Mood of the Day

Since I'm such an unpredictabley moody bastard,

and,

since I found photographs of my adorable,

younger self,

I thought I'd help you all out

by posting in the side bar

my mood for the day.

This little tike will be Happy Steven...

and this...

will be Cranky Steven.

Today gets a Happy Steven.

I'll see if I can scrounge up an Indifferent Me,

should the need arise.

Snow

A

It’s dark yet, so I can’t say for sure how deep the snow is now; two or three inches maybe, on the ground. They say it will continue into tomorrow. I’ve seen one record snowfall in my twelve years here in Tennessee. I’d like to see another. One, I can enjoy from my porch and don’t have to drive through to get home.

     I was in second-grade when I first experienced snow. It is an experience, after all; especially the first time. We lived in Southern California then. I’d seen pictures of snow, in the Peanut’s comic books I read incessantly; seen Charlie Brown and Linus wading, waste deep through it and dimpling snow balls for the perfect pitch, seen it piled high on Snoopy’s sleeping belly. Maybe I’d been begging, but my folks had decided to take us kids—I have a younger brother and sister—up to the mountains, were we could witness snow, first hand.

     Snow wasn’t actually falling when we arrived. There were some wind-swept patches at the lower elevations—hints. I stared in awe. I wanted to get out then and there, to mold the two or three handfuls of crystalline white into tiny, pebble-eyed snowmen. But my father drove on. “That’s not snow,” he said. My parents are native Iowan’s. They know all about snow; deep snow.

     We climbed. Plowed mounds of oil stained snow began to pile up along side the winding highway, Pines bows began to bend under the white frosting and soon only the largest crags of granite could be seen under the blanketed mountainside. But it still wasn’t enough snow for my father.

     A chain was drawn across the highway, where it became impassable to native Southern Californians, who apparently lacked the snow-driving skills my father had. We parked in a cleared turnout along with the other twenty some odd vehicles, filled with families, up to see the snow.

     We didn’t have any winter clothes: galoshes and mittens and downy jackets and the like. It was Southern California. I didn’t even know they made such things. And even if I had, my father was not about to run out to the nearest sporting-goods and pay to outfit three children with the proper gear for, maybe, an hour’s worth of snow play.

     So, Mom layered us. She stuffed our hands into socks and our shoes into bread bags, which she secured with rubber bands. Prompted, no doubt, by my father, I assumed that this was how you prepared for snow.

     In hindsight, it was very resourceful of my mother. But when mixing and mingling with other children, out in the snow, who are wearing proper galoshes and mittens and downy jackets, one’s bread-bagged feet and sock covered hands quickly become the subject of jest. After five minutes of playing in my glorious and long-anticipated snow, I wanted to go home. My father wouldn’t hear of it. He hadn’t driven all that way for five minutes.

     Mother, who is prone to seeing the bigger picture, stayed with me in the van. She’d seen plenty of snow like this, when she was a kid.

Tomato Juice

Tomato juice. You’d think, with all of the nurturing smiles, Holocausts and Tour-Buses available, a guy could have something better than tomato juice for his first memory. That’s almost pathetic.

     If the shoe fits... 

     I guess there was Mexico too. But hell, it wasn’t Playa del anywhere, no white beaches or crystalline waves lapping over my infantile feet, nothing spicy. My Mexico was a bon-a-fide shithole; the kind that attracts young, missionary types...namely my father.

     I don’t know much about memories—how other people see their reminiscences—but most of mine are snapshots, Polaroid’s, shot on Super 8, or some compilation of the three. There aren’t any dates, ages or names. I rely on my father to fill in the historical nonsense. Tomato Juice, my first memory, is kind of a flipbook of old Kodachromes; those four by four white-framed numbers, with that burnt orange tint that looks like they were taken in a stage four smog alert. Pops says the year was 1967. I was three years old.

     My father bought a new van that year, a Dodge. In those days, Pops equated weird and ugly with cutting-edge, especially when it came to vehicles. I think a lot of people did. That particular make of Dodge had plenty of both weird and ugly. A loaf of bread had better lines. Its face was punched in flat and its eyes bugged out like a Pug dog's. To top it off, it was painted sky blue and white. Refreshing.

    
We’d been driving along an inland stretch of Hell between TJ and Rosarito when Pops pulled the van off the highway into one of those ‘scenic’ turnouts. Pops got out and stretched. I followed.

     The scenic turnout was a plateau overlooking a deep valley and adjacent rise. Pops walked over to the plateau’s rim and stood there surveying the valley, a little like Moses looking into the Promised Land of Canaan, sans beard and crazy hair. I inched up beside him, leery of the edge.

     The view was a far cry (as my father often said) from scenic. Everywhere I looked there was scalded red rock and sand; not a bush one. We might as well have landed the van on Mars. There were stacks of car tires all up the valley’s walls, scattered metal, wood and cardboard. It could easily have been the beginnings of a landfill. When I looked closer, I could see paths, and people, moving in and out of the trash; that the trash was houses... homes. 

     This was a scenic view of rock bottom. Even a three year old could see that the only way these people were going to get any further down, was when they were buried. They might have been looking forward to it too. The valley had been burnt clean of all hope by decades of poverty, ignorance and whatever corrosive ingredients were leeching from the core of Mexico.

     Any other person would have been stunned by this display of squalor. But not Pops. Pops was smiling.

     You see, rock bottom, to the young missionary type, translates roughly into ‘ripe for salvation’.

     Pops had always claimed that Australia was his ‘calling’. I’m assuming he envisioned the Outback, something desolate, where he (and his family) could truly suffer for God. But Australia didn’t pan out. Pops couldn't drum up the money. We were living in Southern California in ’67, and I guess, after a year of unsuccessful panhandling, the Spirit finally led him across the border to the next best wasteland: Mexico.

     That doesn’t explain the tomato juice though. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone would take a half gallon can of tomato juice on a road trip into Hades. But it was there. Pops swung the back doors of the Van open and produced the silver can. Then, like magic, he produced an equally silvery opener and pierced two triangles into the can’s top.

     “One for pouring, one for glugging,” he said.

     Pops tilted the can back into the blazing Mexican sun and chugged down a mess of the thick (probably warm) juice.

     I watched my father's Adam’s apple pump the fluid down his throat. I wanted an Adam’s apple, and tomato juice...everything my father had.

     “You ain’t gonna like it boy,” he said.

     I would like it. I promised.

     Pop squatted down and held the can out to me.

     In my memory, my Kodachrome flipbook, I watch my two tiny hands reaching for the enormous can of juice that my father easily palmed in one. But my little hands hesitate. There was a smile on my father’s face that I’d never seen before; slight, dark and twisted.

     "Go on, take a drink."

     I looked down at the ant-size people moving in and out of their trash homes. Nothing was getting them out of that valley, not even death. Pops wasn't going to make a damn thing better for them either.

     Maybe that's why I remember the tomato juice so clearly: Reaching for it, seeing that smirk on my father's face, my three year old brain must have realized that there are people the universe conspires against... toys with... simply because they're trusting, and that I was one of these people, my father a co-conspirator, and I'd always be the brunt of some cosmic joke...God’s Piñata.