Ladder Skills

        When I was around six or seven years old, my father was still building our house. It looked kind of like a house from the outside, but there were still a lot of things missing.  We had windows, but no interior doors. We had floors but no interior walls, and no stairs anywhere.  We got in the front door by way of a stack of cement blocks, piled neatly with their open ends up, holes filled with sand.  Ladies who wore heels complained a lot about those steps when they came to visit us.  We got from the main floor of the house to the basement by way of an 8 foot rung ladder. 

One summer day I was wandering around our house looking for something to do.  My mom was outside, doing laps around the house with my sister Veronica in the stroller, and my sister Bernadette holding onto the stroller practicing her walking skills.  My dad was at the back door of the house, in his shorts, t-shirt and work boots, fitting and installing the door sill.  There was nothing for me to do.  I decided to play in the cellar.  I loved our cellar.  It had no floor yet, and so it was full of sand. It was a lot like being at the beach in your own home, and if you ran around a lot down there, you could also make a dust fog that we kids thought was great, but the parents HATED.  I went to where the cellar stairs were going to be, and I carefully turned around and lowered down one foot at a time to meet the round rungs of the ladder. I held the edge of the floor with my hands and backed down a step. I was familiar with this process - I had already done it dozens of times.

I must have fiddled around too much with my feet. Suddenly, the part of the ladder that had been leaning on the floor I had just left was no longer there.  It must have sunk down just far enough into the sand so that it was no longer tall enough to lean on the floor above.  I felt the ladder tilt away from my now dangling feet... I saw it in slow motion… falling, falling... until Pfit!  It landed with a soft thud and puff of dust in the sand below.  Luckily, my hands were still in contact with the floor. I looked down at the ladder lying uselessly on the sand far beneath me, and then I looked up at my hands above me, grasping at the flat floor I had just stepped off of, and I did the only thing I could think of..

“DADDYDADDYDADDY!!!I screamed for my dad.  I heard him drop his tools at the other end of the house and come running. It took him literally 3 steps to get to me. I counted them… ONE and he was almost though the kitchen, all the way from the back door, TWO and he was halfway through the playroom - almost there! THREE and he was crouching low in front of the stairwell and lifting me up by the wrists. He placed me gently back on the floor.  

“Are you ok?” he asked me. He knew I was. He knew that I was just scared because I had hung off the edge of the world for a second. I shook my head, yes, yes, I was ok. 

Years and years later, I asked him, “Dad, do you remember that time the ladder fell out from underneath me when I was going down into the basement?”  

“OH yeah,” he said.  

“I just remember that it only took you like, 3 steps to get there,” I told him.  

“Kids yell all the time,” he said, “but sometimes…” 

“Yes,” I said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

That day, I just remembered that my dad had gone back to his work, and I went outside and found my mom and told her the story, but I always thought to myself, 'Wow, I never realized how fast Daddy could run.'

My Bra's Maiden Voyage

      Is is any wonder middle school kids are so stressed?  Even things like wearing a bra to school for the first time can stress them out.  Be kind to those little devils - the little bumps on life's path are hard for them.  A while back, a writing teacher of mine asked the class to jot down 25 memories and then expand them into memoir pieces.  Here's one of my funnier memories.

My Bra’s Maiden Voyage

  Madeline and I shared a trapezoid-shaped desk in the exact center of my 6th grade class.  Mr. Kogler, our teacher, sat just two desks in front of us, his curly head bowed as he wrote in his grade book while we worked. He was paying minimal attention to us, but it was still pretty quiet for a group of 6th graders, as everyone was silently writing. Or so it appeared.  Most likely, a good portion of us were silently agonizing over what to write next.  I leaned back in my chair and glanced around the room.  Our school was built according to the open classroom model, with four very large “houses,” each divided by partitions into smaller areas we referred to as classrooms.  Sometimes, if someone had a friend in the next classroom over, they would sneak their hand through the partition into the next room to pass a note.  Kids would sometimes throw things, or pull things over that had slipped too far under the dividers. A small bookshelf made the wall in the front, left corner of the room.  Since ours was a corner classroom, in addition to the wall with the window and chalkboard behind Mr. Kogler at the front of the class, we had part of a wall on the right side too; beyond that was a room of lockers.   

