Found this interesting photo of my grandmother Smith’s Uncle, Arthur St. Charles Dunstan, in the Auburn archives.
He was a student at Auburn, when it was Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API), later became a professor of Engineering there, and then head of the Engineering department. There was a building there named after him, Dunstan Hall, for many years, but I believe they may have renamed it.
His brother, my great-grandfather, was John Harris Rowe Dunstan. He also attended Auburn. Arthur, and their mother, Medora Louis Hall Dunstan, are buried in Pine Hill Cemetery in Auburn. It still blows my mind that the after party for my wedding was walking distance from the cemetery where my dear Grandma’s own Grandmother, whose Civil War stories of Fredericksburg were handed down in the family, is buried, and I never knew it until years later. From Fredericksburg my line went, through Lee and Chatham county NC, to St. Tammany Parish, LA, and Chattanooga, TN to my parents having me in Atlanta, and me meeting a boy from Auburn, and ending up in that cemetery where my Grandmother’s grandmother is buried.
Think I might go visit old Medora in a couple weeks. See how she’s doing.
Get 5-year-old dressed as Dorothy Gale.
Take pics of kid in driveway, trying to elicit smiles by making husband do flying monkey impersonation. Check
Get to school barely on time. Check.
Try to complete work for job that actually pays; Get only about 1/4 done. Stress about it rest of day. Check.
Deal with fallout for calling neighbor a jackass. Check.
Pick daughter up from school. Check.
Take daughter to lunch. Leave before being seated due to bad manners. (Hers, not mine.) Check.
Drive wailing daughter home and make peanut butter sandwiches for us. Check.
Fold clothes, put over load of laundry, let dog out. Check.
Load Tiller in car, along with stuff for errands. Check.
Drop candy off at pinata house. Check.
Drive to school, hang banner and other stuff for Fantastic Friday. Drop off baked goods. Check.
Get Rollie from class, take him to library to take Lit Guild tests. Check.
Drive home. Make snack. Eat own snack. Read email. Check.
Break up fight between kids. Check.
Put kids in car, call husband to meet us and get cut off before making plans, pull out of driveway. Realize kid left shoes at house. Drive back to house. Turn off car, go back in. Check.
Meet husband in garage coming back out. Snap at husband unnecessarily to get into car because we are late. Check.
Get husband to drop off close to school so won’t miss volunteering timeslot. Check.
Man duck pond AND Go Fish because other volunteer doesn’t show up. Check.
Explain to high school kids who help out and finally get to sit for a minute. Check.
Explain to next shift. Check.
Stand with daughter watching people come out of Haunted house looking scared, and laughing at them. Check.
Watch as son comes out, not looking scared. Worry about his mental state. Check.
Eat BBQ with family, watch children eat too much cotton candy, get blue faces and hands. Check.
Do cakewalk, but fail to win anything. Check.
Reluctantly take tickets from friend with twin babies so she can get her kids out faster. Check.
Find way to burn tickets fastest (Bingo). Check.
Play Bingo with whole family, actually have fun. Check.
Watch husband win Bingo and get restaurant gift certificate. Check.
Play another round with big gambler son, win another gift certificate (manicure). Check!
Decide with son that final tickets should be used for big cakewalk win, just like last year. Son wins cakewalk! Check.
Drive home, find secret gift at doorstep. Check.
Eat cupcakes won at cakewalk with family. Check.
Feel sick. Check.
Clean kitchen. Check.
Put kids to bed. Check.
Open beer. Check.
Watch Red Dawn with husband until time to drink with neighbors. Check.
My baby is seven today. SEVEN. When you were six, I could still think, I have babies. The baby is gone now. I look at you now, and remember what you were like as a baby, a toddler, a preschooler.
But he is seven now, and seven is no longer baby.
This has been a good year. You started Kindergarten this time last year:
and now you are in First grade. What a difference a year makes!
