Whichever Comes First

The frog in the riverbed at the top of the falls was maybe the size of a dime. It looked like someone doodled on its back with felt tip pens.

Back at Doodlebug it was just me and a few teenage girls who work there. At one point a ten year old came in to work on a project for spell. I sang along to Tommy James and the Shondell’s while I put the second and third coat of ceramic glaze paint on Secret’s bowl. The teenage girls seemed to know the words to all the songs that I didn’t. We have committed different things to memory.

Tar and rock roads were laid through Southwest Minneapolis, in the 1970’s, during the recession. At that time it was a blue collar neighborhood. My parents rented farmland from Mrs. Rudder in Eden Prairie in expectation of disaster and the basement was stocked with canned foods when the first news and ripples of economic crisis began. We filled our red wagon with ice and bottles of Coca Cola and mom and I pulled it round to where the workers were laying road and sold them Cokes for a nickel or a dime – I can’t remember which. We waited while they drank so as to get the return on the bottles. Mom laughed while dad tossed mud crusted squash across the kitchen after the harvest. He worshiped her and she was happy. I wonder what happened to them.

Despite everything, there’s not a part of the story I don’t cherish. I wish I could have loved it all more when it was happening. I remember being a very nervous child. Something frightening lived behind the wood panels of the walls. At night, the vacuum cleaner would come alive and make sinister faces at me. When I dared leave the bed and slip downstairs, mom would let me slip my cold feet between her thighs to warm them up (that must have been cold and uncomfortable.) My grandpa was a Pentecostal preacher who wore boleros with scorpions encased in Lucite, big silver and turquoise rings, loud Hawaiian shirts, drove a purple Cadillac and pointed to a scar from an appendix operation and wove tales of being injured by Indians. Grandma canned tomatoes and made strawberry preserves.

In the summer, mom would haul a lawn chair and a cooler to Lake Harriet and I’d stay in the water until the very last minute – crawling along the shoreline and then running across the hot, hot, hot black top foot path to the shade of the concession and just hope she might buy us ice cream or saltwater taffy. We’d all put damp towels on the searing vinyl seats of the Buick Station Wagon – avocado colored I think, or was it mustard? Everything was made of splintering weathered wood painted forest green or white with sun faded red lettering, not quite pink. Grandpa caught fish on big lakes up north and kept them alive in buckets of water outside his garage so we could win the ice fishing contest at Lake Nokomis during the Winter Carnival. My brother sold my sister’s turtle for five dollars at the Aquatennial. Under a full moon snow sparkles like diamonds and the trees have secrets. Before Dutch Elm disease, every street was a canopy of color in the Fall – you couldn’t even see the sky.

These girls in Doodlebug, they don’t know seasons like that. They don’t know poverty or wealth like that. They know it all differently. We have committed different things to memory. They will have memories of Oleander and Naked Ladies blooming in late summer. They’ll talk about what they were doing when the Twin Towers were struck by airplanes the way my parents remember where they were when John Kennedy was shot. And then once these pictures are painted just so, with the right number of coats and we set them to rest… we’ll fire them up and fix them like this for eternity or whenever they break.. whichever comes first.