflate with color and hope.  I don’t think she had any idea how perfect her timing was. I don’t remember if we told her. She didn’t receive anything from us in return.

I took that bunny into the church building and sat it on the pew next to me during the assembly. Nobody was going to persuade me to do otherwise. I kept the bunny safe and alive until late that afternoon when my desire for sugar exceeded my desire for strange companionship. I ate the ears off. And then the head. I knew I really shouldn’t eat the entire thing in one sitting, but what a day it had been. And having only a chocolate torso looking at me seemed so deviant and tragic.

So I ate him. All of him.

And then I placed the empty box strategically outside my mom’s bedroom door as a reminder. Maybe next year I’d get lucky and she would shift the age requirements.

Happy Easter. You’re never too old for it.

I am traveling.

Preparing to travel alone is the reason I haven’t written this week. I spent half the week catching up on family laundry and the other half of the week cursing myself that the kids don’t do their own laundry.

Now I’m making a plan.
Which means nothing will change except the volume of the voices inside my head.

I used to travel by myself a lot. I don’t mean the fancy kind of travel, where you go see exotic cities and book sightseeing tours. I mean the kind of travel where you get picked up in Dayton, OH and stay with a friend and eat out a couple of times. I did fly alone to Seattle once and go backpacking with a friend more insane than I am. And that trip would make QUITE a blog. But that blog would eliminate all chances that I’d ever be allowed outside Hillsborough county again. I can’t risk that. Sorry.

What happens on Poo Poo Point, stays on Poo Poo Point. That’s a real place. Look it up.

During the days of flying to normal places and seeing normal people, and even during the days of road-tripping to Texas with four small children by myself, I got pretty travel savvy. I figured a few things out. I figured out how to pre-board with babies slung to various body parts and how to break down a gate-check stroller with my toes. And I figured out how to safely get all four into a gas station bathroom during a quick stop somewhere in Mississippi. I figured out nothing related to Louisiana. Hate that place. Louisiana will always have the upper hand. Which is mostly why I hate it. That, and everything else.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the savvy. All of it. And since that time, I’ve been following Todd’s savvy around like a lost 3-legged puppy. But with this trip, I was determined to look like I knew what I was doing.

The flight was cheap, so the first thing I did was book Early Bird for myself. I mean, I can’t wait in line with all the other smelly passengers. And nothing says travel savvy like being already hunkered down in your front-of-the-plane seat when the Bs are walking on. So I booked Early Bird.

Except I didn’t.
And I can’t explain what happened, except to say that I’ve lost my edge.

So because I thought I had Early Bird check-in on Southwest, I didn’t bother to even see what my boarding number was until Wednesday night at midnight–a mere 12 hours before I flew and 12 hours AFTER all the non-early birders had checked in.

C13.

Sigh. I knew this meant that I would be getting on the plane after 132 people had already boarded. But you know, I decided I could play the game. I was going to wear C13 like a boss. When it was finally my turn to board, I was walking down the jetbridge behind C9, C10, and C11. They were a cute little family with mom, dad, and teen daughter. Teen daughter, C10, called over her shoulder to her dad, “Dad, I call window.”

Oh, sweetie. I wanted to say. You won’t even be sitting with C9 and C11. And you can forget the window, babydoll. We Cs don’t have these luxuries. I have no idea where they ended up sitting or if they managed to be together on the back of the plane. I couldn’t think about them once I rounded the corner. At that point, I had to go into full recon mode to locate my seat. Be strategic. Waste no time. The flight attendant was standing in the area before Row 1. There were seats open in the middle on both sides of the first row.

“How full is the flight?” I asked. I mean, I could see it was pretty full. But my question was, did these outstretched front rowers have a chance of staying in their chaise lounge without someone like me plopping down next to them.

“Completely booked,” he answered. So, no. No one would make it out alive. I started to veer left to sit down between two strangers and the flight attendant said, “You can’t have that with you,” pointing to my backpack. “There’s no place to store it under a seat. You can put it a few rows back in an overhead.” No way. You aren’t taking my backpack. It’s like a Mary Poppins purse. I wasn’t parting with it. So I allowed my front row dreams to die and kept moving. Row 2, no. Row 3, no. Looking for some skinny people. Row 4, no. Row 8, loud women talking. No women. No on the women. Row 7 had two dudes, one of them average build and one of them skinnier than my right leg. I scooted in and shoved my backpack under the seat in front of me.