You are still in the Magnet class and it is fun to see you with your friends. You started riding the bus last year and you still like the bus. Daddy drops you off in the mornings, though, because it means that we get a little more time together before you go off to school and he heads to work. I get you from the bus stop in the afternoons, and you are usually a little grumpy with me. I guess you are tired and hot (it is still August and buses don’t have AC). You did great in Kindergarten, really progressing with your reading now. You still read with Tiller and Daddy before bed, but you also read chapter books after you go to bed, and we are worrying you don’t get enough sleep because of it. You are currently reading, “The Guardians of Ga’Hoole” with Daddy and Tiller, and on your own, you are reading “The Magician’s Nephew.” Just last night, you argued with me about whether you can read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” first, and then go back and read book one (Magician’s Nephew), or whether you are supposed to read One first. I say you can do it either way. Not you. You like order and in an orderly world, you read One first, then move on to Two. Hopefully, some day you can forgive me for making you read Two first.
You and Tiller got razors for Christmas and you ride them around in the garage for an hour at a time. You don’t get sick and you don’t fall and get hurt. (Knock on wood.) Speaking of, we haven’t had any ER visits or really any sickness in a year. You and Tiller both missed a week of school last year because you had a puke once then have a fever for a week virus. But they weren’t bad and it just made you snuggly.
You don’t have too much time for snuggling this year, but occasionally, you will slow down and cuddle on the couch in your pjs with me or daddy. I realize now that they are dwindling that those moments will be fewer and further between. I try to cherish those moments.
You lost some teeth this year! The first two you lost at school and they just sent them home in a plastic baggie with your name written on them in sharpie. I felt a little gypped. But then your tooth got loose when Cousin Luci and Uncle Wade were visiting and you wanted me to pull it, and we made Daddy and Wade squirm while we stood in the kitchen, wiggling the tooth back and forth, wiping the blood with a paper towel and finally making it crack! and come out. You are not scared of the tooth fairy like Aunt Lisa was when we were little.
This was the year you ate all the chocolate out of the Advent Calendar. I know one day it will be funny, but right now it is still too soon. And the year you cut a chunk right out of the front of your hair. And the year that you got a mohawk. Three times.
I am amazed at all of the things you did this year. You played t-ball last fall and this past spring. You are a natural – always raring to go play, and really pretty good. Watching you out on the field, doing celebratory dances when you make a play, is like pure joy for me. I try to be modest, but i just about burst with pride at how you excel. You are about to start soccer this fall, again, and I hope you like it as much.
You learned how to ride a bike this year, and how to swim. You could swim before, but suddenly, you were going underwater and swimming the length of the pool and you even had your first year on Swim Team this summer. (Go Stingrays!) The competitive Mom in me had to wrestle with not pushing you, and letting you do things your way, even though I knew there were pointers I could give you that would help you improve. You finally listened a little bit and really improved your time, and then you spent the rest of the summer asking me to give you “some more pointers.” It was pretty cute, and I liked that you asked me, because usually, you want to do everything yourself, and don’t want anyone to tell you how to do it.
You also learned to go off the diving board! I can’t even tell you how terrified i was when you and Tiller and Daddy came home saying you both knew how to go off the diving board. And sure enough, we would go to the pool and you and your friends would jump off the diving board, over and over for hours on end. And then we would go home and you would say you didn’t feel good, but i knew it was just that you were completely waterlogged.
You have reached the point where you can sit and watch a whole baseball game (in person or on tv) and I am very much looking forward to watching some football with you this fall. You have learned the rules and can have a great conversation about it, and I never realized how satisfying it could be to have those discussions with you.
