Unless you were in an Oklahoma public school, you probably didn't do the annual Land Rush
picnic day, a brown paper sack lunch all ready to go, and a stake to plant and claim one's
spot out on the playground lot there at Highland Park, after a hurried survey of the lay of
the land and its proximity to water, dry goods, and ammo: dirt clods. Unless you were some
pagan waif buried in the sweaters of 1970, you probably didn't do the Maypole on this same
playground, or know what a Maypole is at all, the crisscrossing rainbow streamers just
a social hurdle, the merry rub of shoulders as trees blossom and bees make economy in the
sun.
Vague remembrances, all those crisscrossing rainbow serpents, all those weird games that make
no sense, and towns of faces of the conquered, dressed up as blue jean victors. Pawnee Bill,
Woolaroc, the Salt Flats, Woody Guthrie, and Jim Thorpe, place names and names of places,
veins and heart. A sack lunch, a Fox and Sac Swede, getting sacked by Eisenhower, or the
other way around. Barefoot running those section lines barefoot, past the home of the woman
at the farmhouse she opens the door as I knock, selling magazine subscriptions to fund the
school orchestra program. She opens the door, her robe opened from a couch-side nap, her
chest a scarred pit where the breast once better homed and gardened. Learning what the word
mastectomy means.
Laid sleeping in the back of the VW station wagon Big Blue, four a.m., under a pile of blanket
on the way to Hydro, or Ames, it could be time for the farm and barns and cotton fields and
ponds where cattle drink when it isn't frozen, or it could be at Aunt's house and that time
sledding I busted my lip as they say, and the drama of blood on snow. Loaded like cargo in
the hold, carried sleeping from place to place, checking our name tags, making introductions.
I wanted my name to be Steve, not Forest. I wanted to be the 6 Million Dollar Man, but
hadn't thought it through, with inflation. Waiting to be picked up from school, bored, I hoofed
it toward home one day age five, or six, starting walking the 5 miles out of town along the
HW 51, picking up curious things and putting them in my metal lunchpail, lots of parts of
crushed turtles. Dad was flummoxed to find my a third of the way home, and who didn't get
the lecture that night.
Nineteen years in the same home, on the same land, in the same town, means nothing. Our
random names, our organs and skin, or addresses. Weather, wind and water, and the variety
in fashion at the moment. Kangaroo skin running shoes, I left you on the bank of a river
as we hurried on to some destination, a museum, or scenic midway point to the next postcard.
Topsoil so loose the Land Rush stake has nothing to grab and bite into, other than the crust of
a PBJ others buried last year, in that corner of the playground where the 4 leaf clovers pop,
where there is a hole in the chainlink fence that means a home run if one can kick the ball
there with enough luck, wearing the right toenails.
All the kids in white-face, in dirt-face, in OK-face, our own reservations. Wanting to be
Indian and Cowboy, both, not knowing anything. Still dumb, or numb, or a patient butterfly
waiting for the pin, the ether, and the placard. When you're young, you're a plot that hasn't
mapped out, a prospecting pan just dipping the stream for water, nothing else. It may look
like a feudal rodeo, if one can get the clown out of the way, and keep enough peanuts
in the pocket for a ride up the ferris wheel.
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