October 13th, 2008 lindalarson
by Linda Larson
It is the nature of the watermelon to be good-natured, sweet-natured and to bring out the best in everyone except for boys ages 11 to 17. Watermelon boys are good natured themselves, but bad boys all the same. Have you ever heard of the watermelon wars?
I have known watermelon boys to tie a big-bellied simpleton of a plough-striped melon to the IC railroad tracks and wait for hours in the hot, wet night of a Mississippi July for that midnight special (yes, the same Midnight Special that Leadbelly sung about) to bust its guts.
Busting melons is a sport usually confined to neat, tidy places for the most part…Sunday morning church sidewalks where women in bright dresses and delicate high heel sandals, frail little shoes on half-naked feet, try not to slip in the shiny, slick juice of the thousand-eyed hapless guts of melon.
Seed spitting is all right…except it turns into target practice with chunks of sweet, red pulp bursting like blood and gore (the movie kind) across the white butterfly sundresses of sister’s party friends.
Into every lap a little watermelon must fall.
In the late evenings, when only the master bedroom had an air conditioner, Dad would feed slightly too-large pieces into and around the general vicinity of my mother’s mouth.
Papaw grew watermelons; he always had a truckload going to market any day in July or August. That’s why he grew them, to take him to the air-conditioned barroom he always stopped in on the way back home. He would sit at the bar where he would salt down a cold glass of beer like a man taming a bird, and show all of us cousins who got picked to go to market with him, his Wings of Victory silver dollar.
That was my same Papaw who wrote my name in a golden-meated (an experiment for the watermelon industry) melon when it first formed on the vine, and on my birthday I would be presented melon cum laude with the words Pretty Linda, Sweet Linda or even one summer Magpie Linda.
We would play Red Light, Green Light-Hope To See A Ghost tonight, around the house every clear summer’s night. Unless we churned fresh peaches into ice cream, we would have a watermelon party each evening.
Watermelon and a swim made for a party night. Too young for urges or purposes, cold watermelon rubbed on my face and shoulders or on my young, long throat between dips in the pond let me know that someone liked me.
People that ate watermelon with a fork instead of with a shaker of salt and a knife, had a long way to get by me on any topic whatsoever.
They were the people I would let ride my gray, placid-looking Tennessee Walker named Thunder out of spite.
The colder your Daddy or Uncle could get the watermelon by icing it down (forget fitting it into the fridge), the more they would horse around pretending to brag on each other. How cold was it? was the question of the hour. The answer something like “Colder that a ditchdiggers butt in Idaho.”
Between my four cousins, their cousins and our buddies there was almost a birthday a week. ..we’d have fireworks. Then Uncle Will, Uncle Jewel, Uncle Carl, Papaw, and my Dad would have us kids heaven-bound with excitement. Skyrockets, roman candles, slow burning black snakes, poppers (which would explode with a bang if flung down on pavement) and lit sparklers which even the youngest child could hold in hand and write in silver stars on the dark blue night. A homely display by big city standards but oh so beautiful to us children. Pyrotechnics came after the water melon and set us kids off into spinning like pinwheels around and around the house in the night…pursuing fireflies and each other. We were too excited to play games-we were just going wild with happiness at what light can be.
None of us kids turned out happy and well-adjusted and grateful like our folks were. We all ended up alone, or crazy in some kind of way. A few of us died in car wrecks in our teens or in Viet Nam.
All of us youngsters were taught to believe in marriage and family and now almost without exception- everyone of us has been through at least one divorce.
But we all have watermelon songs-mine is Sam Cooke’s “She Was Only Sixteen” with “Finger Popping Time” as a close second.
We are in agreement that we were blessed because at least for a time we lived in innocence, before heartbreak set in. And that it was a lucky thing that we, who as children got excited about cold watermelon and red light, green light after supper, were not kids whose imaginations had been looted, as so many children’s are.
Words themselves are like furrows in our minds turning over the old dark soil of memory into the light of now…a mouthful of cold, briskly pink melon can summon up a whole lifetime of summers. The legacy? A remarkable fondness for mouthfuls of summer.
And like old songs bring back the faces of once-adored, vivid visages and the seemingly endless hopefulness of being young, the frantic song of late-summer crickets and fingers sticky with watermelon wine bring back to me, very close to my heart, the stilled laughter and the faraway adolescent tenderness of a world that is gone.
Songs on the radio, and small, chilly bites of iced watermelon let me into that world again for brief flashes of time, and the children of my friends permit me and the ghosts which only I can see, to settle at the fringes of every grassy circle where moths and fireflies dust off memories of that sweet intoxication, Mississippi in July.
