Skip to main content

Teaser File: I Can Explain

I clearly remember the first time I looked to the right and then to the left and then straight into the inquiring eyes that were looking at me with that pained what in the world have you done expression. 

I was seven.

My brother Rodney, two years my senior, was hanging by his feet, which were duct taped to the garage rafters.  I was standing on the concrete pavers just in front of the open garage door with a half empty container of cool whip in one hand and a rubber chicken in the other.  A record player was hanging halfway out of the dormer window above the garage playing an Earth Wind and Fire album that kept skipping, repeating half the chorus of “Boogie Wonderland” over and over.  My dad pulled our station wagon into the driveway and, in dazed bewilderment, stepped outside the car and uttered those words, the words I would fatefully hear so many times in my life,

“What the hell is going on here?!”

“Dad-let me explain.” 

Because there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, there always was.  Well, that’s not true-when it involved Rodney there was a fifty fifty chance it was reasonable…..70/30...Ok, Rodney was behind a lot of the more inexplicable moments.

“Hey Bobby, bring me a book of matches.” 

Considering the options with him were usually do it or get swirlied, I usually acquiesced.  Within thirty seconds of bringing the matches to Rodney he had lit three bottle rockets on fire, then freaked out that they were lit, and pointed them into the bathroom toilet.  Did you know that toilets shatter when you shoot bottle rockets into them? Into millions of pieces? Did you know that if you had a bloody nose and dumped all of your bloody nose tissues into the toilet and what appeared to be half of a human body’s worth of blood that when the toilet shatters into a million pieces, it looks like a scene from Law and Order Special Victims Unit?  And in sprinted Dad, right on time, and there went Rodney out the basement bathroom egress window. 
“What the…”

“Hey, don’t freak out ok, let me explain.”

By the time I was twelve Dad had enough and talked mom into sending us to boarding school.  Rodney got shipped off to a boot camp type facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I was kind of relieved, thinking my days of being caught in strange, unintentional trouble were over.  But my mom, a well-meaning, but confused hippy who favored and babied me, dressed me up like a girl, doctored my birth certificate, and sent me to an all-female preparatory academy in Maine called Eden.  Despite my hopes, it was there that the biggest “I can explain ever” would take place.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Willpower Versus a Heart Change

I sat there in my car, with the engine running, for quite some time.  Staring at the phone screen.  There were so many things I wanted to say in response to the mean and underhanded text I had received.  True things.  Things that I had a right  to respond with.  Things that would have made the reader on the other end pause perhaps, and realize the stupidity or hypocrisy of what they had sent. There have been times I have responded that way-and there have been times those stinging, criticizing texts have elicited the response I was looking for.  An apology.  A put-them-in-their-place success.  There have been many more times it just made things worse.  But does it matter if it makes it worse?  I should stick up for myself, right?  I should fight for the justice in every situation, right?  I mean, I'll turn the left cheek eventually but I have some things to say while I rotate my face from one side to the other. For a ...

Our trash was meant to be taken OUT

One of my son's favorite things to do when I tell him to take out the trash is to take the bag out of the can, tie it shut, and walk it all the way to just outside the front door where he sets it on the ground, leaning up against the house, to await some magical future time when someone (else) will happen to be walking by and take it the rest of the way to the bins.  I don't know why he does this.  He knows that as soon as I see it I'm going to yell, errr "encourage", him to bring it the rest of the way, and he'll have to come back down from his room and do it right.  This has been going on for years.  He's too big and fast to spank, I just end up chasing him around until I pull a muscle.  I walked by the front door this morning after yelling, err "sternly requesting" that the kids do their chores without me telling them to (paradoxical, I know) and there were the two bags of trash from the kitchen leaning up against the house just outside the ...