Sock it to 'em.

Considering I was a pretty rough and tumble kid, I find it surprising I didn’t get my first set of stitches until 1987, when I was eight years old and in the third grade.

It was early in the school year at St. James Catholic School in Decatur, Illinois. (My little brother and I shuttled to Decatur to go to this school instead of the farm school closer to us because, my all day-working parents were enticed by the school’s all day-kindergarten program.) Getting to school early that morning, my brother and I climbed up onto one of the concrete platforms that flanked the big stairs leading to the grandiose entryway of school. Over my uniform of a navy blue jumper that had secret shorts under the skirt on account I seemed to have my feet over my head at least fifteen times a day and a light blue, button-down, neatly collared shirt; I wore a grey, acid wash denim jacket from which I’d painstakingly peeled the Rainbow Bright decorations I’d suddenly grown too old to endure. It was draped lazily off of my shoulders. I was an expert on how tough kids wore their jackets because I watched “21 Jump Street.” I knew the only accessories that would complete this outfit and tell the world I was a total bad-ass were lace fingerless gloves. I didn’t have any of those, so I’d taken a pair of my dad’s tube socks, cut five holes in the ends of each, and shoved my arms into them. They were pretty big socks, dad-sized and white with bands of yellow and blue at the tops. I’d wrongly anticipated that my thumbs would be right about where the heels were, resulting in a big wad of the sock positioned in the palm of my hand while my fingers poked through the small holes along the seam. Whatever. It was good enough, and none of it mattered, because the day before, I'd seen “Who’s That Girl?” starring Madonna.

The movie’s story revolved around a street-wise smart aleck, Nikki Finn (Madonna). Nikki wore skin-tight animal print dresses, high heels, and a leather bomber jacket. She sported bright red lipstick and a platinum blonde, bobbed hair-cut that was kind of curly. She laughed a lot, did what she wanted with a carefree attitude, and had a pet cougar that she walked around on a studded leash. Add the generic 80s plot of, ‘despite her great attitude and plucky charm, she gets mixed up with some bad dudes who are hunting her down for something they think she did, but she’s always one step ahead of them,’ mixed with the blossoming of an unlikely romance, and you had the movie equivalent of crack cocaine to an eight year old girl’s brain. I don’t remember specifics from the movie, but I do remember immediately after I watched it, I ran out to the tree in our back yard and climbed up to the top. Sitting up there, I felt charged and excited, and I decided that I would be a bad-ass just like Nikki Finn from that moment on. Then, I looked down and saw my brother come outside. I fished around in my pocket for a peanut and shoved it into the new vacancy left by a tooth I’d just lost and hurried down the tree to play a joke on him.

So, my brother and I were up on the concrete platform by the stairs before school, and I remembered that I was supposed to be a total bad-ass. So, I jumped up and down and made like I was boxing my brother. Right jab, left hook, shuffle step, shuffle step. Jake whined at me to STOP IT, which, in the tradition of older sisters, only encouraged me to do it with more voracity. Well, at that point, I right jabbed, left hooked, and then shuffle stepped right off the platform landing directly onto my chin on the stairs below. Dazed, I opened my eyes to a LOT of blood pouring from my face onto the stairs. I started to cry. An older kid, who was often nice to me and named Greg, led me to the teachers’ lounge where I was cleaned up by the nurse and got to lie on the couch and drink a can of coke while she called my mom to take me to the emergency room. I ended up with five stitches that I thought kind of smelled like Cheerios, and I got grounded for ruining a perfectly good pair of my dad's socks.

Two weeks later on the playground at recess, my best friend, Heather McKay, hit me in the face with a baseball bat.




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Closet Hamm's.

The first time I drove a car was when I was about seven years old. Sitting on the seat, I couldn’t even reach the pedals of my grandma’s ’84 Chevy Citation. So, I had to push the front bench seat all the way back and kind of stand on the floorboard, bending my scabby knees and arching my back into a lazy S shape, gripping the steering wheel, and standing on tip-toe to see over the dash, all while trying to operate the gas and brake. This was how I’d practiced it, so this is how I was going to do it.

My grandmother was a woman who kept three cases of Hamms and Meister Brau in her bedroom closet. She only drank half a can at a time about once every two weeks or so. Often, she would pour me about a quarter of the can into a small glass, but only when we had spaghetti. So, she was far from being a drunk. But, she let a seven year old, scabby-kneed, gap-toothed girl who often cracked wise and had dirt under her fingernails to drive her car, because she needed to smash the hulls of the walnuts she’d gathered from the tree at the way other end of the creek. You see, walnuts fresh off the tree are these green and brown warty bulbs. The hard hulls encase the shell that encases the nut. When you touched them, they’d leave a swipe of bright green on you. I would often rub some on my hands and arms because I loved the smell, kind of citrus-y and very sharp. The hulls were tough, thick and messy, and it took a LOT of effort to peel them from the shells. So, my grandma decided that it would be better to just take the buckets she’d gathered and dispense their contents up and down her driveway and slowly drive the car back and forth over them, breaking the hulls but not the shells. To me, this idea qualified my grandmother as pretty much the smartest person in the world.

Standing in front of the garage with her arms folded, she watched me struggle with shifter. “You gotta press the the brake ALLLL the way down,” she hollered. As I whispered to myself, “you gotta press the brake ALLL the way down,” I grasped the steering wheel, pressing my chest against it, and stomped down on the brake with all my might, finally managing to fumble the shifter into R. “Now, let off the brake SLOWLY, but keep your foot on it,” she yelled, arms crossed. “..now, let off the brake SLOWLY, but keep your foot on it…” I whispered inside the car, looked down, and let my toe off the brake. The car lurched back, scaring me, so I stomped my foot back down on the brake and looked over the dash through the dirty windshield at her. My grandmother was furrowing her brow. I could tell it was because of me and not the sun, because her glasses had turned dark by this point. For a second, I was scared she wasn’t going to let me do it anymore, and I couldn't believe how sweaty my hands were. “It’s ok, just let the car rollllllll back.” Again, I repeated her instruction inside the car as I wiped my hands down the sides of my jeans one at a time. I let off the brake and the car rolled, just like she said it would. Keeping my toe on the brake this time, I felt more in control. I was smiling a big gap-toothed smile at her, she laughed and said, “DON’T LOOK AT ME, LOOK BEHIND YOU!” I swiveled my head around and could only see the top of the big oak tree down at the end of the driveway through the back window. But, I could feel and hear the steady whup whup whup of the walnut hulls bursting under me as the car slowly rolled over them.

When, I reached the end of the drive, she waved her hands to get my attention, “Put the car in drive and just let the car ROLLLLLLLL forward back to me!” Into the hot air inside the car, I mouthed those words as I’d heard them and pressing on the brake with all my might and more confidence than before, I shifted the stick to D and let off the brake. The car rolled forward. This was easier, because I didn’t have to look behind me and could see out of the front. With a newfound casualness, I sent the green and brown bulbs to bursting under me, though, more intermittent now. As I rolled to the threshold of the garage door, I eased my toe onto the brake and put the shift in P. Grandma said, “Thanks, kiddo!” and opened the driver door. I hopped out, and she pulled the car the rest of the way into the garage.

We gathered up all the nuts in the driveway. Just as she’d predicted, it worked perfectly, and I still think this is the most practical application of a car. I still have no idea why she didn't get in the car with me as I was doing this. I mean, sure, she was always pushing me to be my own person and would often make me figure things out on my own, buuuut, ultimately, I think she just wanted to see the hulls exploding, because...well, it probably looked pretty cool.


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