Madeline, who sat to my left, kept looking at me.  Uh oh, I didn’t like that look.  When she got that look, it meant she was going to say something, and usually when Madeine said  something, it was something obnoxious or at the very least, annoying.  She talked to everyone and everyone knew her, but she didn’t consider all of them her friends.  I, however, was graced with her friendship.  She had committed her time and attention to helping me “come out of my shell.”  How did I get so lucky?  Wait… she was looking at my chest.  I was wearing a bright orange shirt with a sequined dancing girl on the front.  Although my shirt was kind of flashy, I was pretty sure she was not staring at it because she loved it - she was more into nautical stripes. Her blonde eyebrow lifted noticeably under her reddish-blonde cowlick.  She leaned back in her chair and said quietly, but smugly, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were wearing a bra under that shirt… It really looks like you’re wearing one…” 

  “That’s because I AM wearing one,” I whispered back. I gave her a smug look of my own.  Apparently according to the Rule Book of Madeline, I should have told her about this news, firstly since we were friends, and secondly, since this was my first public appearance in, as my own mother called it, an “over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder.”  Besides, much as I HATED the idea of having to wear a bra, I knew she’d be jealous, and after all the ribbing I took from her on a daily basis, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to annoy her just a bit in return.  For some odd reason, she thought having boobs was cool.  

“I’m going to tell the whole class…” 

I cut her off in mid-sentence. “You better not!  I’ll kill you!!” I tried to look threatening, but Madeline wasn’t threatened by much.  Not only did she model herself after a bizarre character I’d never before heard of named Pippy Longstocking, but she had tried to shove  me in her closet the first time I had been to her house.  “GET IN THERE WITH THE DEAD PEOPLE!” she had yelled until I really started to think she was crazy, and not just annoying.  Afterwards she laughed and said, You really started getting scared for a second, didn’t you?"  

She caught the eye of Daryl, who was siting just even with us at the long bank of tables further to our left. Daryl could be obnoxious, too at times, but he seemed a bit more savvy of his audience.  He knew when to shut up.  “Guess what?” She said to him, “I’ve got something to tell you…”  She KNEW I would hate this - telling girls was one thing, but telling a BOY?  It reminded me of the time in 5th grade music class; we were divided into two rows of chairs facing each other, boys on one side, girls on the other.   One day while I was minding my own business sitting with my friends on the girls side of the classroom, boys were laughing and pointing at me and I didn’t know.  Toward the end of class, it dawned on me…  I looked down at my brown corduroys to discover with horror that the fly of my pants unzipped and my bright white underwear was exposed.  Now here we were, a year later, and in addition to Daryl, Debbie and Andrea too looked up from their papers, ready to hear a juicy tidbit that would break the monotony of English class.  Madeline glanced back at me again.  She was undeterred.

“You’d better not!” I said and glared at her with my most fearsome, but obviously ineffective stare.  “I’ll kill you,” I muttered. 

She turned away from me and leaned towards them conspiratorially, “Melinda’s wearing a BRA!”

“Oh GOD,” Daryl said, let down by the banality of it all. “Shut up, Madeline.” He shook his head at and smirked at her, then went back to work.  The girls, too, went back to their writing and Madeline looked at me triumphantly - she had broken the news to the public.  I’d been outed.  I went back to working on my essay in a solid attempt to dismiss her, but when I leaned forward she reached behind me to grab my bra strap and SNAP it loudly.  

“Cut it OUT!” I said, as loudly as I could without drawing too much attention from Mr. Kogler.  Behind her back, Daryl rolled his eyes sympathetically, but it hardly seemed to matter.  Madeline had struck again.