Just about a month ago, i let you drive the JetSki (with me right behind you) at the Lake. I had the kill switch, but I pulled over in a huge cove, far away from the shore or docks, and I let you sit in front of me, and taught you a little about how to drive it. Then I said, do you want to try? And you were excited. I was prepared for you to hit the gas too hard even though I warned you not to, so I wouldn’t get thrown off, but I don’t think you were prepared for it, and it scared you. You didn’t want to try and drive anymore, and I think it was a good lesson. Riding with you kids is one of my favorite things to do. We drive around to some usual spots, usually in the morning, before there are many folks out on the lake and you are learning your way around. You know the usual spots: Bulldog, Aerie, The Warm Water, Rooty Creek, Crooked Creek, and Goat Island. I ask where you want to go and you almost always want to go to Goat Island. It’s kind of “our place.” At the end of our rides, I always head back towards the house, and I make you tell me how to get there. When we get back near the cove, I ask if you want to do some circles, and you always say yes, and then I ride us in circles until we’re a little dizzy and you are just on the very verge of being scared. Each time, we go a little harder and faster. And this summer, we started taking you and Tiller out on the tube (nice and slow). The first time, we went out, and you were the guinea pig (except you kept calling it being the Hamster) and Foley rode as spotter. After that, I started teaching you and Tiller to be spotters for each other, and that has worked well. Maybe next year we’ll try skis.
You talk back a bit now, and you fight with us, and you probably are a little too addicted to video games. You definitely have your own ideas about how you want to do things, and you and I get into some arguments, but I am so very proud of the smart, funny, laughing, passionate boy you are. I love your eagerness, and your gap-toothed smile, and the way you drag your feet when you walk up the hill from the bus stop. I know you can’t stay my baby forever, that I have to work hard to make you a wonderful young man, to teach you respect and pride and the value of an education and courtesy, but I understand now why Mom and Dad still say I’ll always be their first baby.
You will always be my first baby. The baby with the skin that tans easily and the big brown eyes that just make me melt and the thick, wavy brown hair that always reminds me so much of my own, and of my Dad’s, and of the inexplicable ways that we are all three so similar, just a little line of stitches marching down the hem of time. Pop, Daddy, Me, You.
I’m really not sure whether this makes me eco-conscious, or a big old, no fun stick-in-the-mud. I do know that it looks frighteningly like something Pop would have done, although I did not take it as far as his sister Mary, who would just strike out the writing on cards and then reuse them.
Perhaps would have looked cuter had I saved weeks of comics and wrapped it all in those? Curious to see what Rollie’s reaction will be when his gift is not clad in Spidey or, um, anything with color on it.
The proverbial Needle In a Haystack. The diamond in a very messy and large rough. My diamond. We found it.
I was picking veggies from the garden, and I came up to the carport and Todd and the kids were grinning like jackasses eating briars.
“Mama?” Todd said. “Remember when you said you would take the kids to Chuck E. Cheese if they found something for you?”
I knew right away what it was they had found, but I played dumb for effect. For the kiddos. I had promised them, in those first days after losing the diamond, when we were turning the house upside down, and going through the dirt in the vacuum cleaner, that if they found my diamond, I would take them to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
“Did you find something?”
They made me close my eyes and hold out my hand. I did. They told me i could open. I did.
There was my engagement ring, diamond still missing, in the palm of my hand.
Wait. What? Where’s my diamond?!
Rollie walked over and put a gem in my hand.
I looked at Todd. “Where did you find it?” I said, amazed at how small it looked in my hand.
He had been moving the new mattress his parents gave us into Rollie’s room to replace Rollie’s old mattress. He lifted the old mattress up and found a piece of paper and my diamond. It is so small, it is a miracle that he saw it. I remembered, then, that one of the places that I remembered my ring hanging up on things was in Rollie’s room when I changed his sheets. It must have come off then.
What are the odds of getting a new mattress a month after losing your diamond and then finding the diamond under the old mattress? Was it God? Maybe. I waver between thinking there are no coincidences and thinking that life is all a series of hits and misses without any rhyme or reason. This definitely made me swing back to the side of fate and destiny and higher power. At least for a moment; For a moment, things seemed clear and magical at the same time.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Todd said.
“Yeah, I think so.” Diamonds look different when they aren’t in the setting. In all honesty, it kind of looked fake.
