Totally Toasted OR: Smoke Em' If Ya Got 'Em

When I was a kid, I had this dark HBO-esque fantasy where I would take two pieces of bread, and they were like two biddies going to a spa day together. I'd put them into the toaster oven/tanning bed, imagining some invisible & insincere attendant promising them beautiful, golden tans. Then they'd come out, all stiff and brown, and I'd imagine his mock horror; "Oh dear, ladies, let's get something soothing on that right away," as I smoothed the margarine on. Then I imagined the complimentary "natural preserves treatment" he added as an apology -- usually my Mom's homemade peach-nectarine jam -- and coddled them in fluffy fresh white paper towels. Then, just when the affronted duo were just beginning to settle down, I'D EAT THEM OM NOM NOM NOM NOM. And the attendant, who'd been in on it, laughed and laughed. I know -- creepy.

But that was when we got the new toaster oven, sleek and spiffy and white; that was after the Incident With The Last Toaster.


Ahhh, memories - crazy, terrifying memories

The last toaster was my first toaster, in that it had already been a well-established resident of our household before I was born. It had served us well, or at least I assume it did, through my infancy and toddlerhood -- it's hard to be definite about anything before I was tall enough to see over the counter, of course. Unfortunately, as I was almost through kidhood and just about to cast my eye upon the pree-teen era, it started to show Signs. You know; getting tired easily, its jointings stiffer, all the hallmarks of advancing age. We were worried about it, of course -- started keeping a closer eye on it, seeing how it was doing, etc. But sometimes you need to make some toast AND do something else, gods forbid, and as riveting as the toasting process is through that little window, you walk away. This model had a spring-action linked to its timer function, which would cause the little door to burst open and the tray to pop out, presenting you with your toast with a flourish and a rather celebratory-sounding ding! And I'd had a few years to be trained to that sound, my Pavlovian promise of the first meal of the day.

So I go, preparing for my day in the way children do -- not caring about my hair, or my clothes, only techincally brushing my teeth, blah -- waiting to hear the ding. But on this, the secret final day, our toaster was Godot. I eventually came back to the kitchen, wondering why it hadn't dinged yet, and looked over to find our kitchen counter the stage for some dark and tortured hellscape now being enacted. The toaster's hatch was still shut tight, but through its little window I could see rolling smoke and tongues of open flame. I was appalled, and uncertain of how to proceed. Our friendly, once-familiar toaster was posessed. I advanced one tenative step towards the monster, and the hatch sprung open -- probably at the vibration through the floor and not, as it appeared to me at the time, to gobble me up -- and twin pillars of flame stabbed upwards as the tray popped out. At the base of each fiery column was the charred remains of a piece of toast.

I do not remember if it dinged. I know -- its last words. Haunts me still.

 I do remember yelling for Mom, in the way that any sensible person under the age of twenty thirty forty might do if they know there's someone more capable around. I remember her bustling with terrified efficiency to tame the fire demon, and a looooonnng lecture afterwards about fire safety in which I was like, Tell it to the toaster. And I still had to go to school, which seemed like a terrible waste of an emergency -- this was like the death of a family pet, it should have at least been a half day with a note.

RIP, First Toaster -- you will always be remembered. Because trauma will do that to you.


A Belltower Promise

When I was small, my working single mother was alone in a new State with a baby and no support network. But she was a visionary, so she took us to church; i.e., a wonderful pre-assembled collection of sweet and compassionate people. Although spiritual, my mother is and was primarily a Science teacher, and she carted carrier, infant, diaper bag and purse out to that old stone church every Sunday morning not for God, but for a little compassion and a sense of community. Fortunately, they had it in spades.

We moved again when I was four, so only my earliest memories contain any trace of that place; the muggy heat of the assembled congregation, the subtle smell the old hymnals generated that filled the whole room, the big-girl purse I carried that contained nothing but a packet of travel tissues filched from my mother's own purse...the fact that the Sunday school's bathroom had a smirking frog painted on the the toilet seat lid. And, my first-ever regret.

Strange, of all life's firsts, to remember one's first regret, no? But I do.

The Sunday school/daycare, for the congregation's tiniest members, was taking a little excursion across the yard to visit The Church Itself. We were going to be taken up the belltower, to see the big bell and look out the windows. This was pretty rock n' roll stuff, for toddlers/lambs of the Lord.