I was feeling pretty good about my choice until I realized both men had claimed their armrests, which mean that my arms would be glued to my side in an almost concave fashion. And the guy to my left had his legs splayed like criss-cross applesauce. So I got to touch his elbow and his knee the entire flight. I was also thinking one of them smelled until I began to wonder if it was me.

It wasn’t me.

When I arrived, after a shorter flight than I anticipated, I found my way to the rental car counter and pulled up my confirmation number. I had rented an Economy Car. I was hoping for a bright green Chevy Spark, but ended up with a white Ford Fiesta. I’ll have to describe the fiesta sometime. The rental went fine and I headed out the sliding doors on the rather lengthy route to the car itself, in Hertz space 444. It was a long walk. Halfway there, not yet to the escalators, I was watching the guy in front of me maneuvering with all of his luggage. Poor guy. Look at all the luggage. Compared to him, I was agile. I felt free and easy. Until it hit me that the reason I was having a much easier time walking was because I had left my luggage sitting at the Hertz counter.

They don’t not call me savvy for nothing.

The woman was surprised to see me back, but was already helping another customer. I just awkwardly mouthed the word “luggage” and grabbed it out from its spot next to the new customer’s knees. No one had stolen my bag. If they had known there was a brand new pair of Vans in it, I bet they would have.

My goal for the rest of the weekend is to book a sightseeing tour of Glasgow, Kentucky, spend a little time in Hobby Lobby, and hang out with cherished friends.

And if you are looking for me, I’ll be zipping around in a Ford Fiesta, wearing a brand new pair of Vans.

Ain’t nothing middle aged about THAT.

That’s savvy.

When I discovered the newspaper clipping of this story in my middle school yearbook, it had been at least 20 years since I had read it. My mother used to keep a framed clipping on the wall in an upstairs hallway of her house. But we always just pointed and chuckled as we went by. I never stopped to read or remember.

Last night, not only did I read it, but I typed it into my laptop. I had to resist the urge to edit the entire time I was typing. I wanted to change this word or that word and constantly reprimanded my 14-year-old self for certain word choices or clichés.

It was more important to preserve what it was than to make it better.

I really don’t believe that.

At any rate, this morning, one of you asked me a question I’ve been asking myself for 34 YEARS. She said, “What would you have titled your story back in 1985? Would you choose a different title now?”

Oh, what a question that is.

I tried to blame the Tallahassee Democrat for their terrible alliterative title. And it IS a terrible title. But the fault lies with me. Because I sent it in without a title. I knew it didn’t have a title. Everything has to be titled.

I didn’t know what to call it. For 34 years, I’ve been asking myself what it should have been called and I still don’t know. I was lamenting this again to Todd last night and he said, “It doesn’t matter now. It’s Sinkhole Sadness. That’s its title.”

Sigh.

I need someone to give it a real one. Clearly, this is beyond me.

The other thing I will mention about the story is that near the end, the main character calls his friend a “stupid fool.” When I wrote the story, that was the only thing that seemed to fit the integrity of the desperate moment he was in. That was all well and good until I won. When I got word that I had won, I questioned the words, based on Matthew 5:22 stating that if “anyone who says ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. I remember calling the Democrat reporter in charge of the contest and discussing my concerns. We had a good discussion. Ultimately I kept the original phrase in, probably for the same reason it ended up with the title of Sinkhole Sadness. I couldn’t think of anything else.

So here it is. There are so many things wrong with it. Some of them go with 1985. Some of them go with the writer being a melodramatic 14-yr-old girl. It’s mostly bad, with a few good moments that peek through the Sinkhole Sadness clouds.

Sinkhole Sadness

I surfaced, gasping for air, and glanced nervously around for my pursuer. Impulsively, I scratched at a raw mosquito bite at the back of my neck. My eyes shifted and searched but all was still, almost as if the earth was holding its breath.

I went under but immediately resurfaced, coughing up a mouthful of dirty water.

“Charles?” The uncertainty in my voice skipped across the spans of the water. I weighed the possibilities of his unexplained exit and decided that he had given up to go home. The sinkhole had always been his least favorite place to play anyway.

