Summer Gaol

I’ve been teaching long enough to form a guess as to why my summer breaks fly by in the blink of an eye. I think it has something to do with free time being more conducive to big experiences that eat up days and weeks (travel, summer projects, other acts of ambitious edification.) In order to cling to summer in any way that I can, I’m trying to count each day that passes by and narrow in on something small. This will either prolong my summer or make it fly even faster (as is the case whenever I get immersed in something.) Think of it as a prison journal in the sense that I am confining myself to the small moments of the world around me, but with the distinction that I actually want to be incarcerated and for as long as possible. I hope this works. When I go back to school in August, I want to step into the blinding light and stagger for all the time I’ve been immersed in my summer break.

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Day One of Summer Break: Barton McGee is coming to the house to rip out some poison ivy and generally tidy things up in the yard. Maybe one day I’ll take some sort of personal responsibility for my own trees and flower beds. A friend tried to explain to me how much she loved gardening, and I tried very hard to step into those feelings and try them on for size. For a brief moment I could imagine the pleasure of keeping something alive and playing in the dirt. A little bit of labor and the reward. But my life isn’t currently conducive to having “pets” right now. If it were, I’d have another dog.

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Barton just texted me with all thumbs that his mother’s knee locked up. She had fallen three “qeeks” ago and he needed to go “Ndchexk” on her. The weeds and ivy have won this round.

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Day Two: There’s a little coffee shop just down the road from my house that has over the past fifty or sixty years been a myriad of businesses. Working backwards in time, it’s been a popsicle shop, a video rental place—some other businesses I know nothing about—finally back to its origin as a fuel station and mechanic. I like to sit at a bistro table by the biggest window where once was the great rolling door that admitted cars. The floors are the original concrete. In the bathroom is a bricked in, recessed archway indicating an old entrance. My insecure self still envisions someone coming in through that brick wall by way of some inexplicable knob and hinge. I see it happening at my most vulnerable moment.“Hey! Occupado, buddy!” I would yell, rather than reacting to his supernatural ability to reactivate old door ways. I think that would be a good, weird super power. Must remember that one when next engaged in awkward small talk. To go through any wall that used to have a door. People would think it was the same old passing through walls, but no. Much more specific and useless. New buildings would be my kryptonite.

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Day Four: “And what was the best part of your day yesterday,” the barista asked me.

“My what?”

It came right after the question of my milk preference and in the same tone, and as he asked he was punching buttons on his till, as if he was going to input my answer as part of my drink order. Then he rested his elbow on the pastry case like, “You’re not getting your drink until you tell me.”

Well. Yesterday we celebrated my birthday even though my actual birthday is later in the week. A few months ago I bought a record player, and last night I got my first two records. I had to get a friend to show me how to actually play them, even though I grew up in a house with a decent music system. I had never actually learned how to work the arm or where to place the needle. One of my earliest childhood memories was cranking the knob on my parents’ stereo to 100 and then pushing a series of buttons till there was a great explosion and I was knocked backwards by “The Bear Necessities.” I remember my dad running into the room with his hands clasped over his ears. The brief trudging in place against the rippling sound waves of Phil Harris’ booming voice. From then on the music was put high up in the literal sense. Even now I have to get a step ladder to access my parents’ stereo at the very top of the entertainment center.

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Day Five: Today is Memorial Day, which, by some people’s accounts, has its roots here in Mississippi. At least, we’re one of five or six Southern states that makes that claim. It’s an issue of who decorated the graves of their fallen soldiers first. Ladies in Columbus, MS paid homage to both Union and Confederate soldiers “a day earlier” than a handful of women in Columbus, GA. But it’s just as possible that other people were doing the same thing even earlier and in other places. Its official start is as fluid as the date the holiday lands on every year. I was born on Memorial Day, but this year my birthday lands on National Flip Flop Day (for those who celebrate.)

Right now it’s raining, but somehow we’re going to grill hamburgers. Currently I’m thinking about the massive hole in the roof of my shed. The neighbor has taken full responsibility for the dead tree that broke off in a recent gust of wind and created a hole just big enough for me to drop through. He sent a crew over on Thursday and now, after cutting away all the old rot, almost half of the roof is gone. It’s a gaping maw drinking in the rain that my weather app says will continue for five days.

I’m not terribly worried about it. The part that would be ruined is already half destroyed by nature and a century of disuse. At the very back of the shed are the remnants of a bathroom, the vent pipe and curled up fragments of linoleum and an orange ring of rust where a commode used to sit. A random, hidden water closet installed at the back of a toolshed. A little brick path that leads from the shed to the house’s kitchen. The era in which my house was built gives me a rough idea of what this separate bathroom was meant for. I’ve read The Help. Its setting is here in Jackson. The mother of Mae Mobley lives by the “separate but equal” mantra and has a bathroom installed away from the house for her maid, Aibileen. In the novel, that house and its separate bathroom are on Devine Street. I live on Devine Street.

That part of history is a little more definitively rooted in Mississippi. The question of who did what earlier in time is painful to unveil. Like peeling back the rot.

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Day Six: Today is my birthday. I’m 41. Over pancakes my parents and I marveled at all my ancestors’ untimely deaths. Typical pancake talk. I’m always a bit impressed by how very nearly I didn’t exist. Two civil wars, two world wars, one revolution, and one streetcar. Every generation spared not by a guardian angel but by the birth of a child.

It seemed appropriate to acknowledge that, despite their best efforts, I have managed to end one branch of the Bannerman line by never being a parent to more than a black lab. It sort of feels like dropping an ancient vase and it shattering beyond repair. “Your grandfather’s brother had no children, either,” Mom reminded me. Neither of my parents have ever given me a moment’s guilt about not giving them grandchildren. An impressive feat here in the Deep South. “Have you ever been to Grand Cane, Louisiana?” Dad asked. That’s where his dad grew up. “You should go out there sometime. See if the old house is still there.” That’s his method of consolation. Take your childless freedom and go do something with it. I plan to go there this summer. A little homage paid to the ancestors.

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Day Seven: Last night as we were doing duck walks (painful but also undignified), I thought I’d try my luck and tell our coach that it was my birthday. I figured that would mean we would have to do fewer duck walks. Also I thought maybe one didn’t have to always be so coy about birthdays. I’d always prided myself on being discrete about aging up ever since I was seven-years-old and decided to tell the old lady next door, “Good morning” rather than, “Guess what, it’s my birthday.” I thought that was the grown up thing to do since all adults I knew tried to keep that sort of thing a secret. Miracle of miracles, she asked me. Looking back, that sort of makes sense. That’s one of the questions you ask a kid when trying to keep a conversation going. Birthday, favorite subject in school, and, “Who is that on your shirt?” But at the time I took that to mean that God was rewarding me, pleased with my discretion. Last night I threw it all out the window. In my stew of sweat, I hollered out that it was my birthday. In response Coach led the whole class in “Happy Birthday to You,” except everyone else was in the middle of duck walking and were exhausted. For half the song he was the only one singing until he yelled out, “If you people don’t start singing I will kick every one of you in the face!” Then began this droning, panting dirge that sounded like something from a chain gang.

“What was your favorite part about yesterday?” that same barista asked me this morning. Leaving the gym. Duck walking right out of that place and quietly escaping the resentment of forced singing.