“It kind of looks fake, though, doesn’t it?” Todd said.
“Yeah, kind of.”
But I set it in the prongs of my ring and it fit perfectly.
We went inside and the kids celebrated “their” find. I put my arms around my husband and hugged him and remembered how wonderful it is that he asked me to marry him. I have not ever, not once, ever regretted saying, “Yes.” It is the most important “Yes” i ever uttered. Then, we all ate dinner together.
And that’s how, after seven years of parental avoidance, yet another wall came down, another line crossed, and I finally had to break down and take the kids to Fuck E. Cheese’s.
SkeeBall is still fun. The pizza is still disgusting.
I can’t believe that school is back in session so early. I know that it makes a difference in the education of kids with crappy parents, but I feel like the good parents and the kids who still learn at home over the summer kind of get the shaft. It just seems like summer should be Memorial Day to Labor Day.
Rollie started first grade this year. FIRST GRADE. How do I have a first grader? I keep on thinking back to my first grade teacher, Miss Hamilton, at Northwestern Elementary in Crabapple. We only had one first grade. Rollie’s school has four first grade classes! I hope that his first grade experience is as rewarding as mine was. I remember my reading group, and the table at the back of the class where we would read together. I remember doing SRA cards, too. I remember music class with Mr. Martin and PE out on the field. I can still smell that old school.
We took Rollie to school the first day, because you have to send about three bags of supplies with the kids and they could never get it all on the bus and to school in one piece without some help. It was crowded, so Todd and Tiller dropped Rollie and I off out front and we went in together. He was so excited.
We didn’t make it to class before they started the pledge of Allegiance. Everyone, parents and kids, all stopped in the hall and put their hands over their hearts and recited the pledge. It was comforting, in the same way that saying the Lord’s Prayer is comforting to me. I kissed him goodbye at his desk and headed back out.
Next day, we put him on the bus. Now, there is one little boy down the street who is in 2nd grade this year. He never rides the bus in the morning. Instead, it’s just Rollie and his harem:
Yes, he has six girls at the bus stop with him. He is the only boy. Next year, with Tiller and her friend Josie down the street, the number will be eight girls to his one! Nice to have so many of them, so close in age, all on one street.
It was the summer of 1998. I can still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was pre-Todd, pre-Rollie and Tiller, Pre-Quint and Simon, and Scully. Hard to imagine that now.
My sister was my best friend. No one else even came close, except maybe that boy. We were parting ways. He was off to Phoenix. It was an amicable parting, but i think I knew it was over forever. I’m not sure he knew yet. I was headed back to Atlanta, back to the South, back Home. The open road was like the first sheet in a blank book just waiting to be written.
I had me a Ryder truck, and a sister who agreed to follow me, driving my car back. It was the same car that I had in Atlanta the day I crapped in my pants on the connector, caught in the worst traffic jam ever, and just having left Three Dollar Cafe. It wasn’t pretty.
But that is a story for another day.
We left Denver on a sunny, hot, dry day. It was July 31st. We broke down later that day in Victoria, Kansas. You are probably thinking, “they didn’t get very far” and if you are thinking that, then you have never driven across Kansas, because Kansas is a never ending Son of a bitch.
Lisa flagged me down, driving the Acura, and waving frantically. This was in the olden days, when people didn’t have cel phones, unless they were selling drugs, and I didn’t even know what I was missing. I know that is hard to imagine, what with me having my iPhone surgically attached to my hand and all. If I were to do that drive today, without my phone, it would feel just like walking across Kansas naked.
I pulled over at the next stop. Which looked just like the last stop and every other one in Kansas, too. I pulled up next to Lisa and probably said something along the lines of “What the fuck?”
And she probably said something along the lines of, “There are fucking flames coming out from under your truck!”
Okay, they were just sparks. We had a muffler. It wouldn’t stay attached to the fucking truck. I didn’t know it was the muffler until we got down on our stomachs at a truck stop in Kansas and looked under and saw this round tubular thing hanging down.
