Ah, Wilderness! Ah, Bottle Rockets!

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I was never the best with fireworks.

Which I find odd, in retrospect, because I had nearly flawless hand-eye coordination. Reflexes that would make a hummingbird jealous. I played tennis, and well. But, somehow this quick-speed ability failed me at fireworks.

I learned the hard way, too.

For some reason, as children, when the Hot Holidays arrived, so called because we were allowed fireworks as part of the celebration – and these included Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas which drained into New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, the Fourth; basically, we begged for fireworks on every holiday – and when we got them, oh how we eagerly hoarded the stash of Wildcats, Roman Candles, and Bottle Rockets.

We did this because we were preparing for battle, specifically with the bottle rockets.

The competition was fierce because the family was large, and so, there was precious time to twiddle thumbs and admire the holidays for their own purposes. Blood was soon to be drawn, when night fell, and there was an entire forest behind the house where our stashes would have to be hidden, kept in utmost secret, until the crucial hour.

I’m not sure who started Bottle Rocket Battle (it was by far and away, the most anticipated and heated of the Fireworks Wars), so I’m going to blame my cousin Michael, or his cousin from his mother’s side,  Hubo. (That’s right, his name was Hubo). They’re easy targets. Literally. But more on that in a moment.

Looking back, I wonder why no one stopped us.  Perhaps, our families knew we’d learn more if we actually got hurt. At any rate, that’s exactly what happened.

With the exception of the Christmas my mother set the yard on fire with an unfortunate mishandling of a Roman Candle, while trying not to spill her eggnog (it was less egg, more the nog), we held all of our fireworks displays, way out in the country of Winston County, in a section of it called Nanih Waiya, the birthplace of the Choctaws: land of gulleys, poprocks, a park with a large mound where their sacred dead are buried, and the countless number of people the police fine and/or arrest for trying to have sex on top of it, or “smoke the weed,” after the park has closed.

There was family land out there; Ma Onie, for instance, lived out here with two of her children, and about three hundred or so head of cattle. Cattle that were never sold, never killed, just fed, and allowed to reproduce.

The setting-of-the-yard-on-fire was an accidental ritual my Mother introduced, I’m afraid. It was a unique event that I would repeat down at Fish Camp, in Aunt Dot’s yard, several years later on the Fourth, while trying to outshine my cousin Kaye who could do everything perfectly from marriage and babies to coiffed hair and making even bran cupcakes delicious, etc. The difference was this: Mother set the yard on fire in the daylight; I, however, set Aunt Dot’s yard on fire in the middle of the night. 

I mean, come on!

You might think fire is easier to spot at nighttime. It isn’t.  Should this ever come up in dinner (or water cooler) conversations, you will now be the wiser.  I’m still waiting for this tidbit to somehow find its way on Jeopardy.

I remember that Christmas, a distant relative who was traveling (he always seemed to travel on family holidays) and unable to come home sent the children a large box of Chinese fireworks. At first, that meant little to nothing to me, wasn’t fire the same in every language, culture? Wasn’t it like, the one thing you could always count on not being different?

Pretty much. It was the “works” part that was foreign and dangerous and of course, absolutely what any child could ever ask for in a firework, if he or she were prone to throwing them at his or her cousins in War.

This is what we did, this was our game.  And these Chinese Reds, Paul called them that, he was fifteen and so, far more intelligent about the world than we were, they flew at a speed that had gotten my sister in trouble on more than one occasion.

See, we’d wait until dark, slip outside under the guise of, you know, shooting some fireworks, so far so good, that was expected.  The adults would mill around on the back patio, and we’d shoot out for the pasture.  The cows, grown used to the tradition would see us running into their yard, so to speak, and begin the long trek and amble down the other side of the hill, to settle in for the night, and low. We’d head to our respective stashes and the game would begin.

The point?

So, anyway, here’s how you played, and don’t try this at home (unless you have cows, and thus, a large pasture). You’d have your own cigarette lighter, no easy feat in a family of non-smokers – thankfully, we had grills and Buckstoves – and you’d track your opponents down, zero in on them, as fast as you could, light the bottle rocket and throw it at them.

This is the stupidest idea for a game in the history of the world, abridged and otherwise.

Yet, we played it. Year in and year out…until the time when I almost took Hubo’s eye out. It was all our faults, actually. We’d decided to play the game during the day, out of absolute and sheer boredom…I mean, we’d already kicked over all the antbeds and stuck the ends of the bottle rockets into it, allowing the ants to attack the rose-colored wood, and then we’d light the sucker and send them to the moon, pretending they were on a mission from their own Anthropod NASA.

They would never make it to the moon. Half the time, they didn’t make it over the chimney. One ill-fated flight flew slap into the side of the mailbox.  There’s always a risk.

