Embarrassing Moment (1st person)

            The other day, I was sitting in the hallway by the Choir rooms; eating my lunch and watching other people go about their business.  I had contemplated doing my homework, but in the end was too lazy to actually do anything.  It was one of those days.  I looked up from my ham sandwich to see this short, blond girl walking by with a stack of sheet music.  I thought “That looks unstable,” and went back to my lunch.  A second later, I heard a soft rustling sound.  The girl had dropped her papers.

            She was now on the floor, trying to gather them up, turning bright red in the process.  Had she tripped?  And over what?  In the middle of the hallway, there was nothing to trip over.  I watched her trying to scoop up all those papers from off the floor, and felt genuinely sorry for her.  No one was helping her clean them up.  She was there by herself, looking embarrassed, trying to get her sheet music into the neat stack it had been.

            I went back to my lunch.  Although I felt bad for her, I wasn’t going to be the one to help her out.  I just sat there, watching her.  Eventually, she finished up and walked away.

Summer Moment (in 3rd person)

Last summer, Lizzy took Geoscience in summer school, just to get it out of the way.  On the second to last week, her teacher announced that the class would be going on a field trip to a nature museum in Milwaulke Wisconsin.  (Which was odd, because there are many good nature museums in Chicago.)  So they were given excursion cards and told that the bus ride there would take about an hour and a half.  They were also told that they would need to get another chaperone in order to go.  Enter John Konchar.

            John was a pretty cool guy.  He was a graduated senior, preparing to go off to the Navy to be a nuclear technician, and a mutual friend of many people ion the class.  He agreed to accompany them to Milwaulke as their chaperone.

            The bus ride was long and boring.  When the students arrived at the Museum (at about 10:00), they were told to wander around until 10:30, when they would gather by the museum’s theater to watch an educational film.  Lizzy’s group wandered through the indoor village of “Old Milwaulke” (a fake old-time village fully outfitted with fake people.), and then through the fossil wind.

            At 10:30, they congregated at the theater, waiting to watch a movie about Lage Mouth Bass.  (Which turned out to be very dull.)  They took their seats and watched as a school of Bass moved upstream to their spawning grounds.  All of a sudden, a huge bear lunged toward the fish, managing to catch one in its mouth.  Then the picture and sound faded out.  Lizzy and her classmates sat there for a few moments, trying to figure out if this was a part of the movie.  Next to Lizzy, John Konchar jumped up.  He stepped out into the aisle and ran up to the projection booth.  A few minutes later, the film was back on.  John returned to his seat next to Lizzy.

            “What did she do?”  Lizzy asked him.

“I fixed it,” he replied.  Lizzy was impressed.  The rest of the trip went on without incident.  A couple of hours later, they were back home.  John Konchar is now away at the Navy, and Lizzy will never forget how he actually managed to be a good chaperone.

Ruby Slippers

I remember, when I was little, I would go over to my grandma’s house and watch movies.  We would sit on her worn brown couch with blankets and popcorn and cocoa.  I would get to choose which movie we watched.  I loved the freedom of being able to decide which movie to watch from amongst her vast collection, although I almost always chose the same one: The Wizard of Oz.  I loved the story.  A girl gets transported into another land and goes on all kinds of adventures with a Scarecrow, a Tin Man, a Cowardly Lion, and her Scotty dog Toto.  All the while, she is looking for a way home.  But what I loved best about Dorothy was not her courage or kindness.  It was her Ruby Slippers.  To my three-year-old self, the Ruby Slippers were magical.  They were glittery and red, and ultimately became Dorothy’s way home.

            I was the kind of kid who loved to run around and play outside in the mud.  Needless to say, I went through shoes pretty fast.  One day, soon after my third birthday, my mother took me shopping for yet another pair of gym shoes.  I sitting on a bench, whining as my mom tried to force my foot into a pair of too-tight shoes when I saw them.  They were red and sparkled in the fluorescent lighting, throwing tiny red spots of light against the wall.  They were perfect.  They were amazing.  They were just like the slippers Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz.  And I wanted them.

