Shades
of Yellow
Haziness
toyed with me. I was hazed to days. It vexed me. During the summer of
1970, give or take a month, a sunny morning or a silhouette's shade,
I woke often to see leaf shapes on my window shade. The walls were
painted a soft blended yellow that gave the room a false sense of
security. The room was mine and my sister's and fit at the east end
of the house. The window above my sister's bed looked out to the
backyard. She saw the garage and the alley, possibly the dog house
and lilac bushes on the periphery. At the foot of my bed, nestled,
inches from a closet, was the window that hatched my most malicious
operations. It was the window to my five-year-old soul. It was the
window through which I escaped a babysitter's valiant attempt at
discipline, perhaps in practice for her anticipation of 20 years to
impending motherhood. Its height and I were immeasurable, its width
to me was discernible, with a wood grainy sill like soft tan
sandpaper that invites one to touch it. My window was my first look
to the world each day, our narrow Avenue of suburbia on which balls
were thrown twixt blocks, within yards, to be caught in tan gloves
that smelled like leather belts.
My
older sister was deep in school competition. Central Elementary would
feel my monster tiny feet cross its threshold that fall. With my new
school supplies I'd cross past the heavy green doors. I was not wild
about rules, and probably would have made an acceptable anarchist.
(Although as may folks and the DFL proved, democracy works
sometimes). I played by my own rules. Most kids do—or did. I look
in to look out that window in my first, and last, shared bedroom. I
look from my mind now and see that lawless five-year-old, that
crew-cropped hatchet chopper of plants, that curious agent of bucolic
upsets.
She
had grown sunflowers to the left of my window. Susan took great pride
in her class project, standing by her plants, nurturing them with
love and water and the sunshine their name could not pull from the
sky. She had the makings of a farmer, with her two years over me and
inches and allegiance to the lessons of school and nature. She read
directions. She took directions and, at age seven, believed the
writers of those directions should never be questioned, least of all
by her. She loved me like a biological brother, I loved her like a
sister, but the reality was similar traits were more at odds than
most siblings. I was adopted and it showed not only in appearances,
but in actions. Most of the time, though, we found common ground. For
the most part, we were peaceful and respected each other's space. I
trusted her two years more of knowledge, time spent reading, doing
math and things I never slowed down to do.
Mornings
in Richfield, on our little slice of Aldrich Avenue, cardinals sang
and crows screeched like orphaned banshees. I ruffled my tan fluffy
blanket and sprang up in bed, anxious to unleash the mischievous
possibilities a new day brings. Outside, an almost-still-born breeze
commands the 6' sunflower to intrude out to my window pane...intrude
out to my window pane...intrude out to my window pane...day after
day, morning after morning, crow after murderous crow to feign what
can and test how a kid's too sane. My sis slept in the trundle from
under my bed, up-righted and on the other side of the room. It was on
wheels and inched in unperceptive millimeters horizontally on the
hardwood floor. Across its ends was also a spring, reaching, skimming
the floor. She writhed and sent shock waves from end to end like a
seismograph machine. A plot was a foot.
It
was not vindication for a past offense. It was not jealousy. Maybe it
was the intrusion on “my window,” my space in that mutually
impaired room. And, perhaps if she had grown her sunflowers under her
own window, if she had not left mine open to temptation, if she had
not obscured the sun with brightness of yellow peddled black beehive
patterns, I might not have ever been moved to destroy them. So all I
can say is that resentment, politics, territory, imminent domains may
have been working in subterranean realms.
It
happened one August evening. The day had been hot and humid, the kind
where the kids on the block, myself included, run down to the corner
chasing the ice cream truck. In daylights the merry wind-up music
tinkles and out of the last tiny hair in your ear, above play noise,
the sound of drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches for sale perforates
everything. My plot was thickening like the aversion to rules that
conquered my mind. And like that sandwich in the August heat, it
would soon melt with each hatchet chop. Dinner had just concluded and
I passed on dessert, which itself raised suspicion. I slipped
cat-like to my side of the room, grabbed the hatchet I had stashed
earlier in the closet, opened the window just enough to my a clean
break, and rolled into the night. I fell to the ground, narrowly
missing the well that enclosed a basement window, and went to work.
For a moment I stood and listened to the warm breeze, the crickets
keeping time and, of course, the sways of the plants. My bearings
held fast telling me I was between the bosom of my adoptive family
and my neighbors and forgiveness could be found.
CHOP!
CHOP! CHOP! .. . stalks of shrapnel flew in to the darkening space.
I felled one stalk, hearing it rustle to earth like a dead luminary,
a toppled idol that had dreamed past its boundaries. I felled a few
more of the sunny tribe and went in for the big kill. Without
hesitation I jackknifed my logistics and I was on top of that main
leaf. I was looking down into our room. Nothing had changed. I was no
bigger.
I aborted Operation Sunflower
with the main flower head held high, its leaf trimmed, intact as well
as any dignity five years can collect.
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