“It figures,” I almost jumped at the loudness of my own voice. “I hate Charles sometimes.” Angrily, I swept up my blue towel from its spot next to Charles’ belongings. I wiped my face and began the trek home along the rough dirt path.

I unlatched the front gate and hopped quickly around the back of the house, the heat off the ground scorching my calloused feet.

“Mom, has Charles been by here?” She looked up at me from her crouched position next to the garden. She sighed, her blue eyes tired and glazed.

“No, honey, I haven’t seen him today.” My face twisted in confusion as I trudged up the steps and entered our house. Dazed, I reached for the phone and dialed Charles’ house automatically.

“Hello. May I please speak to Charles?” His mother had answered.

“He’s not here. I thought you and Charles were off swimming.” My mouth dropped open and my blood iced up.

“Oh no…the cave…” I left the phone dangling on the end of its cord. I leapt off the back steps and without slowing, I shouted, “Mom, call the police and meet me at the sinkhole. It’s Charles!”

Nausea swept over me like a huge tidal wave but I ran blindly, fleetingly. My throat drained dry and my tongue clung helplessly to the roof of my mouth. The water was ahead just as I had left it. I stopped at the edge of the water and looked down at Charles’ worn sneakers and yellow towel. I suddenly remembered seeing Charles’ things earlier. Only then, it hadn’t registered. The roar of engines filled my ears, drowning out my thoughts.

I turned slowly, trying hard to understand. I squinted, but the people climbing out of cars were blurred and unrecognizable.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” My mother reached for me but I backed away, shaking my head.

“Don’t touch me,” I said. “Find Charles.”

The policemen were already searching for him in the water. I turned my back on the blinding, golden rays of the sun that continued to shine despite the sickness traveling through me; despite all the confusion caused by a simple game.

I sat down, wrapping my arms around my knees, and tried to block out my fear. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. I jumped up , startled, and stared into the sensitive face of a wet policeman.

“Son, we found your friend.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder. Following his gaze, I spotted a body lying still on the ground. I ran around the policeman, who turned to watch me, and knelt on the ground beside Charles. I took his hand and shook it. The coldness and stiffness of his hand stunned me, causing me to drop it in fright. His eyes were fixed on something in the sky. I looked up and then back at him. My eyes grew wide at the sudden realization. I stood up and clamped my jaw tight.

“Charles,” my voice cracked. “You stupid fool!” I turned and ran, my legs pedaled furiously by some unknown force. I stopped finally and sat down against a tree that shaded the edge of the dusty clay road.

Pictures of the scene at the sinkhole washed a wave of guilt over me. The guilt was a cement block on my head, weighting my small body to the ground. A single crystal tear rolled off the tip of my nose.

The past hour of tragedy was confused and scrambled and I was unable to piece it together. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. I could not get up.

During the summer of 1985, my life was changed. Twice. The first time, when I was waylaid by a slimy gray frog. The second, when I entered a writing contest.

The two incidents were not entirely disconnected.

That summer had begun in typical Florida fashion. It was 8 weeks of 95-degree sunshine. It was daily thunderstorms. It was wandering from house to house along Marston Road looking for the latest adventure and adventurer. It was hoping for an invitation to swim in a backyard pool, because my house didn’t have one. It was frequent trips to the coast and time with my grandmother. It would not have been summer without those things. But my path took a sharp left turn the day my mom dropped the Tallahassee Democrat on the kitchen counter for me to see. It was early one weekday morning and I was standing up eating a bowl of instant grits. She had circled in pencil what she wanted me to see.

“Teenage Writing Contest: Enter now! Amazing prizes!”

There were guidelines and age categories in the fine print below. I skimmed the ad and looked up. My mom was waiting for me to finish reading.

“I think you should enter this,” she said. My mother was not in any way an artsy person, but she supported me in being one. They had me at ‘writing’ and sealed the deal with ‘amazing prizes.’

“Ok,” I replied. “I’ll give it a shot.”

The deadline was in 3 weeks. I would enter the Short Story category for middle school grades 6-8.

“Maybe you can write it at the beach,” she countered. “I need you packed by 2. We’re going to try to get to the Oaks for an early dinner. I looked down at my bowl of grits and no longer wanted them. My mouth was watering for a ceramic boat filled with triangular shaped Wheat Thins and garlic butter. The thought of an early dinner of fried flounder at the Oaks made my instant grits instantly subpar.