So, naturally, there we were, in broad daylight, every antbed left unmade, and what’s a bunch of kids to do? Bottle Rocket Battle.

The problem was, this time, you could totally see your opponents. The bigger problem?  Parents milling about on the patio could also now see you. The lovely mystery of stealth, from all sides, was eliminated. The spoils would have to go not to the soft-footed, but to the quickest draw. If we were going to get in trouble for this, I was, at the least, going down in a blaze of glory, for it.

I was, like, having to try and light four and five bottle rockets at a time.

And, then, before I could see him, there was Hubo, one foot in the ditch, and the other on the cold, unloving road, merely a foot or two away from me; he’d been hiding behind that unsightly bridal bush that Ma Onie wouldn’t let anyway cut down, even though the county had told her it was a blind spot.  People should drive slower, she said.

The calling of the cows.

He was flicking his lighter, hopping a little on one leg, and I got nervous. I didn’t have time to light a single bottle rocket, so I just threw them all at him, at his face, and the bottom of one, apparently, stabbed him in his eye.

He cried so loudly, we were all around, what, 11 or 12, and with such a wail, that the cows came back over the hill, thinking it was time to eat breakfast. There was hardly a scratch on his eye, I thought, really, but he still came back from the emergency room with an eye patch.  

He was the center of attention at school until like Valentine’s Day.

Which we celebrated, quietly, peacefully, and with nothing more exciting than  a couple of stupid sparklers.  And that was fine by me.  I didn’t touch another firework until this past New Year’s, and that I did with my foot, protected safely behind a steel-covered boot, my jacketed arm covering both my eyes.

Which isn’t easy to do when you wear glasses.

I drank it as if it were holier than Coke.

Hold on, now. Don’t think I’m crazy, entirely, but I have on three separate occasions dreamed things that have then occurred. In actual life.  

The first involved a childhood pet, Scruff, who had gone to live with my grandparents at Fish Camp, a family compound surrounded my cabins, ponds, a basic swimming pool, and a torturously long vegetable garden, where we gathered each summer for a fish fry and the annual task of grading blueberries and other such fruit; several on my father’s side were in the fruit farm industry; after an afternoon of grading blueberries, there is no child on this planet who wouldn’t rather be doing math.  All in all, I enjoyed these summers with a relish heretofore unknown to a child that age.  That is, until Uncle Joef decided to install an octagonal-designed farmhouse for emus.

Emus, I’m sure you know, are the opposite of all things pleasant.

Anywany, the dream: I was back square in the middle of eastern Mississippi, tucked away cozily in my bed, when there, in my blue bedroom, appeared Scruff jumping into the bed with me, and curling up above my head, whining. 

The next morning, Ya-ya called to tell me that Scruff had died.

She’d been poisoned, allegegly by some evil hunter who had been trespassing on the land and was irritated at her barking; my grandfather, suspicious as always, still arriving too late to make amends. It seems an awful thing to do to any living animal, especially for such a ridiculous reason – and it is.  Sadly, it is not that uncommon in the small-minded backwoods of Mississippi. I stay angry at men like that. But, I suppose, it takes all their thinking skills to carry the rifle, upright, barrel away from their own faces.

The second such dream involved a man I’d never met before. The father of a teacher my sister worked with.  I only nominally knew the teacher, herself, Mrs. Bell. A sweet woman, who, on the few occasions I went with my sister to her classroom – mostly before the school year started to help her clean her room – and Mrs. Bell, when she was there would always give me a Vernon’s Lemon-Lime Soda. I’m not sure why, but like any child would, I took it, and drank it as if it were holier than Coke.

She was a giving woman; still is.

And then one night, I dreamed I was on the edge of a high red hill, a small cliff, many of which dot the “famous” Winston County landscape. Our annual crafts festival is called the Red Hills Arts Festival, for instance.  It’s a type of clay and it’s a dense, earthy material full of possibilities for a kid. It, and the poprocks.

God, I loved a poprock.

They’re hard but breakable. You throw them on the ground, and they pop open revealing a soft collection of dusty, dry dirt inside. The Choctaws, native to the area – truth be told, it was their area – would mix this dirt with water and create war paint.

Need I say more? Does an adventurous child, to the point of earning a raw switch to the hind legs, need anything else in this often, too-great-big-of-a-world than access to bona fide Indian war paint?

Take a look at my hind legs and you tell me. (Just don’t be jealous of my calf muscles – I played tennis for years).

Now, in this particular dream I was peering over the edge and in the bottom of the small valley there I noticed a 1970s Lincoln Continental. It was a dull mint-green color, and very long…surely, you recall how long those cars used to be. All that was missing were goal posts. 

And in this car, with the driver-side window rolled down, a leg resting through the open window, was an aging black man, with a cane/fishing pole, a genuius of an invention for a senior citizen who requires a cane and a fishing pole combo, napping.   I watched him for several solid minutes, and then it started to rain.  Heavily.