Doesn't look that dangerous,
but appearances are decieving

I was delighted to be out and about, but when I started to climb the spiral paddle stair case, and I could see the receding floor between each paddle, I became frightened. My perception, warped by fear, made it seem as though the paddles were barely there; mere slips of solid matter to divide up the massive amounts of thin air. I had to go back downstairs and wait at the bottom of the tower for the group to come back down. It took ages and I felt miserable.

I regretted my cowardice almost immediately. Even a few short months later, and little Kana felt silly to admit she'd been afraid to climb those stairs. But there were no more belltower excursions in offer; the opportunity had passed. I grew older, and moved away -- we lived on a different part of the island, and I didn't see the church very often. Every so often, though, when our plans took us upcountry and we passed it, I would look up at the belltower and feel this strange sense of loss.

I grew up, and learned the word regret -- got to know it, had it over for drinks -- and eventually it made a home in me, as it does in most grown-ups. Fortunately my regrets are relatively few, but that first one -- that belltower one -- itched at me. Quietly, at the back of my mind, for nearly all my life.

Sorry so dark; but it wasn't Midday Mass, now was it?

Until this Christmas, that is! We went upcountry to see friends, and attended a Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at that old stone church. One of my mother's card-game friends is the current minister's wife, and after entertaining them with the story of my belltower misadventure, she asked me if I'd like to rectify (Ha! Church pun!) that lapse. I don't think she was ready for the level of passion in my response -- it took her a minute to catch up, because in my heart I'd been climbing those stairs for years.

"Oh, you mean, right now?"

OF COURSE I looked down

I did it! I got to see that bell, and I (most evidently) photodocumented the holy heck out of it. And, as ridiculous as it may seem, I did get a little panicky about two turns from the top. It's not that the stairs were as ludicrously insubstantial as my childhood fears had decided; it's just that there's a gap at all, so you can see how high you are. The trick is to have someone else walk right in front of you and not look down.

Although it was too dark to enjoy the view out the window, I felt terribly pleased to have finally made the excursion. I'm sure my mother's friend was quite concerned for the poor aetheist girl, who is so likely mentally ill...but thanks to her graciousness, I got to make good on my first-ever regret. I think in retrospect that it was better, more satisfying, this way. It felt like closure.

Some of you might now be wondering, Well, what did it look like up there? Don't worry -- I gotcha covered. The camera clicked probably once every fifteen seconds the whole time. Well, that's what adults do when they're taken on excursions, right? If toddlers don't, well that's their own fault. A grown-up went up that tower, and was very proud to do so. So...click, click, click!


This window was labelled, for some reason;
click to enlarge

Totally worth it



Over The Fence

Once, when I was about 14,  my mother had taken us out to dinner. This was not so unusual, and at the end of the evening she began to do something very usual -- that thing adults do, where they fall into a well-worn groove of endless circling futile conversation that tests the patience (and, frequently, the bladder) of even the quietest and most well-behaved children...which I was not. It was after dark, they were just wittering away at one another by their cars -- and the night, she was calling to me. Who was I to deny her?

Yeah, that looks promising

I decided to go for a stroll across the parking lot to where a large, weed-filled vacant field stretched off into the non-illuminated night, only to be limned in the distance by Stygian orange sodium lights outlining excitingly industrial architecture. This seemed like an excellent plan to me, as my mother was now lost to the ever-hardening amber of polite nothings. I'd only gone a few yards into the knee-high tasseled weeds when I heard a distant wailing, wheedling sort of cry in the night; like a champion decision-maker, I headed towards it. Because if there's pain, death and judgment being handed out somewhere nearby, you don't want to miss out on your turn, right? Of course right.

It came and went, and I changed directions several times, trying to figure out where the wails were coming from. They were coming, of course, from the monstrous facility on the other side of the field. This place, it had everything, man. Steam was hissing up into the black night, billowing orange under the sodium lights...there were excitingly chunky shapes rendered in concrete...plenty of valves and dials about the place...it was positively ideal for an inadvisable night-time adventure.

Except for the fence.

