dirt

Literary agent extraordinaire Janet Reid placed a writing contest on her blog yesterday. Although I have followed the Shark's blog for some time now, I have never entered any of her contests. The criteria included using 5 preselected words in a short story that does not exceed 100 words in length. The resulting fruit of my labor is strange and not likely to win anyone's awards, but it was a great way to get the juices flowing before school starts up again:

“Jasper. Jasper! Wake your lazy ass up! I know you’ve hit the snooze button at least three times now. You promised to clean up the guest bathroom days ago. There’s mildew everywhere,” I said.

“No one told you to invite your mother to stay here with us. Clean it yourself,” said Jasper.

“You know she’s had a hard time ever since that gardening club scandal went down.”

“No one told her to buy aphids online and set them loose on old Miss Daisy’s roses! She’s almost ninety!”

“Well, you know Mom. She’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”

Confession hour

There was a recent trending topic on twitter called #confessionhour that I found really interesting. I thought I would give it a try and see what things few people know about me.

1. I have a fascination with crimals, serial killers, and gang and prison culture, and would be a prison guard or police officer if I wasn't too scared.

2. I am torn between a small town and big city mentality.  I am in love with everything bigger cities have to offer: culture, excitement, possibilities. However, I cannot forget the benefits of home: family, neighbors that know your name, community involvement.


3. One of my long-term goals is to have information about me show up as the first listing under my name as a Google search.

4. As a continuation of the job prospects of #1, I have also considered lawyer, doctor, teacher/professor, business owner, real estate agent, advice columnist, photographer, book editor, literary agent, and writer just to name a few. The interim (temporary) jobs I have considered have included card dealer, hotel maid (I'm a sucker for Maid in Manhattan), insurance agent. Today I am slightly more realistic. I want to graduate within a year and go to grad school for a very random degree: library and information science. Yes, this means I want to be a librarian. Sadly, even this major has a huge degree of uncertainty and is decidedly "uncool," but it is something I'm interested in and I'm gonna go for it (at least for now). There just aren't that many jobs out there.

Are there any facts about you that no one else knows?

L'accusation

Well, you’ve certainly gone and done it now

Haven’t you

Haven’t you

You say you don’t know what I’m talking about

You’ve never seen me like this before

I’m not the person you used to know

The one you fell for

The one you connected to

The one you cared about

Well that’s a luxury you’re afforded

On the other side

Of life

A work in progress...

Working in the cafeteria was not my idea of fun. Of course, my slave-driver of a mother insists that fun isn’t necessary. I believe her exact words were “Jimmy, you can have fun when you can afford to not have a job.” Quite unfair I'd say, but still understandable. She worked two jobs to support the two of us, so I’d do anything to help her. 

At a chubby 219 pounds, you’d think a cafeteria would be an ideal employer for a kid like me. Unfortunately, I had a few things working against me. For one thing, I had told myself that this would be the summer I would lose the weight. The wisecracks from the guys in the P.E. locker room made me so angry that previous year. 9th graders can be such douche bags, and no one wants to go to high school and be the butt of jokes. Secondly, the cafeteria I worked for is in a veterans’ nursing home. This particular nursing home appears to be home to some of the most uncouth seniors around. They certainly didn’t bite their tongue about my weight problem. And the food, well that’s another story.  “Damn kid, I don’t know who taught you how to cook, but I sure can tell you like to eat,” said my least favorite geezer Milton during my first day on the job. 

Milton had been a military man. As an admiral in the Navy, Milton Caraway had been fit. There was ample proof of that. The pictures that lined the hallways leading from the dark brick building’s entrance to the cafeteria haunted me. The pictures, meant to serve as a silent and continuous thank you to the men and women that called the place home did me no favors. The more personal photos exposed muscles that I didn’t know you can have, especially Milton’s. He had won the U.S. Navy Golden Gloves competition as a young man, and had no reservations about reminding me of his achievements. 

“By your age boy, I had two jobs and was bench pressing 300 pounds before breakfast. That’s what’s wrong with kids today. No work ethic. It’s a damn shame.” These were the kind of words that were spat at me in that first month. One day Milton hobbled into the kitchen as I was preparing the yeast rolls for lunch. When I reached up to grab a new 50 pound bag of flour from the top of the baker’s rack my hand slipped and the bag came tumbling down. The loud thud of the bag hitting the floor was drowned out by the sound of my yelp as Milton’s cane whacked me in the back of the legs.

“What’d you do that for?” I asked.

“Do you make it a habit to go around wasting stuff boy? That flour ain’t free, and I know that you don’t want them taking it out of your measly paycheck. Hell, you might’ve made more working at one of those fast food joints, but that would be right up your alley now, wouldn’t it kid? I tell you what. You have anywhere to go after the lunch shift?”

“Yes,” I lied. I knew in all honesty that all I had to do when I got home was play the new video game I had bought with my first check, but I didn’t want to tell him that.

“Too bad. You’re gonna meet me in room 127 at 2:00 once you’ve finished washing the dishes. And they better be clean.” After his spiel Milton hobbled his way out of the kitchen and I went back to work, wondering how I had just got shaken down by an eighty-something-year-old man. Nevertheless, I made up my mind to ignore him and head home.