© Linda Larson 2004
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October 13th, 2004 lindalarson
(Written in 1990)
By Linda Larson
When I smoke cocaine a light goes on in my bloodstream, in my innermost region, a light goes on. It is the brilliant cold morning light of winter, chilling me like a teardrop of glass. The Snow Queen splinters one’s eyes with shards of ice, turning everything cold and snowlit with exhilaration. Then the talking begins, the quick disjointed confidences of swift, disjointed lives meeting headlong and head on in the clouds of smoke and the passing of the pipe.
Suddenly, light is everywhere. In a black cup of coffee we meet as at a railway station in a blizzard after a long parting.
You are wearing a different coat than I remember, there are more lines around your eyes and you grow thinner with each hit of the pipe, but it is that beloved face; those familiar arms, the caring, strong hands and your black and blue smile, your eyes of midnight, that prizefighter gaze for an instant that tells me you are my champion, my oldest, wisest friend, my father, brother and more than that, my lover husband that is lost with me in a cloud of smoke that flames out in an instant, leaving us remote.
The smoke disappears and we are at the railway station in the darkness of early morning, our train unmet, alone and cast off in ragged clothes with ragged eyes…the light has gone out and we are strangers camping with only an empty pipe for warmth. And everything has been spent of and on the moment. We are bankrupt with nothing to share and nothing of our own but the hunger and ache for the light. Our horses have been left untied and have run away and we are barefoot in the snow with no footprints to lead us home. We climb into the big bed and nest in each other’s arms without any light or warmth left in our hearts…only the dark refuge of each other. That in our crimes we have spent even ourselves and our love on this momentary spark that goes out when the money runs out. The candle glow of our human hearts is snuffed out by the lightning flash of the drug, and the smoke that billows around our heads carries with it in its passing our dreams and hopes and gratitude for this life. And with only the aching we retire, more than bankrupt, less than murdered, we lie in a risk gone bad.
Food gives no nourishment, beauty has lost its dazzle, flesh and blood becomes an irritation…our only yearning is to disappear like the smoke in a memory of what peace is, in a memory of that sunlight blaring in the bloodstream, that whisper and cry for more.
What is left in the embrace, that behind the smoke billowing in the shadowed room are two hearts that beat as one and that we live. For this, O Christ, I thank you. We have made the journey towards your light once again and returned into the humble, breath of midnight…cold and ghostlike, we have returned from the journey once again and found each other.
Trust is gone and in its place remains a knowledge and a dread that we are doomed to try again to capture light and lose each other in smoke-filled corridors of time. We are junkies. We are chasing death and my greatest fear is that you will get there first, abandoning me to live in the tattered ribbons of daylight without you…that you will catch the light and be gone like the smoke goes, to some place I cannot follow…and there will be no one to hold the match up and shield my eyes as I hold the pipe up to my lips. You will be gone at midnight in a puff of smoke as the years of my life have gone without any song of remembrance, without any monument to your wild sweetness or any map I might follow to your good heart.
Somehow we are living outside of history, outside of consequences, outside of days and nights and weeks and month and years and there is only the calendar of cocaine, tearing off pages until I am alone, until there is no harbor and no home, until there is no way to bear the darkness, until the hunger never goes away again, and the warmth of summer turns cold and my being melts in a hiss of flame and smoke and I am gone to the devil.
I want to stop this while we still have autumn, or the brilliant blue chill of a winter’s morning, or the summer night of a winning team and a longing to hit the ball out of the park. Soon it will all be gone, all the ways of renewing ourselves for the journey will be played out and the voices of love will be silenced, and the prayers for our souls will cease, and our crimes will be against nothing and no one. Even the wings of angels will not beat in our breast, and it will be silent and dark forevermore. We will become like the Snow Queen, and none of the children of the world will laugh outside of our windows. Our parting approaches deft and neat as a shot of whiskey. We will flee the snow to save the fire in our hearts and lose each other to memory.
Just a couple of base heads is what we are becoming, and the marriage of light and hope is running black with the blood of our wounded innocent hearts. Like a felled fat-lighter pine we moan: “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t let us end in a cloud of smoke.” Let us end as we began, in flight from this and other madness. Carry something of our love into tomorrow, carry something human into the light, leave us something human in our hearts or we will vanish like the Apaches over the Sandia crest, off the cliffs our horses straining power into the air. We are a vanished race of lovers, lost children against the firepower of the smoke we are turning into.* * *
© Linda Larson 2004
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