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.

Dear Buttercup,

Today is March 24.
It is not a birthday.
It is not an official anniversary of a marriage or a death.
But it is a special day to me. And to you, too, I hope.
Two years ago today, the allergic husband said yes to adding you to our family. He said yes to bringing you indoors and we embarked on an adventure for which we were grotesquely under prepared.
I said I would never share my home with a beast. I said those words just that way. And I meant them 100%.
When we brought you home, I tried to block off the stairs with a twin mattress we were getting rid of. I figured you’d be a downstairs dog only. I tried to get you sleeping in a kennel in the guest room. When that didn’t work, I tried to attach you to Andrew, who has a bedroom downstairs.
But things evolved, as things often do. And now, not only do I share my home with a beast, I have on occasion shared my bed with the beast and don’t view you as beastly at all. You attached yourself to me. You are my bdff. Best dog friend forever.

I’m that person now.

When I showed up at the front door of your former owner and you bolted out the door and down the sidewalk going 55 miles an hour, I wore an expression of shock. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Were you a naughty dog? Were you a runner? What I know now is that you love to be outside. You love your walks. When you get your outside time, you don’t bolt. You weren’t getting any time outside before you came to live with us.

I’ve wondered 1000 times why 2 different owners gave you away. What did they know that I didn’t? What about you was hard that would cause someone to willingly place you somewhere else? I still don’t know the answer to this one. The only answer I have is that you were born to be with us and we just weren’t ready to embrace that fact until that day 2 years ago.

You are the perfect dog. Perfectly housebroken. Perfect happy. Perfectly snuggly. You do become a demon when a golf cart goes by. And golf carts do go by a lot. But I have to give you a pass on a few things.

They call dogs like you rescues. And in a sense, I do think we rescued you from a situation that wasn’t ideal. But the real truth of the situation is that you rescued us. The whole family came together to adore you in a unity we were really craving. We took walks together with you on the golf course. Together we bathed you about 15 times the first month because we thought we had to for allergies. We came to find out that we were cleaning you to death, so we stopped that business.  

There have been a few accidents along the way. A few times we gave you a little too much freedom and almost condemned you to the mouth of a Belgian sheep dog. A few times we didn’t interrupt your need to roll around in another dog’s fresh waste. A few times we backed into you in the kitchen and almost killed the both of us. That one time we tried to teach you to swim. But mostly, we’ve gotten it right. We adore you. You are a hairy 5^th child that doesn’t require a lot and rarely talks back. You are the best of all of us.

I don’t know what was wrong with your two previous owners, but I can tell you one thing for certain. We are your family.. We will always be your family. You are home now.

So let me hoist you up onto your dad’s side of the bed and tell you all about what happens when a guy travels to New York City without his wife. This is a good story. You’ll like it. It starts with New York City and it ends like this:

You are my bdff and I am your mama.

Happy Dogiversary, Buttercup Snapp.

It is the 15th anniversary of the day I first laid eyes on you. I had seen some sonograms. I had spent some time trying to roll with you when you woke up jamming at 4 a.m. But this day was my first meeting in real time, full color. Turns out, as hard as we tried to check you out in advance, test your lungs, and plan every last detail ahead, you still weren’t ready to make your entrance. You’ve never liked getting up or out early. You like your sleep.

You were born on a Tuesday afternoon and placed immediately up against me for a first hold in this world. After about a minute of a strained cry, the doctor determined you weren’t quite all right, so they plucked you from my cradled grip and ushered you away from me for the next 8 hours. That was an exhausting 8 hours, swollen with anxiety about what was actually happening in the NICU. As it turned out, it was fairly standard stuff. But it isn’t standard to not have your arms around the baby you’ve loved for 9 months and who has only been in the world for a few hours. There is nothing that feels standard about that. When they finally let me see you again, it was about 8 p.m. I was shot all to c-section pieces, but still so happy to be headed down that corridor in a wheelchair. You were hungry. And screaming. Really. Really. Screaming. You still make shocking amounts of noise 15 years later. I scrubbed my hands, rolled around by your bassinet, and the nurse handed your pink, wrinkly disgruntled self. I hugged you to me and said quietly,

“Hey, boy. It’s mama.”

And in that exact instant, you stopped crying. Not a peep. And then I started up. Because I couldn’t believe that you were here and you were mine. And that the sound of my words could be a salve to your caterwauling soul. It was a moment I will remember until I don’t remember how to string two words together anymore.

That was the day you became my mama’s boy.

Even today, it is my privilege to be the one to cart you to a trampoline arena with 3 of your buddies and then on to eat our favorite, MEXICAN FOOD. You don’t need me for as much now. You don’t hug me quite as often. You outgrew your rather extreme lisp and don’t look over your shoulder anymore to see where I am in relation to where you are. But you’re still you and I love you exponentially more than I did that day when I suddenly got woozy and handed you back to a nurse right before throwing up in a cup someone handed me.

Hey, it can’t all be swaddles and lullabies.

You are rap music (clean version only), and marching quads, and jokes pushed too far, and extreme sports, and expensive shoes, and so many pairs of shoes, and fluffy hair, and oversleeping, and sidestepping the siblings who take swipes at you when you have poked the bear one time too many. You are kind when you need to be, funny to a fault, and really bad at drawing trees. Your words, not mine.

You will always be my mama’s boy.
But we can just keep that between us.

Happy Birthday, boy,

Mom