Pop up your Nimrod

“There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something different; and that of the traveler, who says, Anywhere but here.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grew up in a small Southern town where nobody knew the street names, but just gave directions by landmarks and events: turn left where the Biltmore Dairy building burned down, go straight past the Pool Hall where Guy "Frog" Ramsey got shot in the face, turn right at Mull’s Feed and Seed where evidently nothing of note happened other than the rambunctious selling of feed and seed.

Daddy was the town barber. Mama worked at the bank on the Square with the Town Clock on the side of the building that was always off by 8 minutes but it really didn’t seem to matter to this slow-moving populace, perambulating past my vantage point in Modern Barber Shop like they were wading through tepid water. It was as close to Mayberry as you can get; I was Opie’s missing red-headed sister, working at the public library and taking piano lessons from Myrtle Muench once a week for twelve whole years, culminating (of course) with a slightly mechanical (yet secretly rousing) rendition of Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

Life was predictable and orderly. I had to vacuum and dust on Saturday mornings while my brother got to mow the grass simply because he was male, but I’ve worked through all my post-existential phenomenological feminist anger about that. Thursday night was the miracle of Swanson’s frozen Chicken Pot Pies, Friday night was hushpuppies and other fried objects (with that tiny-chopped-runny cole slaw) from the Fish Camp near the Putt-Putt, Saturday was steak and potatoes and shoe-polishing night. Gilligan, Lucy, Bobby Sherman, and Lawrence Welk were old friends who dropped by daily or at the very least, weekly. Like Swiss trains running inevitably on a Southern Baptist schedule, we were at Calvary Baptist every Sunday, a day during which no card playing could occur, including Go Fish and especially that evil icon of capitalist society and materialistic greed, Monopoly.

My next door neighbor lived in the only house in the neighborhood that wasn’t ranch style. Hers was a two-storied house (unheard of! how nervy and ostentatious!) with impossibly skinny white columns holding up a tiny rectangle of a portico. Columns were impressive objects in my town; they were Big News. Only the rich people on Riverside Drive had columns, yet here was one right smack dab in my very own neighborhood. “It’s a mansion,” she often reminded us poor ranch babies. This was not the only reason she was never chosen for anyone’s tag football team in the neighborhood, but it sure was high on the list.

Being the daughter of a barber didn’t lend itself to too much extravagant living, not really. Our vacations were spent in and around a jolly Nimrod pop-up trailer that I adored—named, of course, for that great Mesopotamian “mighty hunter before the Lord” (now there’s a company executive with a sense of humor)—and how did those sides work? I can still smell that wood and metal and kerosene, still feel that puffy and comforting green sleeping bag with the plaid insides on that hard pop-up shelf where Mama slept beside me on a silk pillowcase to keep her hair from falling, still remember listening to the crickets and tree frogs and PawPaw snoring, seeing the glow from red metal lanterns like those railroad men always carry in movies, watching Daddy cooking on a little Coleman stove with sides that unfold to form a metal wind barrier like a industrial Calder, sliding forks and knives into that wooden silverware tray that Daddy made and that I so coveted for my paintbrushes, stoking those campfires at night.

Daddy was a very neat camper, a fastidious Tenzing Norgay of certified campgrounds; the tent poles that held up our little awning were polished to a fault, his every campfire was an architectural miracle, a smoldering Bauhaus of orderly flame and smoke. It must have been his Navy training (hence our Saturday night shoe-polishing festivals).

It was a sweet and magical life, those vacations, though at the time I probably dreamed of fancy hotels and room service, not hiking trails and cold showers. Spending time in streams and woods soothed me, propped with Pippi Longstocking or Daddy Longlegs or Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle in the crook of a tree over a cold swift stream, a quiet broken only by the surprising sound (and aftermath) of a tree frog plopping into Mama’s coffee one night. There was no TV, cell phone, portable DVD player, IPOD, laptop, GameBoy, or WiFi—no blogs!; we were blessedly unhooked while we roasted marshmallows, mine flaming uncontrollably until the crust turned into a charcoal dot, structural ash in my mouth with pure molton bone marrow beneath. Just imagine the audacity of having face-to-face conversation.

When I wanted something as a kid, I had to work for it, like those Vasque hiking boots that I longed for (I actually lusted for them, but that word was unusable in my childhood home). They cost an exorbitant forty dollars. To get them, I had to wash all our dinner dishes at five cents a plate or glass until I had the whole forty dollars plus tax, an idea that shocked me, this Neanderthal practice of adding surprises onto the price of something.

There was none of this indulgent “we’ll get them for you first and then you can work it off.” Oh, no. I spent months washing those 800 dishes until I got enough for the boots, begging family members to use superfluous plates at dinner to accelerate the process. I still have those boots. They are still my pride and joy, all the more so because I can remember every plate, every saucer, every Fred Flintstone jelly jar glass that bought them.

When the neighborhood started buying color televisions, of course my next door neighbor with the columns—let’s call her, oh, Rama Dean—was the first to get one. My brother and I adopted our best whiny voices to beg for one, rationalizing with that by-now familiar refrain “but Rama Dean has one,” quickly learning that Daddy would be happy to oblige—if we raised the money for it. Months passed, during which we—like little orphans and to my mother’s complete mortification—scoured every culvert in Burke County, every scrub brush no-man’s land near busy intersections for glass Coke bottles, which we’d dutifully submit for the 5 cent refund. Relatives got into the spirit of the Movement, the Campaign, the Million Nickel March, car brakes screeching to a halt while they dashed out at stop lights to pick up bottles for us. And yes, we bought that color TV, one sticky bottle at a time.

When Rama Dean and I both turned 16, she got the keys to a brand spanking new tiny little sports car and what I got was Not a Car. On special occasions (oh, say, the election of a new Pope or the advent of Halley’s Comet), I could drive my father’s Oldsmobile 88, a huge tank of a car.

I so envied Rama Dean. I even envied the fact that she had two first names. Everything she wanted, she got.

Just a few years ago, my mother found a newspaper clipping in her yarn box when I was visiting. “Oh, look!” she said brightly. “This is the article I clipped out to send you when Rama Dean’s father got arrested for cocaine trafficking!”

Turns out he wasn’t paying for those mansion columns and Rama Dean’s sports cars with proceeds from his Patio Drive-in Hamburger Restaurant. There he was without his hairpiece, shackled and in a bright orange jumpsuit on the cover of The News-Herald for all to see. Last time I saw his wife she was a greeter at the new Wal-Mart. This was Big News for a town where grape juice would just have to do at the Last Supper.

“Isn’t that terrible?” my mother said with what I can only describe as smugness, satisfaction, vindication for all those Coke bottle refunds and mosquitoed camping trips, that damn tree frog, all those casseroles from leftovers, the square dance dress with sunflowers and stiff underskirt she had to sew herself, and the moments of quiet sadness and inadequacy when we had reminded her of what Rama Dean had that we didn’t.

Looking from the outside in, peering past those columned porticos we call the lives of other people, I guess it’s hard to tell the true cost of sports cars.

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Be satisfied with your Oldsmobile 88—you can use it to pull your Nimrod pop-up, that holder of sweet, irreplaceable, un-buyable memories.

Make sure that the things you wash all those dishes for are the things you really want.

And know, as they say, that the best things in life aren’t things.