It stretched to a towering height -- probably about 9 feet, an actual keeping-people-out height not hitherto seen before by this good little girl (ha!) who was more familiar with 4-foot playground fences -- and it stretched as far as I could see in either direction behind the scrubby hedge planted all along the border of this strange dystopian kingdom. I stood with my fingers curled through the diamond-shaped holes, so very like the fences at school, that when the cry came again from within the facility I began to climb almost automatically. Some sort of jungle-gym auto-response had me 7 feet in the air before I had begun to seriously consider my acrophobia. But a tragic pleading moan kept appealing to me from the steaming shadows beyond, and I kept climbing.

I reached the top, and the air was cooler there above the scrubby hedges. As I'd flung a leg over, my twisted posture pointed my face back across the field to the bright lights of the parking lot, now tiny twinkles in the distance -- I had a passing urge to just go back, and see if they'd even noticed my absence. But the cries came clearly again after a moment, and it seemed ridiculous to stop now.

Who's more trapped, here, really?

I'd flung one foot over, toes now tangled in the fencing from the far side, but I couldn't quite figure how to swing the rest of me over to join it without dying of heart failure -- I really am quite afraid of heights. Several pained and laborious strategies were attempted, and eventually I'd graduated to having both feet on the far side of the fence -- but oriented all wrong, with the toes facing out toward the facility, not in towards the fence I needed to climb down. My hands were braced painfully on the top of the fence underneath me, where the triangular zigzag pattern was leaving me no good options for supporting my weight. I swayed there, ponderously, painfully, and listen to the crying rising up into the night air. I was paralyzed by my view of the distant orange-lit ground, but was beckoned by the piteous sound of what I now was confident was a kitty whose voice was distorted by metal reverberation; visions of a tiny, worried furry face peering from within a trash barrel or air vent kept me there, facing my fear.

It went on for a subjective eternity; my arms burned, my knees sagged, and I came to rest upon my thighs on the horrible triangular top of the fence. Gravity continued to exact its horrible measure, and I could feel myself sliding, now upon my buttocks upon the fence-top, and rather feeling like wailing myself.

And here I was barefoot from climbing the fence

I'm not entirely sure how I got down from that position, but the exigencies of the situation brooked nothing less; I found myself within the facility grounds, and wandering amongst the strange and complex geometric shapes in the black and orange bi-chromatic night. Roaches skittered away from my footfalls, so large their bristly feet pattered audibly in the echoing canyons between the buildings.

I followed the wailing sound, quite loud now, to a loading dock. I stood at the edge of the artificial cliff, and looked down at what I'm sure you have already so sagely predicted; two cats, rutting and having a grand old time, sharing their feelings unabashedly with all who would listen.

My rescue was was not needed, had not in fact been requested. I'd never heard cats go on like that before; I live in the kind of neighborhood where all the cats have been fixed, because that's what responsible homeowners do. I was scratched, bleeding down the backs of my legs, dustily barefoot in what was most likely, from the smell of it, a water-reclamation facility; there was no adventure, and now, I'd have to climb back over that horrible fence.

I was suddenly disillusioned, weary, and my shoulders hung like millstones from my neck as I turned back the way I'd come.

I looked the place over, searching for a door; or barring that, an easier way back over. As I faced back towards the field I'd come across, I saw to my right a huge pile of loosely stacked building materials, the sort of thing you tend to find in large workyards of any description. My decision-making portion of the brain was still churning out doozies, so I scrambled cautiously up onto the heap. I was about a third of the way up the height of it when I heard the only thing that could make me feel younger, weaker and more afraid than I already was; my mother's frightened voice, calling for me.

My mother has traditionally expressed her relief at finding me after an unplanned separation by making me wish I'd never been born. For a moment I crouched on the rubble, weighing the pros and cons of life in a water treatment plant versus alerting my mother to my presence; but only for a moment, before calling out to her. I was ready to be grateful for whatever lecture/punishment combo she had planned -- scratches and pervert cats will do that to a girl.

I'm sure she was nearly expiring from maternal instincts as she had to wait on the far side of that fence, listening to me slither up this loose rubble sight unseen. She relieved it by exerting an incredible amount of pressure on my arm once I had climbed down the far side -- nothing will get you over a fence that before had held you terrified like your mom furiously expecting you to hurry up -- and she dragged me back to civilization like a very unsuccessfully escaped convict.