Two days later, after a full day of seafood and beachcombing, I picked up the legal pad I had brought with me for writing and sat down in a vinyl-cushioned lounge chair at the edge of the screened porch. Every afternoon we had rest time. It was a thing from my earliest memories until we sold that shanty in 1996. The times for resting shifted daily like a curfew, but we always rested. Sometimes I was told to lay down. Sometimes, I took a legal pad to the lounge chair.

Ballpoint pen and a yellow pad on my lap, I rested my head against the neck cushion and tried to channel my inner storyteller. With my eyes closed, the entire story unfolded in color behind my eyelids.  All I really had to do was obey and write it down. It took me two hours to finish. I wrote my opening line as rest time was beginning and wrote the final one as I was given my freedom to go wander the beach.  One neat rewrite later, I handed it to my mom and told her she could mail it in.

That was the last I expected to hear of that. I wasn’t going to win.

A month later, in the middle of July, I was housesitting for my friend, Kara, who was traveling with her family. My routine was to bike over, which was less than a mile, take the mail inside the house, and then care for her gerbils. The gerbils were a religion in that family. Their names were Jimbo and Homer and they were the family puppy. On my third day of doing that job, I pedaled up the hill toward her house until the heat began to push back against me like an unseen forcefield. When I couldn’t pedal through it anymore, I hopped off my bike and walked it the rest of the way. I dropped the bike at the edge of her driveway and gathered the mail to take inside. It was a bunch of dumb stuff like insurance and bank statements. I didn’t think it looked like much fun to be an adult. They always got bad mail.

The front door was 6 steps up from the front walk. I climbed them with effort, still out of breath from biking, and stood there for a minute thinking about the routine. Maybe the gerbils would be in plain sight and I wouldn’t have to spend 10 minutes digging around for them. You couldn’t assume they were in there. I tucked the mail under my arm and fished the spare key out of my jeans shorts. I was unsuspecting of anything more than little tomfoolery in the gerbil cage.

When you are most unsuspecting, that’s when you should suspect. That’s precisely when you need to be wearing a beekeeper’s suit and wielding a baseball bat. Standing there with their mail dampening into my armpit like an extension of myself, I reached for the doorknob and was hit in the forehead by a force powerful enough to be a point blank paintball. I had no idea what it was, since I couldn’t see my own forehead and I hadn’t seen it coming.

I knew that it had hurled itself from the door jam above the front door
I knew that its landing on my forehead sounded like a bar room slap.
I knew that it was slimy.
And I knew that I did not want it there.

I dropped my key and the mail and began whirling and flapping and swiping at my own face. It took too long, but my friend jumped off my forehead and onto the railing that bordered the square porch. At that point, as I allowed my heart rate to level out into a safer range, I got a look at him. He was one of those slimy, sticky, tree frogs, the color of my small intestine, and representative of everything appalling. If there’s any consolation in this story, it’s that I surely shocked him as much as he shocked me. We came at each other like a day of reckoning. I used a piece of mail to launch him off the porch rail and silently declared war on frogs for the rest of my life.

I have stayed true to my word.
There’s a reason God chose frogs as one of the ten plagues.

I shut the door behind me and went straight upstairs to check on and feed the gerbils. I was hanging the water bottle on the side of the cage when the phone rang downstairs. I skipped down the stairs and stood there at the kitchen table for a minute while I decided what to do. Do I answer it? Is this part of housesitting? What do I tell a person when they ask for the Pearsons?

I picked up the phone tentatively and said, “Hello? Pearson residence…”

“Missy, it’s me,” my mother said, breathlessly. I had only been gone 30 minutes. I had no idea why she would be calling me.

“Mom? Is everything ok?” I asked. Somebody was dead. They had to be dead.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “You got a letter and I wanted to tell you about it.”

“I got a letter? Who from?” Don’t even get me started on the grammar.

“It’s from the Tallahassee Democrat,” she answered.

The contest. I hadn’t thought about it since she mailed in the submission.

“Open it! Open it and read it to me!” I was practically shouting. And she was as excited as I was. She ripped into the letter and the phone went silent for a few seconds. Oh no.