When 2:00 rolled around I completed my usual ritual of wiping down the countertops and hanging up my apron. Then I began the walk to the front door of the home that would take forty-two steps to complete. That was part of my plan to lose weight: counting my steps. I grabbed the old beat up iPod my mom had bought me for Christmas out of my back pocket and stuck the headphones in my ear at about step 11. Step 26 would take me around a corner and into the entry-way of the home. As usual I scanned the photos of the veteran’s that lined the hallway and thought of all the wonderful things they had done in their lives. And as usual I wondered if my life would amount to anything half as important as what they had done. At step 42 on those hard linoleum tiles I pushed the cold metal handle that separated me from freedom. As I stepped out the building something to my right caught my eye.

“Ouch! What’d you do that for old man?” Milton had hit me with his cane again. “Don’t you know that that’s considered child abuse these days?” I said as I pulled the headphones out.

“What are you doing going home? I thought I told you to meet me after work. And here you are doing everything but what I said. Turn around and head to room 127,” he said with a determined look on his face.

“I told you I have something to do today.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Well, stuff. You know kid stuff.”

“I don’t think so. Look kid, I was overweight myself for years. Just like you, I grew up without my father, and had to work when I would have preferred to be with my friends, but life doesn’t always give us what we want.” We stood in silence for what seemed like an eternity, with him staring at me, and me staring at a suddenly interesting spot on the ground. I guess he got tired of looking at my face because he said “You know what? I can’t help you if you don’t want to be helped,” and turned away.

I watched Milton’s steps then. I mean really watched. I couldn’t help but wonder how a man who had been in such great shape had been reduced to using a cane to get around. He moved faster than some of the other residents did, but he moved laboriously. When he reached the door, he had to switch the cane from his right to left hands, and I saw the cane shake as it changed hands. That’s when I realized he had gone through this same process earlier in order to ambush me. No person on their right mind would have gone through all that trouble for nothing, so I couldn’t just let him leave. I wasn’t sure how this old man could help me, but for the first time that summer, I was willing to find out.

“Milton wait.” It was barely over a whisper, but the old man stopped. He didn’t turn his head or respond, so I spoke up again.

“I…I think I’m willing to try.”

His only response was a nod of the head so I followed him into the building.

I had never been to room 127 before, since my duties pretty much confined me to the kitchen and cafeteria areas, but according to what I saw, the residents were no strangers to what lies within its walls. The “Fitness Center,” as the little sign outside the door called it, was stocked with equipment you might find at one of those fancy member’s only gyms. There were two treadmills, a few stationary bikes and ellipticals, two or three weight racks, and various other “target-these-muscles-only” machines around the room. Despite the fragile and lethargic demeanors you’d expect from people in a nursing home, there were three other people in the room when we arrived. One was a personal trainer hired by the home and the others were residents focused on staying in shape. Milton shuffled his way to the first treadmill and told me to get on, so I did. Surprisingly, instead of starting me off with a jog he turned it to one of the slowest speeds one can choose from.

“Why am I going so slow?” I asked just a few steps into my walk.

“Isn’t it obvious? I thought you might like to see what it feels like to be old; to be like me. You waltz in here with your able body and have probably never once stopped to think about what life will be like when you’re old, or if you get bigger. Life gets harder Jimmy, not easier. You’d have a lot going for you if you knew how to use what you got.”

I didn’t even know the old man knew my name, or that he paid attention to me when I wasn’t serving him his peas and mashed potatoes. Milton was right. I didn’t think about how my presence at the nursing home might have affected the veterans that lived there. Most of them didn’t have a choice but to fight for their country, and here I was wasting my youth hating my job and spending my free-time inside make-believe video game worlds.

I worked out hard that day. The snail’s pace on the treadmill was replaced with a brisk jog after a few minutes, and Milton had me hit every machine in the place before he allowed me to go home. That became our routine after that. Every day after work I would meet him in room 127 for workouts that we both came to enjoy. He even introduced me to some of his friends and incorporated a few boxing lessons. At the end of the summer, I begged the nursing home director to let me stay on permanently because I enjoyed the job so much. To my surprise he accepted and even gave me a raise. When I walked into school that first day, I was thirty pounds lighter and a thousand times happier, and for reasons bigger than losing the weight. I had gained a new friend and a new sense of self respect.

Today I’m on leave from the United States Naval Academy to speak at Milton’s funeral, per his request of course. He turned ninety last week, so I can’t say his death came as a surprise, but the pain is still there. I had continued to work at the home until the day I left for the Academy, so I enjoyed countless hours with the man who had started out as my enemy but became a surrogate father/ task master. I’ll have to make sure I remember to mention how much I enjoyed that cane of his.

Fun with random words!

What happened?

Goddess mother

manipulate men

please

me. them. us.

the world was gorgeous

enormous

sweet milk and luscious honey?

Not here

we boil black lakes

and wax her forests bare

winter is a mean apparatus

but summer is like a hot tongue

licking away life and love