Bleeding scratches spared me from the dragon-wrath more than anything else -- nurturing is even more fun than punishing, in the Book of Moms -- and I winced every time I got them wet, for weeks...bear in mind I lived in a beach- and pool-rich environment, not to mention the regular bathing nonsense. Hot water was worse than salt or chlorine, but at least at home I didn't have to explain the terrible scratches. Rubber ducky expects nothing from me.

Yes, those are nipple tassels

I think my baseline compassion as a human being shrank a size that day, sort of a reverse-Grinching; I'm now much more prone to phrases like "Ah, it's probably nothing." And then I lock my door.

You ruined it for everybody, kitty. You and your kinky exhibitionist lifestyle.

Baby's First F-Bomb

I learned "the F-Word" in first grade, as so many things are at that age; contextually, on the playground.

I had to observe carefully as it was most frequently said by bigger kids, who had to be given a wide berth; they were volatile, unpredictable, and had superior reach. However, it was obviously an expression of anger at one's own misfortune, such as when you miss the ball, stub your toe or someone plays a trick on you. That seemed clear enough...but it seems I had missed some social connotations, and as a only a nascent social scientist, had not correlated the lack of teacher presence when the dreaded "F-Word" was said.

So when I was riding home with my mother one afternoon and she was rudely cut off in traffic, I implemented my new understanding with a sympathetic "Fuck" at her plight -- which almost caused her to really crash the car.

She was also, unfortunately, giving a coworker a ride home that day. They had never ridden with us before, and never did again -- leaving me to wonder what impression my first "Fuck" left on this nameless grown-up, and whether the maiden voyage of my F-bomb contributed in any way. How it affected her work environment, I still dare not inquire.

Mountain Dew: A Lifelong Love Affair

*K-CHIKaaahhhh*

The stuff of dreams

Yeah, you know what time it is. Tasty beverage time, à la every drink commercial you've ever seen. Beading condensation, a refreshing spray; whatever your fantasy is, baby. Soda pop is here for you, and always has been.

I first got my habit from hula lessons -- no, I know, really -- where our hale, for some unknowable reason, had electricity running to a large incongruous vending machine "out da back." Since there was nothing else remotely stimulating to the American eight-year-old in the vicinity -- being disappointingly full of stupid things like trees, well-mown play fields and other children, while totally bereft of televisions and bright plastic toys -- I turned to the glowing monolith as my only contact with the materialistic consumer real world. After every lesson, I'd take my small change out back where the vending machine stood humming on a pallet in the grass, plugged in right next to the electrical meter -- whose sole purpose was to monitor its lone charge's (ha!) consumption. There's nothing like a cool drink on a hot tropical day -- and there's nothing like soda pop to a little kid. It was, between us, the only reason I could bring myself to go to those lessons. There is something fundamental to my very biological makeup that prevents me from being able to wield puili without hurting myself.

Once I had imprinted on this delicious nectar of the gods, nothing could dissuade me from Doin' the Dew. Not the older girl at hula class who said it was pee-colored, and so therefore was pee-flavored. Not the fact that my mother suddenly decided she wasn't going to shell out for the privilege of caffeinating her child every afternoon, necessitating the gathering up of every coin I could find in order to get that sweet taste; pushing in every dirty penny one at a time with great deliberation, lest my childish motor control somehow ruin this countdown to Dew. It didn't matter -- none of it did. I had Mountain Dew.

When I was ten, the great test of our love struck on a sunny afternoon during Teacher Conferences. Not only was I out of school for two bonus days, but my mother was a teacher, so I was unsupervised & free as a bird on some high school campus I'd never seen before -- for hours each day. Shit got EXPLORED.

It was a wonderland of comically oversized school trappings; desks and chairs and lockers, for children who were the size of grownups? How droll! There was an especially wonderful outdoor staircase that, instead of having handrails, was sided by giant (in hindsight, probably 4-foot high) steps! They had to be conquered. But first, a refreshing Dew!

I had brought one along with us with almost god-like (for a ten-year-old) foresight, and once I had broken into the meeting and wheedled the car keys from my mother to let me go get it out, all was anticipation. I raced to the car; the door opened with a gagging whoosh of superheated air. I had somehow forgotten a phenomenon I had witnessed firsthand every day of my life to that date -- cars parked in the Hawaiian sun get HOT. I extracted my precious Mountain Dew, now almost too hot to touch, and returned the car keys, crestfallen. I stared at my once-frosty midday treat; what was I to do? And the answer is, drink it anyway. Besides, Mom had told me to wait a few hours for it to cool down with her in the air-conditioned conference I was continually interrupting, so of course I had to keep my treasure out of the hands of that longstanding Mountain Dew-hating nemesis. Besides, I knew what I was doing! Yeah!