“YOU WON!” She shouted. “You won FIRST PLACE!”

“What?! Are you kidding? I can’t believe it!” The frog was now long in my past. My future included ‘amazing prizes.’  “What did I win?” I asked. It was a fair question.

“Well, let’s read on here…they are going to print your story on the front page of the Lifestyle section of the paper.”

“OK, that’s cool…what else?” Where was the money? There had to be money.

“And you get to eat dinner one night at the Governor’s Club with all the other winners.”

What? Dinner at the Governor’s Club? With strangers?  My face fell and suddenly I could again feel the imprint of the frog as he’d suctioned to my skin. Dinner at a fancy restaurant. Did the prize patrol remember this was a contest for people under 60?

But still, I told myself, getting published would be cool.

Getting published, even if only in the local paper, was cool. But I had made an egregious, irreparable error that still haunts me to this day. It haunts me more than frogs.

I had neglected to title my story.

They did not call me to ask me what I wanted it called. They titled it for me.

Sinkhole Sadness. The world’s worst title for a short story in the history of the written word. The words were mine. The title was not. The title was so bone-chillingly bad that I couldn’t get past it. It lodged in my throat like boiled turnip greens.

I was pretty famous at church for about a week. People I didn’t want to talk to at all came out of the pews and the woodwork to tell me they had read my story. My story, Sinkhole Sadness. There were only about 2 of them I cared to hear from.

By the time the “prize” came due, the story and its printing was a black speck in my rearview mirror. I put on church clothes and ugly burgundy flats from Etienne Aigner and was dropped in front of the Governor’s Club for the most awkward dinner of my life. My prize turned out to be a rare steak that was stewing in its own juices on my plate. We grilled our steaks until they bounced in my family. I didn’t know rich people and politicians ate them rare.

The only bright spot in that evening, and it wasn’t bright enough, was the man who served that steak to me. He was nice to look at. His name was Ben.

Other than that, it was all just a frog to the forehead to me.

There was never a question about my going to college. I was going. If I’d tried not to go, I’d have still gone. By my junior year of high school, I had grown serious about my grades. I was making As and only As. I was developing stars in my eyes in the shape of ivy league brick buildings. I wanted to go somewhere special and do something special. My parents wanted me to go to a small, private, Christian junior college.

I said UNC Chapel Hill, as if I would have been accepted.

They said Florida College, who accepts almost anyone.

They only required one semester there and said we could then discuss it. They said this knowing I’d stay longer than one semester. It was there that I met many of the lifelong friends I still have. It was there that I met Todd. I stayed until I’d earned every last credit they could hand me. And then I was off to Florida State for my junior year.

I was alone at Florida State. Alone with 14,000 other students just like me. I lived at home (highly UNrecommended, no offense, pops), parked my car at a friend’s home near campus and biked to all of my classes. Occasionally I would run into a friend from middle school. But most of the time, I walked into and out of my FSU classes by myself.

It sounds like a sad story, but I loved my final two years of college. I hadn’t gotten my way on where I went to school, but I totally got my way on the classes I took. I was an English Major with emphasis in Creative Writing. I took workshops where all we did was write stories and critique each other’s work. I learned specific writing techniques from studying the likes of William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I couldn’t think of anything much better than this.

In the Maymester of 1991, I took Beginner’s Fiction Workshop: Art and Imitation taught by Ralph Berry. It met from 6-9 on Tuesday and Thursday nights. I had spent the day before lining up my texts for the class, one of which was At Swim, Two Birds by Flann O’Brien. The book cover was every bit as weird as the title. I was intrigued. Because the class started when I would normally be eating dinner with my parents, I had to wolf down a sandwich and head toward campus by 5:15. Parking was almost always a bad day in Vegas. I had my tricks, though. My best parking trick was the back 40 clay parking lot behind the Tri Delta sorority house.

