My Crazy Life – A Writing Place

Listen to The Written Word

David Louis Heller

It’s a very gray day, like a forty’s black-and-white movie. I’m sitting alone in the back seat of Bennet’s large gray sedan, on the left side with my nose sometimes touching the cold glass fogged with my breath looking out through streaked lines of rain but not seeing anything but gray. Everything is gray. The low gray clouds, the mist that hangs over the never changing marshlands, broken only by the repetitive brown flash flash of telephone poles speeding past my view, and the green-brown soggy marshlands that go on forever and ever, and ever, forever.

I come out of my reverie when cousin Bennet swerves the big car sharply right to avoid something in the road and I slide with it halfway across the seat, then quickly back to the center as he straightens it out. “You Okay back there David?”

“Yeah.” I push myself back to my perch by the window, nothing’s changed out there.

But in here, Bennet’s new wife Judith turned on the radio, and the car’s dashboard speaker came to life with the happy upbeat sound of the Breakfast Club’s jingle. Good morning breakfast clubbers and how ya doin…

This is the worst day of my life and I want to hide, unplug that happy up-beat jingle and Bennet and Judith’s inane conversation from my reality so, like a frightened and sad tortoise, I pulled my legs up onto the back seat and scrunched against the car’s soft, felt upholstered door. I felt hurt and angry, and In my head I shouted at Bennet, Judy, and those happy breakfast clubbers in Chicago; “Don’t you know who she is to me? How can you be so happy. What gives you the right to be happy today while we’re driving to her funeral? But, I stuffed my words, feelings, and all my emotions down deep and out of the way. After all, I did tell her not to worry, and that I can and will take care of myself. Don’t worry Mom, I told her just a few weeks earlier.

With the side of my head resting against the felt-covered door, I listened to the repetitious thud, thud, thudding from the cement highway each time the rear tires crossed over an expansion joint. And as I listened I mentally turned down the radio’s volume, tuned out the talking from the front seat, focused my mind, and visualized the clear plastic gumdrop tree that Mom had sent me before Christmas.

What made the tree special was that she had sent it to me. And, I knew how hard it must have been for her to physically choose and place those twenty or so different colored gum drops at the ends of each clear plastic branch.

The tree was set up on a small vase table in the center of a gray winter sky-filled bay window that overlooked a bleak working-class Waterbury, Connecticut neighborhood.

It was Christmas break, and I was off from school, so spent a lot of time in that living room reading, and popping a few gumdrops into my mouth each day.

My favorite flavor was black licorice, and since there were only three, and since I was only seven years old. I ate the first two licorice gum drops immediately but then thinking ahead I stuck the remaining black licorice onto the plastic tree’s pointy trunk top.

Below it were red cherry gum drops, yellow lemon drops, orange, and green mint, scattered colorfully like fruit at the ends of every twisted clear plastic branch.

But then, after a week of nibbling, not able to resist the shiny black licorice atop a now empty gumdrop tree, I plucked it off its branch and popped it into my mouth so fast that I didn’t even have time to realize, that she was gone.

I didn’t know why I did it. I felt guilty, It was my fault. In my eight-year-old brain, I knew for sure that she had died because I had eaten the black and last gum drop, and that I was responsible.

My stomach muscles tightened as we sped down the road getting closer to “she” who wasn’t there.

[NOTE – concatenate, combine this with the above similar paragraph.

And I remembered again how I succumbed to the temptation of the candy, and how I had harvested each candy, piece by piece, for over a week, until at last, I plucked my favorite black gum drop from its clear plastic branch and I remembered too how I bravely shuddered, held back and stoically pushed away my tears and feelings. After all, I did promise her that I was strong and would take care of myself. Don’t worry mom, I had bravely told her a few weeks ago si ting at the head of her bed.

And, what a day that was.

—- flashback to her sickbed, oxygen-tent, deathbed.

PETER VANDEWATER SHORT