Snippets

Please stay with me...

3:45

AM.

It's very dark outside (and inside).

Crazy beeping sound. Gradually getting louder...

"Oh, that must be the smoke alarm I put in the garage."

Me (yawning): "Theres a fire in the garage?"

"No--the alarm was going off yesterday so I put a new battery in it. But I couldn't put it back on the ceiling thingy."

Me: "Oh, okay." (rolls over and re-closes eyes). Crazy beeping sound persists, but at least the mystery is solved. There is a moment of silence before I realize that handling this falls within my realm of responsibilities. If it was a crying baby, I may have a chance at rolling over and closing my eyes and a lightly passive-aggressive standoff/battle of wills/short straw contest.

"Uuuuuugh." I get up and go turn off the alarm. By "turn off", I mean that I pop the battery out of it and pound it against my left palm until the beeping finally stops. Then I wrap it in a rag and stuff it into a can of something or another out in the garage.

My mind starts to equate this 3:45 AM alarm-going-off thing with yelling "fire" in a theater.

I try to go back to sleep, but I keep thinking that we've disabled our smoke alarm. Seriously, I can envision the fire marshall standing outside our smokey home: "Well, for some reason, their smoke alarm was wrapped in a rag and stuffed into some odd can." The kind of news story I shake my head at when I see them.

4:00 AM. I just decide to get up and get an early start on work. Making coffee--I spot my cell phone on the corner of the bar. I have this friend who, for some crazy reason which we've never discussed, calls at incredibly early hours--usually at least once a week. I'm pretty safe since he called at 6:45 AM yesterday. Makes Fran go absolutely nuts. She wants me to punch my friend in the teeth.

I say that it's some crazy reason--that's not really true. He ended up getting a divorce a year or so ago. I think he was married about 15 years or so, and they have a little boy, who went to live with his mom. Now, the house is probably pretty empty early in the morning when he wakes up. That being said, I'm sure he knows that my house isn't empty at that time of day, but for some reason he chooses to ignore that. I don't have the heart to point this fact out to him, so I've let this somewhat poor judgement go. But spotting my phone, I reach over and flip it to vibrate so we don't have two crazy beeping incidents in the same day.

Work...well, I guess that can wait for a little while.

I picked up a novel that I've been reading for the past couple of days--it's one I haven't read since I was in college. Pressed inside the pages when I opened it the other day was a bank deposit slip to someone that I knew fleetingly in college--on the back, scribbled in pencil, was her name and number. I have no recollection of getting this from her, but I remember this girl--her name was Amy and her family was from Hawaii. She was actually a native Hawaiian. She was one of those friends that you kind of know for about six weeks with a group of friends and then you kind of move on to another group of friends, but she was really nice. So, that's it for Amy: brown, Hawaiian, a little heavy, beautiful heart, about 100 words total passed between us in 6 weeks, haven't seen her since I abruptly didn't return to the same school 17 years ago, and I'll never see her again.

One thing that Amy with her beautiful heart suggested was that several of us volunteer at a soup kitchen for poor and homeless people in Waco, Texas. I did this for a while, until I got tired of it--it's a little depressing. Several old black women, whom I'm sure were very poor, would put on their fancy church clothes and hats with fringe--they would look immaculate. They would sit and wait for us to serve them their meals, and I would be really careful to treat them with a lot of respect and regard. I was embarassed to be serving these older ladies--They were all over 90 years old. The drunks and scruffy homeless weren't a problem--I didn't mind serving them and felt like I was helping them. But for some reason, it bothered me that these ladies needed me to take care them. Maybe I'm guilty for the way their ancestors were treated by the people who lived here decades before my ancestors got here from Ireland (1890's--My aunt has a Bible with the exact date, along with my great-grandfather's patent for the 1940's style of jukebox, which became public domain and later manufactured by Wurlitzer). Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to be guilty about...

After dinner, we would clear up the styrofoam plates and serve dessert. I remember the ladies talking in accents so thick that, unless you listened very closely, you couldn't tell that they were speaking English. Since I'm from Texas, I guess it helped, but I would still have to listen very closely.

One of the ladies talked about chopping cotton with her family when she was only 8 or 9 years old. She complained about how heavy the bags got when they were full.

"I don't know how in the world we could carry those sacks around. I really don't know..." She said, perfectly coherent at her age, but staring off in the distance, her voice trailing.

What it really sounded like was "I do know ha da wurl we ca (unintelligible) dose big ol' sacks lak dat. I really don know..."

One of the guys was obsessed with homeless people and helping them. He actually dressed in tattered clothes and would go and hang out all night under bridges with those people. That was kind of over the edge in my book.

One of the guys we were feeding was a handsome guy who was 20-something. He offered me a pawn ticket for a stereo system that he had pawned in order to get money for drugs. He said that for $50 I could pick up a great stereo that was worth $300-$400. I couldn't tell him that I had exactly $12 in my bank account, which I needed to do laundry for the next 3 weeks. But I did get three meals a day. Isn't life funny sometimes?


Coming home from serving, I was in a car with five other people. In the course of conversation, one of the girls told a story about being home when her father killed himself. She didn't even cry when she was talking about it.


Sometimes I wish I could go back and live moments like that again. I feel like I'm a more compassionate, empathetic person now, and I would have something to say, or at least hug her without being self-conscious. At the time, I think nobody in the car said anything. We were flaky college kids--what did we know? Within 2 hours of that ride, we were taking our shoes off and splashing in the fountain outside the student union building.


I slowly tucked the old depsit slip with the old phone number neatly back inside the book where I stopped reading. I am a little surprised at how I can contemplate these memories and note my changes in attitude since I last laid eyes on it. I hope I find it again in another 17 years and can think on these stories again. I wonder how I will remember and interpret them...