These classes with Dr. Berry were the highlight of my summer. That makes me pathetic. I know it now and I knew it then. I loved sneaking through the Tri Delt property and walking up Park Avenue. The walk led me past Ruby Diamond Auditorium and to the Williams building, a grand old structure with brick and tile from 1926. Every class I took that summer was inside these ancient, ivy-covered walls. I entered the building through an arch. Every time I did, I felt I could hear whispered stories from 80 years before. That building was an audience and a cheerleader for every writer that stepped inside. In my second story classroom, the north-facing wall was entirely windows, overlooking the fountain in front of Ruby Diamond. As Dr. Berry laughed about the absurdities of Flann O’Brien, his face became a deep, neon pink. Some nights, when everything was flowing just right, his laughing face would flush pink as the sun was dropping across campus. For a brief few minutes, everything was the same shade of red.

One night, I had pushed my departure from home too late. I left at 5:30. Tennessee Street was snarled with traffic. I didn’t have time to even consider my other parking options. I had to drive the absolute shortest route to Delta Delta Delta, park quickly, and then sprint all the way to room 229. I whipped in the back entrance to the back lot and parked as far back as I possibly could. But instead of sitting in my car for a few minutes as an incognito sorority girl, I had to exit my car immediately and risk whomever might cross my path.

This would be okay. I mean, all I had to do was move with purpose, blend with girls that looked like Cameron Diaz, and not draw attention to myself. I did not need to worry about getting towed while I was sitting in a 3-hour class. I could totally pull off the Tri Delta look. I pulled into the parking lot at 5:53. That gave me 45 seconds to cross the Tri Delt property and 6:15 to make the rest of the trek. I gave myself a glance in the rearview mirror of my dad’s copper colored 1983 Datsun 280ZX. My hair was going to give me away before I cleared the sidewalk. It was wearing the humidity like a badge of honor and sticking off my head like a frayed rope. I patted it and wished it well and shoved the heavy metal car door shut with my hip. Then I tucked At Swim, Two Birds and my notebook under my right arm and took off.

Don’t make eye contact. Look ahead. Think like a Greek. Practice your bible Greek. Low profile. It was going pretty well on my speed walk from the clay back lot to the side yard of the fancy main house. I was within view of total freedom. The brick, colonial style house stood dignified, pressure washed, unblemished. It kept its stern and stoic face to Park Avenue like a member of the royal guard. The porch was dotted with Delta Delta Delta girls. I pictured them in my mind, but could not make eye contact. Maybe they’d think I was here to see someone. As if.

I took a deep breath. Focus. Be the Delta. Put a little swag in your step.

That last one was the game changer for me. Not only did I decide to make a last-minute change in my gait in hopes that I might blend better, but I sped up. To a run. Somewhere between the transition between normal stride, sorority girl stride, and sorority girl running, I kicked a rock. The rock was camouflaged by nothing. It was in plain view, but I had too much going on. Turns out it’s not easy to rush to class while pretending to be someone else and also trying to avoid detection.

When my foot encountered that rock in plain sight, my leg was already in some unsightly position. I was off balance. There was no recovering. I kicked the rock. Hard. My foot stayed back, as if being held by a defensive end. The rest of my body lurched forward. I threw my books like a forward lateral and went down on my face. Right there. Twenty short paces from the Tri Delt girls who had nothing but time for the show I put on. I hit ground with three different body parts. The one I felt the most was my right knee, which was bleeding pretty freely when I stood back up. Now I was going to have to add a 2-minute restroom visit to clean up my knee.

As I hobbled up the hill toward the Williams building, I never looked back at my audience. I heard my mother’s voice in my head saying, “Haste makes waste.” How could I argue with her now? I had wasted time. I had wasted my knee. And worst of all, I had wasted my chances to ever get in tight with the Tri Delta girls. I had also wasted a perfectly exceptional parking solution.

But I don’t worry. There are sororities for girls like me, too. They’re called Honor Societies. I started one of my own in my mind that accepts school-loving, old-car-driving, clumsy, fluffy-headed readers and writers. The parking lot is paved and smooth and the porch is screened with a swinging bed and Amish rocking chairs. There is a fountain out front with two birds at swim.

I’m a charter member of Pi Trippa Dorka.
And there’s something to be said for that.

Last night, I found a poem I wrote in my 20s for someone’s 50th birthday. I had so much time on my hands. I wrote it to the style and meter of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. It’s funny to me for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that I am almost 50 myself. What I used as old age benchmarks are a bit antiquated now that I’m almost there. It’s also quirky because of my references to pop culture at the time.

And because we’ve established that I didn’t have much to say, I’ll post it. If you know anyone turning 50, feel free to cheer them up with this in a greeting card.