I knocked it back like a champ. I don't know if anyone else in the Universe has found occasion to drink an actively hot soda, and I really don't think the lone survivor of that experience would happen upon this blog, but if the unthinkable has indeed happened -- you know what I'm talking about. There's just nothing else quite like it. (And you're glad there isn't, because that would be a nightmare world with acid-trip demons and shit.)

But I had accomplished Dew, and that meant I was victorious; and now, giant stairs! I had come from up-campus, so first I got to scramble down them; hop, hop, hop. Awesome! This was like being Alice in Wonderland! I drank something weird, and now I'm tiny! I jumped down at the bottom, spiked the landing, and looked back up the stairs; this was gonna be epic.

It was going to be much harder, my tiny brain suddenly realized, to get back up the giant stairs than to get down. But I was determined, I was ten, I was caffeinated; and most importantly, I had all day. And that, my friends, is the secret formula to achieving any goal. Can't get that spare bedroom cleaned out, or finish that last chapter you've been meaning to write? All you need is a time machine to Being Ten, a soda pop, and no supervision. I SOLVED those stairs, yo; with energy, brains, and good joint strength. If you run at a stair, I found, then sort of grab the lip of it and pull yourself up with the momentum, you'd get the upper half of your body onto the next stair; which is, of course, enough of you to then flail and heave yourself up to victory. It sounded sort of like:

Patapatapata HEAVE
Flail, flail, strain, flop
Grin, pant pant pant
...!
Patapatapata HEAVE...

The first one was easiest, because I had an unlimited space for my run-up; the following ones could only be the length of the stair I was on. But I had. ALL. DAY.

I think there were something like four to six of these stairs -- numbers have never really been my thing -- and by the time I got to the top, I was the happiest little mess you'd ever seen. I ran a jelly-legged victory lap on the lawn at the top of the stairs. But strangely, as elated as I was, my stomach didn't feel so hot. Or rather, it felt like I'd put hot Mountain Dew in it and then slammed it into the edge of several giant stairs. Whatever you want to call that; maybe slammy.

Essentially, I had regrets.

Slammy tummy or no, I at least wanted to look back at my achievement -- but when I went back to the top of the stairs, instead of admiring my hard earned view I immediately threw up (still) hot Mountain Dew over the edge.

Of course, by the time Mom got out of conferences and the shadows were growing long, all distress had been forgotten -- after all, that was like, four hours ago -- and all I remembered was that I'd climbed Alice's Stairs. And that I didn't want any Mountain Dew.

It wasn't until high school that I managed to return to Mountain Dew's embrace -- but it was there, waiting for me. It understood, it forgave; we fell in love all over again. Unfortunately, since then I had developed a terrible chronic headache, and caffeine apparently made it worse; but after surviving the Alice-Stairs Incident, what was a little more head pain between friends? And to this day, I just chase my (now Diet) Dew with water, or at least try to take it with food; but most importantly, I just drink it anyway. Like a ten-year-old champ.

"Really" From Hawaii

Surprise; you can be waaaaay white
AND live in a tropical paradise

So there have been some doubts voiced about the authenticity or my origins, and who can blame them? Red curly hair, pale skin and a love for jackets matching boots does not scream tropical to even the poorest geography student. I also speak (type?) like a haolie – a white person. 

Well, I can’t help it -- my mother was a well-educated woman from the Mainland, and she taught me how to speak. I have been known to erupt into Pidgin (the local Hawaiian dialect + slang) with no warning while calling to institutions back home – like the bank, or the accountant’s – because I get better service that way, because they can’t see me and think I'm a "real" kama'aina. As Mom planned, I have a Hawaiian name, even if it’s for the other gender. But it’s enough to get by.

However, my face is fooling NO ONE – I am pale, I am Nordic, I’m too much of an indoor cat to ever get a tan. Besides, that would clash with the hair.

