Our teacher Jonathan reminds me of my step-dad. Both tumbled out of the Punk Rock era, are on their third marriage, are sweet and a little goofy and are warm yet professional with hungry light eyes tucked behind glasses. It puts me at ease. It’s like having Mike around.
He gives us these funny assignments that feel silly at first but get the wheels turning. Often in strange ways I wouldn’t have come to all alone. One of the first games is to make a list of things you loath and pick the favorite on the list. I chose birthdays. Then he tells us to write a page from the perspective of someone who loves this thing that you loath. I’ve decided maybe I will post some of these assignments, these tid bits I’ve been working on. So here goes…..
Birthdays
She’d started wearing suits to school in the 3rd grade. Tailor made by her grandmother and paid for (because she insisted on paying) with her lemonade stand money. It was around that time that she started ordering her Shirley Temples in martini glasses and stealing tampons from beneath her sister’s bathroom sink, though she had no use for them. At her tenth birthday she filled the piñata with nail files and condoms she’d taken from her older brother’s bed-side drawer, her mother’s collection of red lipstick, pencils, and tiny agendas she’d bought by the shelf load at the 99 cent store. The clerk laughed when she counted out twenty two dollars and seventy seven cense in pennies and dimes she’d carried in her mother’s old purse. Lemonade was becoming big business on the corner of Las Palmas and Camino De Estrella.
At twenty five she was still going around telling people she was twenty five and three quarters. She had one of those cartoon calendars that allow you to rip the pages off each day. She took great pride in crumpling them up into a ball and throwing them into the trash with a squeal. One day closer to twenty six. Soon enough she’d be thirty and before long forty. Then she would arrive in real womanhood. At forty she could picture herself as the most esteemed lawyer at Middleston and Middleston, going to lavish parties in the evenings, working as phone sex operator at night for extra cash. A dirty secret she couldn’t wait to possess.