            I begged and clamored for those shoes.  When my mother said no, I screamed at the top of my lungs until she finally agreed to buy them for me if I would stop “disrupting the store” with my temper tantrums.  When the salesman asked if I wanted to wear them home, I said yes.  From that day on, Ruby Slippers were my default footwear.  I can remember a single time in my childhood where I didn’t have at least one pair.  I even branched out.  Soon I had silver, gold, and rainbow slippers.  But none of those could ever compare to the Ruby ones that appeared on my feet on so many important occasions in my life.

            The first such event was my fourth birthday.  My party was held at the Wilmette park district.  I wore a plaid dress and a matching bow and, of course, my Ruby Slippers.  As far as what we did or what flavor my cake was, I can’t remember.  But I DO remember that halfway through opening up my presents, a thought struck me:  I was getting older.  I would NEVER be three again.  The thought shocked me like nothing else I had ever experienced before.  I began to wail.  It was so unfair.  Why couldn’t I be three anymore?!  I was inconsolable.  After about an hour of sobbing, my mother declared that my party was over, and my guests went home upset.  It was not the best birthday ever.

            I had other, happier times in my Ruby Slippers.  I was Dorothy for Halloween three years in a row.  Then, I was seven, on a trip to Seattle with my parents and brother.  We had just come back from seeing the Space Needle, when my mom spotted a museum banner with Dorothy’s famous footwear on it.  We inquired inside, and discovered that the Ruby Slippers on the banner were the actual slippers that Dorothy had worn in the movie.  We hurried over to the exhibit.  I stood with my face pressed against the glass of the display case.  They were magnificent.  I felt everything that I remembered when I first saw those Ruby Slippers in the shoe store.  They were real.  Dorothy’s actual ruby slippers.  In the flesh.  Right there in front of me.  It was incredible.

            A few years passed and I declared myself too old to wear my Ruby Slippers.  They were just something left over from a childish fantasy.  I went on with my life, with no slippers on my feet.  At least, until last year.   I was in DSW, looking for the perfect shoes to match my Voice Recital dress.  Whenever I go there, I always check the sale racks.  They sometimes have really good deals on cute shoes.  On this particular day, I followed my usual routine.  I checked the sale rack before moving on to full priced shoes.  I browsed the aisles, only half paying attention, daydreaming about white strappy sandals, when something caught my eye.  A sparkle of ruby red, that brought my childhood fancies flooding back.  A pair of Ruby Slippers, and in my size too.  I stood there and stared at them, marveling at how a simple pair of shoes could represent everything I wanted as a little girl.  I took the box from its place on the shelf, and slid the slippers onto my feet.  I stood to look at myself in the mirror, and I saw myself both as I had been so many years ago, and how I was now.  I knew I had to take those slippers with me when I left the store.

Now, those slippers hold a place of honor in my closet.  I don’t wear them out much, but sometimes, when I feel like it, I put them on.  In fact, I’m wearing them right now as I write this.  I feel like somehow, they are inspiring me to write a better essay.  That, and they remind me of what I was like fourteen years ago, in that shoe store, with everything I had ever wanted right there in front of me.  Things are different now and I am almost grown.  Next year I will be leaving for college.  But in a way, I’m the same little Lizzy.  Those Ruby Slippers will always remind me of that.

Why Pogo Sticks Are Evil

It was a sunny, slightly chilly, autumn day.  I was in eighth grade and after hours of hard work during the week, I was looking forward to spending my Saturday having fun with my friends.  I never expected that my long awaited day of rest would turn out the way it did.  My two friends and I had just eaten lunch, and were playing badminton in my backyard.  After a few hours we tired of that and were looking for something better to do. 