So, living in paradise? Only about 

20% as awesome as you think it is

People up here in AK express their incredulity about my origins when they find out – “WHY are you HERE??” is the most common response – but that’s just straight-up envy. There’s a lot of Polynesians in Alaska, so Hawaii is coveted but viewed as a peer, the OTHER satellite state. In the continental US, people seem to express outright disbelief as to my origins, and I’m not actually clear if it’s my white-girl appearance or just the exoneration of the islands to some sort of mythical level.

I once got to visit a land-locked state by staying with my Auntie Judy, who lives in Michigan. We’d met her in one of her frequent forays to the islands, which she strives to do every year. She really loves the beach, and although it’s prohibitively expensive she tries really hard to go. I should have reflected on that fervor as we drove to her hometown. It was summer, and the time of their State Fair. I had a blast, as back home there can only be island-wide and not State-wide Fairs, and the Maui Fair is pretty tiny. I was particularly enjoying the livestock area, as Michigan’s 4H is equivalent to Chicago’s Mafia in both far-reaching power and number of members. I was petting a baby goat (!) when I saw two little boys on a fence nearby. I hadn’t talked to someone from that side of puberty since my mother and I had started traveling, so even though I was a little older than them I wandered up. I’m not sure how the subject even came up -- maybe something about how big I thought the fair was and how cool their sheep were or something -- but the conversation suddenly honed in on where I was from. I hadn’t traveled much since I was a baby, so I hadn’t yet had much experience with Hawaii-born bragging rights. So I shyly gave a shout-out for the Aloha State.

 

This was met with a stony silence and an intent scrutiny from both of the fencegoers, and also possibly their ram. That might just be the way rams look at everyone, though…with a sort of doubtful scorn.

However, it left me stranded high and dry on a sandbar of awkward silence. I stood there, suddenly acutely aware of several things; primarily, my extreme whiteness. Also the fact that these boys did not know the first thing about Hawaii, where there are people of many nationalities browning evenly under a ferocious tropical sun, as actual Hawaiians are a bit thin on the ground these days. And finally, that these boys have probably only even heard about Hawaii from the ever-glamorous television people, and adult Michiganites, who probably talk about it with a reverence that would made it sound like the place where good Michiganites go when they die. With this mythos in their minds, there was no way these kids were going to believe some lily-ass beanpole standing right in front of them, even if she was a few years older than them and therefore significantly higher on the Juvenile Hierarchy of Coolness*.

 

The towheaded one squinched up his eyes and issued an exploratory strike at my claim:

“No yer not.”

I assured him that I was. Another foray was made:

“Nuh-uh.”

Panicking at the threat of a seven-year-old’s nuh-uh/yuh-huh filibuster – a terrible, terrible threat, I assure you – I retreated to Cool Kid high ground. “Pssht, fine; whatever.”

This got them right where I wanted them; wide-eyed and admiring. Fools! They could not resist my disdain, which signified me to be not only a Big Kid, but also an emissary from the land of awesomeness. I gloated, I preened. I answered 7-year-old’s questions about Hawaii with greater or lesser accuracy. I even risked being condescending about their Great Lake which was both unfounded and falsified; I would not be visiting the Lake for another three days. I played it off. I soared on the wings of temporary superiority. I was from Hawaii; I was awesome.

It felt so good it almost didn’t feel like reality anymore; I might as well have been lying for all the posturing I was doing. As far as those two little boys were concerned, I was a god; either a champion liar or a foreigner, and either one is interesting enough if you’re sitting on a fence at the State Fair livestock pen. I still take it as a win.

--------------------------------------------------------

*The JHC dictates that the older you are, the cooler you are, as you become more worldly-wise and are given more privileges. The system breaks down at the mid-teens, where the kids look as big as the adults, become Babysitters or Strangers and are considered The Enemy.

A Well-Spent Childhood In Our Friendly Skies

Actual podiums my mom worked on Maui, c/o
http://hawaii.gov/ogg/ticketing-check-in/ticket-counters

When I was but a little lass, my mother worked for a nonspecific but very patriotically named (hint hint) airline. She worked the check-in counter at the main lobby of Maui's first commercial airport when it first opened, abandoning LAX for paradise -- or so she thought. She caught an STD (namely me) off some male model-nee-tour-bus-driver, and grew so fond of the little parasitic wart, she didn't bother to go get it fixed. (This is still me, not him. That wart dropped off of its own accord.) But the long and short of it was that now she was a young mother in a strange place with a demanding job. She did the best she could by smuggling me to work with her while I was still small enough to be smuggled inside things. (Really, REALLY not in the traditional airport-smuggling place of choice. Just FYI.) So if you wondered why your checker seems so harried, distracted or ready to cry/kill you, it might be because there is a fussy baby hidden in the podium between her and you and it is down there that her thoughts are truly centered. Is it going to cry? Spit up? WHY has it been fussing for four hours? If it throws up, I'm going to lose my job -- or maybe just my lunch.  Just for your future consideration.