So, we found the number for Ryder, and we found the payphone, the one around the corner, against the cinder block building wall, in the baking heat. We were on hold forfuckingever.
Lisa on Hold with Ryder.
This is what she looked like when I first handed off the phone after I had been on hold so long that my ear had fallen asleep. I went and got the camera out of boredom. And this is what she looked like another thirty minutes later:
And yes, yes she is wearing overalls. I'm getting to that.
So, when we finally got a hold of Ryder on the FUCKING PAYPHONE, we told them we had a problem with our sparky tubular metal thing under the truck. And they said, “ma’am, you got yourself a muffler problem,” and we said, “Right, the muffler. Isn’t that what I just said? Great, how soon can you be here to fix it?” And he said, “Where are you?” and we said, “Kansas.”
Silence.
“Uh, where in Kansas?”
Lisa runs in the gas station to figure out where the fuck in Kansas we are.
“We’re in Victoria, Kansas.”
Silence. Then, “Well, we can get someone out to Victoria tomorrow.”
I look around me in dismay, because this is what it looks like where we are.
View from Gas Station, Victoria, KS. July 31st, 1998
“Um, okay,” i say, “so, what would you do if you had a muffler problem like this and y’all couldn’t get here til tomorrow?”
“Well, Ma’am, I’d find some baling wire and tie it back up.”
And that’s what we did.
We walked around a gas station in Victoria, KS, begging a piece of bailing wire from men in trucks. Turns out it’s not that hard to find baling wire in Kansas. And then I got my ass down on the hot pavement, and climbed under that truck, just like the T-Birds in Grease, and I used that wire and I tied that muffler to the truck so tight it was never gonna come off!
I told the kids to put on their bathing suits, get their goggles and towels, and get in the car. “we’re going down to meet your dad at a studio, going by Goodwill, then going straight to the pool,” I said. So, that’s how I found myself on 85South, all three of us singing along at the top of our lungs to Tokyo Police Club, and i looked back in the rear view and both kids already had their goggles on down over their eyes, riding down 85, and I smiled at the image of what we must look like to people in cars around us.
I overhear Rollie telling Tiller “Smell my finger.”
Having been friends with more boys than girls along the way, all sorts of alarms went off in my head, backed by a “Master of Puppets” soundtrack. (‘m looking at you. You know who you are. Coming out of your girlfriend’s house, when you went in to “see what was taking her so long” when we picked her up on the way to school, and then making me smell your finger? Some scars never go away.)
“Rollie,” I said. “Come here.”
Rollie rolls his eyes (remind me again why I’m not allowed to slap his face?) and comes to stand in front of me.
“Why did you ask Tiller to smell your finger?”
“I didn’t.” [You little liar.]
“Yes, you did. I just heard you. Why?”
“I don’t remember.”
[I’m staring at him and he is staring back at me, rebelliously unblinking and wide-eyed.]
“Why did you say it?”
“Oh, never mind!” He walks away.
“Get back here.” [Try to control voice so it is not a yell.] “I say when we are done. Why did you ask her to smell your finger?”
[Comes back and stares at me.]
“Why? We can stand here all day until you tell me.”
“Because it’s stinky.”
“Why is it stinky?”
“Because i wiped it on my bottom.”
What. The. Fuck.
Is this normal older brother behavior? Am I raising a psychopath?
He got sent to the bathroom to wash his hands and then to his room. I asked Tiller, “Has your brother made you smell his finger before?”
She thinks, eyes on the ceiling.
“No. But he did ask me to smell his bottom one time. I said ‘No.'”
“Good girl. We don’t smell other people’s bottoms.”
Parenting is sometimes completely absurd. It never occurred to me to teach my kids that we don’t smell other people’s bottoms. But it is a lesson they need to know. Sometimes you end up hearing yourself actually saying words like, “We don’t smell other people’s bottoms.” You think, “what the hell has become of me?”
