Burned Down
In lieu of posting on CowBird (social-elitists anyways) I will post HERE!
Ehem... continuing on.
As a child, living with family members while my parents shook out the contents of their metaphorical baggage and cleaned house, I remember once riding two towns north of where I had stayed for the summer. My aunt and I, and a two year old brother trying to whistle in the back seat, had taken a drive north to swim at the lake. It was warm in the car and her 1985 Chevy Cavalier didn't want to blow cold air. So I rolled down the window with the mechanical handle pushing and pulling with all my four year-old might and stuck my head out the window like my aunt's Maltese dog Barkley - after Charles Barkley of the Philadelphia 76ers - to enjoy the warm wind and floating cotton, which had the tendency of flying up my nose anytime I wanted to inhale. I remember as a child passing by a curious sign to see an obese woman in a bright purple leotard, bunny ears and curly blond hair. I laughed and pointed at the sign with my brother, who was laughing at the snot bubble coming out of his nose. I hadn't bothered to look anywhere else as the blond obese bunny had a certain resemblance to a certain aunt driving a car with no air-conditioning.
I was always quiet as a child, always looking out for my siblings growing up and never expressing anything that I had questions or concerns about, which led to a list of medical bills not related to this story. To say the least, I was impressionable, gullible, and honest with my feelings and thoughts whenever I HAD to answer someone. Usually, I got things wrong, because I thought differently which leads us to the question I was about to ask my aunt.
"Auntie," I may have asked sweetly, or distantly, or maybe I had been a little confused, I don't remember.
"Ye-es." She had a way of drawing out single syllable words like honey being lifted by a spoon from a jar.
"Is that you?" The sign was twenty miles behind us at that point. We were nearing our destination and pulling into a public parking lot that sat adjacent to a golf course by the lake. Tall ponderosa pines provided thick shade on the meticulously kept grass. A two story country-western style jail house sat in the middle of sand with a suspended wooden bridge one foot off the ground, a metal slide that liked to burn your fat little legs as you attempt to slide down and away from your pursuers, a merry-go-round that was beaten up and squeaky you could pretend you were a crash-landing alien. The whining call of monstrous seagulls that ate your frybread whole cried in the distance above the sound of boats and the crashing of waves and screaming of kids. This was heaven.
"What?" she laughed as she unbuckled herself and Barkley got excited to be out of the car.
"That sign. Back in Pablo." not pronounced Pah-blow, like the huts, but Pae-blo. She didn't know what I was talking about so on the way home, after brother passing out caked with sand and snot and huckleberry ice cream, i pointed out the sign to her and, again, asked: "Is that you?"
She laughed with cigarette excited lunges coated with asthma and her honey voice, Barkley's tangled, furry head out the window.
"No-o, that's a bar. It burned before you were born. That's not me, Cha-che."
Burned down. How sad. In my adult years, I found out that there was a kitchen fire in which the owner and a patron had died with a couple of people being injured. It used to be the main hub of socializing when people did it face to face rather than digitally through text and pixels. The paint store, All-Red, kept the sign there along with the words it had proudly displayed more than 25 years ago.
Even now, nine years after her death, followed closely by Barkley in a similar passing-on as Johnny and June, I still remember that day. Sticking my head out that window and cotton up my nose. Her laugh, her look of confusion and disbelief at associating her with Big Ethel. Now, when I think Aunt I synonymously think Big Ethel with her purple leotard and white bunny ears.
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