What was nice about Mom's early job for Patriot Airlines was that we could fly in unprecedented style. You know, whenever she could afford to be doing something other than working. We flew to California see my new grandparents, who were as happy with me as they were mad at her; thirty, unmarried and now a bastard child? ("Awww, lookit that, Hal! She spit up on herself. Isn't she an angel.") They took me to Disneyland so many times I had the layout memorized, and would blithely inform my mother that I would meet her "back at Minnie's house" like I was house-sitting for the mouse. But even more fun than Disneyland, as anyone who has flown to California will tell you, is First Class on an airline. There should be a theme park to commemorate it. I haven't had the privilege of inspecting First Class compartments any time recently, as my mother moved on to another job when I was seven and if a Coach Class flier even looks too hard at the First Class cabin, burly flight attendants ask you to leave and you get stranded in Seattle AGAIN. And while Seattle may be aces at coffee, it's deuces at sandwiches -- two guesses as to which one of those I actually like, and da firs' one don't count.

 

"We're making money RIGHT NOW."

Brian Regan describes it pretty well in his skit; First Class people are lords, nobility who are disgusted that we commoners even get to walk through their special court on our way to the ox-stalls. And I've seen for myself that way they look up at you after they've pre-boarded and you're just shuffling by; they're sitting in their massive leather easy-chairs, laptops and PDAs already out, obviously making money even now. Only a fool like you would pay for the privilege of that sky-borne cattle car back there; they're getting paid to sip mimosas from underneath the corner of a complimentary hot towel, and put their feet up on baseboard storage compartments.

And that is where this tale comes at last to its long-awaited point.

In all the trans-Pacific travels of my childhood, whether for my mother's surgeries at UCLA (carpal tunnel is a big reason why she eventually quit Patriot Airlines) or those legendary grandparents-and-Disneyland sojourns, I spent most of my time in those baseboard storage compartments. They were huge compared to the overhead storage, just right for one little girl's BatCave. I'd drag my chosen toys of the day and their sundry paraphernalia off to one of the empty ones, and set up camp in there. It got so regular in my young life that everything started to have its particular place, and all baseboard compartments were in essence One; dolly's bed went over here, and the little bag I carried to show I was a "big girl" like Mommy (filled with more toys and crap) went over here. It was a constant in my travel-filled life, and I got fond of it. But now, as a slightly less self-centered adult, I wonder what that had been like for the hundreds of First Class passengers who had not realized you could store children in the baseboard compartments*. I imagine it would go something like this:

Livin' the high life - mimosas and hot towels await

Huh? Wuzzat?

Was that a GIGGLE?

But what can you say? "Excuse me, Miss,
I'm hearing crazy things at 40,000 feet?"

That's it, I'm getting to the bottom of this!
I'm a high-powered business executive and
I won't stand for this sort of mystery on my flight!

So as long as nobody's looking...

I hope it's not a talking animal, I hate that Disney shi-

Holy monkeys, a kid!

Eyaa!

Umm...Wha...?

I would like to think that my rabid little child face did not peer up at them in the sudden light amidst my mess like some sort of feral weasel found in one's garbage bins, but I don't think I should fool myself; I was most likely published at least once as the "Wild Child of the Skies" before my mother could shamefacedly claim me. I probably bit at least one of them, in a child's experimental, easygoing way. It was probably a really big deal for a while, with a picture of the bitten passenger under the headline and my crouched four-year-old figure as the side panel shot, with the caption "An unexpected flight hazard of the Friendly Skies." Maybe I even damaged Patriot Airline's profit margin as they damaged my mother's wrists. I would find this highly acceptable.

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*First Class people lead charmed lives that would prevent them from finding out about such unfortunate things as babies and the need to take them with you places. I have decided that the First Class decided that babies come from nannies.