It rained so fast that I began to worry that he wouldn’t wake up and he’d drown. And that is exactly what happened to him.

I yelled and yelled and screamed and it hit me: I knew this man, after all, even though I’d never seen him before. It was Mrs. Bell’s father. I called after him, again and time and again, and nothing. He drowned. And I was powerless to help him.

I saw Mrs. Bell the next day and told her, so sure was I that it was going to happen. She smiled at me, in that teacherly way, and assured me her father was too crippled to drive, and had never owned a Lincoln Continental. And something else about the power of the adolescent’s overactive imagination. She gave me a Lemon-Lime Vernon’s Soda, and then took it back: perhaps it was the sugar in the soda that gave me such dreams. She was concerned, I guess, that she might be aiding and abetting me in my overactive imagination.

I went on my way. Less than eager to help my sister re-arrange her classroom; it was fun until the school year started. Her kids were awfully messy to be the gifted students. I dreaded being picked up from the other school and dropped off at hers. 

Despite being Mississippi, she did have more than one gifted student.

I’m not sure how much time passed, a week or two, but one day Mrs. Bell was absent. She wasn’t in her classroom when I passed by it on the way to my sister’s. I asked Marsha when I got to her room and she told me that Mrs. Bell’s father had died.  He’d ridden with a nephew, last Sunday, to do some fishing, which he hadn’t done in years, and the boat tipped over…and he drowned.

When I did finally see Mrs. Bell, I was terrified she’d blame me for it. She didn’t at all. She hugged me and told me it was all right. Not to worry. Who knew her cousin was even coming to visit. He rarely did, but had a special reason for this sudden visit:  He’d been unemployed for a good while, and finally had found a job; he’d saved up his money to come down south to see the family, and was most proud of his recent purchase: a new Lincoln Continental. He wanted to show them all.

It wasn’t mint-green, but now we’re just splitting hairs.

The third dream, about 9/11, I’m not ready to share yet…it makes me nervous. So, instead, to change the nature of this blog, I’ll share this last one for my third dream. Even though it’s not about anything that’s happened (not yet anyway), and even though last night I had a perfectly frighteningly delicious dream I could tell you about being caught up in a tornado and thrown across the street and into a neighbor’s house…we’ll go with this other dream for now.

We’ll say it’s about destiny.  Because I like to think it is.

[…] I’m on a trip of some sort that has taken me to the woods, a retreat if you will.  I’m waking up, feeling this charge of potential, does that make sense?, feeling renewed.  I gladly get out of bed, which rarely happens for me, and I’m grabbing my towel and toiletries and leaving my cabin.

It’s a cold morning, but I feel rejuvenated.  I head for the communal showers, which are housed a few cabins down, a wood structure situated in the middle of this camp, for lack of a better term.

There’s a tall flagpole to the left, flying a blue, purple, and orange fabric.  The sky is intense and clear.  There’s no one else around.  I seem to be either the only one awake, or the only one at this retreat, this camp.

I step into the bathroom, and I’m immediately awed by how large it appears on the inside, as if it might have once been a gym facility, lockers and all. I pull aside the shower curtain and turn the water on, to steam the cold tile.  I remember putting my glasses on a distressed, amber-colored chair made of pine; I think it was pine, anyway. I step into the shower and feel the warm water.  It’s arresting.  I’m washing my hair when I hear it.  Crying.

I think at first it’s just the shower, you know, how old shower heads can whistle?  But, somehow, I can hear the difference, and I turn the water off. I call out to see who’s there.

The crying stops.

I call out again, Who’s there?

I step out of the shower, pull the towel around me and begin to walk towards the back of the bathroom. I turn the corner at the end of the sinks, there’s a long row of white porcelain sinks, and there against the wall, on a swollen cot, stained with urine, and that smell, in a beautiful copper dress, is Billie Holiday.

And one day, I'll be in this picture, too.

Her face is a mess; her breath stinks. Her eyes are yellowed. And this is what she says to me: “It’s about time. I thought you’d never come. We all sorta mad at you, Kris. You better get on back and start singing. We’re all in your hands; you’ve been picked. You chosen.”

And she put a tear on the tip of her finger and rubbed it on my eye. And I finished her crying, while she turned over on her other side and disappeared into the swollen cotton.

So, you tell me: what would you do next? 

I hardly think telling this story would open recording studio doors to me, but heck, I guess anything’s worth a shot, huh? 

At any rate, that dream was a lot better than last night’s. I never did recover from being a tornado survivor, in last night’s dream, a dream than went on and on and on: I moved away, I bought a house, had an entire career, aged, had children, the Whole Nine Lives of dreams.

But anytime I thought about that tornado, I cried.

No wonder I can’t get out of bed in the morning, dreams like that – they just exhaust you.