Youthful Nevermore

Once upon a midnight dreay
Muscles cramped and vision bleary
Lawrence Welk upon the tube
I used to think he was a bore.
Dentures soaking in the restroom
sending forth a sterile crest fume,
Having reached the end of Welk,
I took the “flipper” from the drawer.
Flipping with a steady hand,
60 shows at my command.
To sleep is all that I have planned,
Because I’m youthful, nevermore.

Is this some occult illusion?
Some maniacal intrusion?
MTV and VH1?
This trash was never here before.
Carefully I weighed my choices,
Thinking I might hear some voices.
Could it be just “old age” noises,
Beating down my bedroom door?

I tried to think what I could do
To bring my youth back into view.
But as of yet I have no clue.
I’ve never been this old before.
I racked my brain in desperation,
thinking up wild combinations
Extinction and annihilation –
words that haunt me to the core.

There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
by my own insight accosted
I raised myself up off the bed
And paced across my bedroom’s floor.
Memories of my prime are nifty.
Days when birthdays never miffed me.
Now, alas, I’m turning FIFTY!
Oh, what with this year have in store?
I leaned against the bed to rest,
a hanky to my forehead pressed,
Still feeling overwhelmed and stressed…
I’ll see my childhood nevermore.

“Oh well, I’ll soon be fifty five.
The discounts will keep me alive.
I think seniors aren’t so bad
And I still think I know the score.
And when this milestone day is done,
I’ll push ahead to Fifty-One,
With every rise and set of sun,
My youth is with me evermore.

This is my version of Cheers and Jeers. I don’t have much to say, but there were a few notable things, especially in the Coos category.

Boos

• April 1. Boo. Every year my kids try to pull things on me. They stink at it but I’m still on edge all day. They love April 1. I am not a fan. BOO.
• Stuffing 800 flyers into PTA teacher boxes. I don’t like counting. I especially don’t like dividing 800 into little groups of 22. BOO.
• Spreadsheets. Enough said. BOO.
• Trying to write a blog on a Monday and having nothing to say. If I am bored by it, I stop writing. If I don’t like the paragraph, why would anyone else? I started the year with the goal of writing Monday-Friday, taking the weekends off. That’s a good goal and I like that goal. The problem is, my typical style of post is essay or story-esque. I don’t know that I can keep up a standard pace of 5 of those a week. Well, clearly I can’t, because I haven’t. Little things like 104-page elementary school yearbooks and 5th grade banquets get in the way. So, boo to slacking. But coos to trying.
• Pretending that it’s normal to say boos and coos. Boo to that.

Coos

• Really cool doorways that I stumble upon while biking and then risk arrest or death as I creep close enough to get a decent picture. I suppose if I’d been shot while taking the picture, this might go in the Boo category. But as it stands, it was just a really cool doorway.
• Heres a big one. I’m 48 and just learned to use a bike pump effectively. I’ve never had any luck pumping up bike tires before right now. I even had to purchase a small compressor that I plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car that would pump the tires automatically. I did have to look up a YouTube video to pump the tires of my road bike because it had a Presta valve, which is smaller and trickier. After that, nothing could stop me. I carry the sucker like a 38 magnum now. Is that a real gun?
• Yesterday something amazing happened. More amazing that learning to use a bike pump and actually using it. Yesterday I witnessed harmony at the Temple Terrace roundabout by the country club. I’ve never seen anything like it. Prior to this, all I ever saw was people stopping like a 4-way stop. People hedging. Hesitating. People with a look of abject terror in their eyes. But not yesterday. Yesterday, on TWO DIFFERENT OCCASIONS, I saw people jumping in when they saw an opening, waiting their turn and merging into traffic, and then exiting like an Olympic dismount. It was beautiful. It created this whirly swirl of car colors and body styles, spinning around an island of flowers and grass. It was like people from all nations and cultures were holding hands and singing a remix mashup of Kumbaya and We are the World. It’s possible this was just an April Fool’s joke played by the universe. But it’s also possible people in this community are finally learning the ways of the mysterious, mythical roundabout.

Have a great April 2. Here’s hoping you have excellent experiences on the roundabout of life and that you don’t suffer trauma from anything that occurred on April 1.