-Evelyn Waugh
The other day I found a
package of root beer popsicles in the freezer section of the grocery
store. And before I knew it , I was 10
again, last day of school come and gone, the summer looming beyond.
Footloose and fancy free.
Free to do what I wanted. Of course, my mother had other ideas. She
bought a stack of math exercise books. My teacher said it would be a good idea.
Lucky me. Enough to last the entire
summer. Oh joy. Oh rapture.
The day after school got out, my mother went to work. I
arranged to meet my friend, Anna. I was supposed to be working on math. But I
came up with another plan. Anna agreed to do several pages of the math books,
for root beer popsicles. Her weakness.
And mine.
My mother bought them every summer. And the freezer was
loaded.
So I plied Dora with root beer popsicles and watched while
she easily got thru five or six pages. Then we were
bored.
I wasn’t supposed to leave the house. But I did anyways. All of the time. That summer
we visited the graveyard every time Anna and I got together. The graves were
old, some toppled over. We’d take turns
pretending we were a knight or a fair
princess being rescued from a fearsome dragon.
The dragon was invisible. Except to us. It hissed and spit
fire over the old grave stones
and we always escaped it’s infernal clutches. It followed us around we
imagined.
We’d walk blocks and
blocks in the summer heat, to the closest corner store. A peach cost a quarter.
And cola popsicles 15 cents. Sweet
tarts, gum balls and gummy bears packed
in small paper bags were our booty.
We’d take them down to the ocean, sit on bleached out logs and stuff our faces . We’d splash in the cool ocean wearing our
sneakers, getting soaked, shrieking at gulls who didn’t know any better.
We’d cap off our afternoon by setting up a pretend campsite at
the local schoolyard. We had a secret
place down by the swings that we’d set
up over the summer. Rocks ringed a fake fire. The ground covered with scratchy
grass and brush we’d pretend to light a fire to warm our hands, even on the
most scorching days.
Funny, how I disliked camping in later years. I loved pretend
camping back then.
We would get back to the house, so Anna could finish up the
math pages for that day. And another root beer popsicle down the hatch.
Home at the appropriate time, my mother always marveled how
studious I’d been , when she saw the math . I never told her about Anna. My
friend, who sometimes sneaked out of the basement door, as my mother was coming
in the kitchen door.
My friend of the summers, wild and free.
But I think my mother guessed, cause my shoes were always
soaking wet, smelling of ocean, my hands sticky from gumballs.
And the math books were a little too perfect. I was a TERRIBLE math student. I couldn’t figure out a math
problem if I ate ten times the root beer popsicles.
Of course, it all came to head, one summer, when Dora and I
were eating popsicles and pouring over the math books, only to look up and find
a teenage boy standing in the hallway just beyond the kitchen. We froze. He shouldn’t have been there. I recognized
him. He lived across the street.Turned out he had broken in thru the open
bedroom window.
We shrieked. He ran. He threw himself out of the window. Later
on , the police caught him stealing from the corner store we bought candy from.
He had a toy gun.
And so it all came out. The math. The graveyard. The camping .
And the reason why root beer popsicles were slowly vanishing.
From then on I had to do my own math homework. That was the
last summer Dora and I hung out like that. She moved away. I never heard from
her again.I hope wherever she went, that she remembered me.
My mother still bought root beer popsicles for me. I shared them with the fearsome dragon that hovered over my back yard, and lived in
the shed where he told me stories to dream by.
Photographs 2022
