(The Meat and Potatoes of Life)
This week, a large box containing a desk chair arrived on our porch. Once the chair was removed, I hesitated a moment before stomping the humongous thing flat for recycling.
“Should I keep this big box for something?” I wondered.
A joystick in my brain moved, dropping an open claw down onto a pile of old memories, retrieving one after several failed attempts.
It was fall in the 1970s, and my brother, Tray, scored two large truck inner tubes. Back then, any kid who found shopping carts, large boxes or truck inner tubes was king for the day.
After lunch, Tray and his middle school friend, Tracy, disappeared to hatch a plan for the tubes while I trotted up the hill to play in the neighbor’s playhouse.
Our hill had woods at the top and a road at the bottom. Starting from the tree line, the hill sloped steadily downward, flattening out at the neighbor’s property, then dropping steeply toward a barrier of blue spruces behind the house on the road.
I was lost in pretend play, when suddenly, there was a knock on the playhouse door.
“Hey, Lisa! C’mere! Wanna do something fun with me and Tracy?!”
My brother and his friends wanted nothing to do with little sisters like me, but I was gullible, so I threw the baby doll I was nurturing into the spider-webbed corner and ran out the door. “Whaddya wanna do?!” I yelled excitedly.
Tracy and Tray lead me to the inner tubes, which were lashed side by side with twine. “Lisa, if you climb inside the tubes,” my brother said, “we’ll roll you down the hill and it’ll be really fun!”
I couldn’t hear the alarm bells going off. All I knew is that my big brother finally wanted to play with me.
I climbed into the center hole, gripping the metal valves like handles just as they instructed. With my chin on my chest and my legs criss-crossed, I fit snugly into the tiny space. Assuring me that the ride would be better than the Scrambler at the County Fair, they shoved me off down the hill.
During the first few rotations, I squealed with excitement. But then, I reached the sharp drop off after the neighbors’ property, and the tubes spun wildly with sudden acceleration.
Undulations in the grass sent the tubes airborne, causing them to elongate into ovals on impact. My teeth clacked. My initial squeals of delight turned into breathy screams of terror, and then into the silence of survival mode.
From my cramped vantage point, I saw flashes of blue sky, the approaching spruces, and Tray and Tracy screaming down the hill after me.
To save myself from certain disaster, I let a foot pop out and catch the grass. My wheel of terror flipped like a quarter in a coin toss, then teetered to a stop just before the spruces. The entire universe spun around me.
Soon, Tracy’s silhouette appeared against the blue sky above me. “Lisa! Lisa! Are you OK?!” Tracy panted.
I survived that harebrained scheme, but would go on to experience many others, involving locked closets, tying our dog to a sled, umbrella “parachutes,” sliding down banisters and climbing trees.
When I had my own children, I thought our advanced society with its modern safety regulations, vast parenting resources and improved threat awareness would surely save our children from the dangerously idiotic behaviors I engaged in so long ago.
As I flattened the big box on my porch, the claw grasped another memory.
It was late 2009, and we lived at the bottom of Vermont Strasse on Patch Barracks in Germany. I was taking trash to the dumpsters, when I saw them: Our two daughters, in an abandoned commissary shopping cart, careening down the hill toward me.
I didn’t yell, intervene or call an ambulance. I simply said a little prayer that no one would break an arm or chip a tooth, I accepted the natural order of things and I realized that some things would never change.
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Read more at themeatandpotatoesoflife.com and in Lisa’s book, “The Meat and Potatoes of Life: My True Lit Com.” Email: meatandpotatoesoflife@gmail.com