            My garage is full of old stuff.  Antique sleds, dusty watering cans, and other unidentifiable objects take up so much space that we can’t park a car inside.  On this particular day, we decided to scavenge, hoping to find something to keep us busy.  What we found was a pogo stick.  It was a rusty old thing with cracked rubber grips, covered with cobwebs and dust.  This was perfect.  We would overcome boredom by having a jumping contest.

            We each took our turns.  After about three rounds, we were getting pretty good.  But I was sure that I could jump higher than the others.  It was my turn next, and I was ready to show my friends what I could do.  I placed my feet on the peddles of the pogo stick, and jumped into the air.  I hit the blacktop hard. 

“Great!”, I thought, “I’m going to beat them for sure!”

            But something wasn’t right.  The next time the pogo stick hit the blacktop, the pogo stick bounced off at grotesque angle.  The next thing I knew, I was in the air, falling.  For a second, it was as if time had stopped.  I hung, suspended in the air, and knew that something terrible was about to happen.  I thought, “Oh, shit!”  And then I hit the ground.

            For an instant, everything was still.  I lay there, trying to figure out what had happened.  Then I felt a strange throbbing pressure in my right shin.  Quickly the pressure turned into a searing pain, completely unlike anything I had experienced before, so intense that I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think.  At least not about anything but how much my leg hurt.  I began to sob.

            “You guys?”  I called to my friends, “I think I just broke my leg.”

Suddenly, my entire family was outside.  My dad picked me up and carried me to the car, while my mom hurried around, trying to find god knows what, and my brother tried to poke my broken leg.  My family doesn’t deal with a crisis well.  Soon, everyone was furious and arguing with each other, and I was in the back seat of our van, wailing about how I was sure I was going to die.  And we hadn’t even left for the hospital yet.

After about ten minutes, we arrived at Highland Park Hospital.  At this point, I was drifting in and out of lucidity.  I remember one minute I was in the backseat and then I was in a wheel chair, then a gurney.  A group of nurses wheeled me toward the x-ray room.

“Elizabeth?”  One of them asked, “Would you like something for the pain now, or will you be alright until we finish the x-rays?”  No one ever calls me by my full name.  Not ever.  And I wasn’t really mentally there.  So I didn’t understand that she was talking to me.  I didn’t respond.  The nurses took me off the gurney and laid me on the cold metal x-ray table.  They proceeded to position my injured leg in a multitude of excruciating positions.  I blacked out.

Some time later, I awoke in an austere, sterile hospital room in the emergency ward.  A smiling doctor stood at the foot of my bed.

“You fainted during the x-rays,” he explained, ”We anesthetized you, and made an incision your leg and removed a few splinters of bone.  As you can see from the x-rays, you broke both your tibia and fibula clean through right about here,” he pointed to a spot on my now, gauze bandaged leg.  “You will need to stay home from school for a week to recuperate, and then we will put a fiber-glass cast on your leg.”

I went home and stayed there for seven days, too drugged up on vicodin to do much of anything but watch t.v.  After that, I was on crutches for eight weeks, then in a leg brace for four more weeks, then in physical therapy for about two months.  And all because of that pogo stick, which was donated to good will immediately after my unfortunate “accident.” Needless to say, I will never go near one again.  My children will never have a pogo stick.  My grandchildren will never have one.  And I will continue to tell my precautionary tale to all prospective pogo stick owners, in hopes of preventing more pogo stick related injuries.

SNL

This is amazing.  Really.  This is possibly the best SNL skit I've every seen.  Tina Fey looks just like Sarah Palin!  Watch it!!!!  

(http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/palin-hillary-open/656281/)

Drawing a Blank

So this is what blogging is like...  Wow.  I have NO idea what to write about.  This could be a very boring blog.  Or not.  I guess I should think of this as a clean slate.  Or a blank sheet of paper.  I can do whatever I want with it or nothing at all.  I could write a story or post a picture or just plain vent.  It's kind of sad.  I can write about whatever I want, and yet nothing comes to mind.  Well, I'm sure I'll think of something eventually.