Around the age of seven, my Papa K and I sat on a porch shooting pebbles from an oak slingshot he'd cut from a branch in his yard. I still have his forked creation wrapped in a cloth in a box, rotted bands and all.
I'm not sure why I've treasured the sling some forty years now, as we did not see each other all that often, nor was this stepgrandfather a "favorite" in terms of those I loved. Still, he was part of my family, and he was occasionally around me, and that July he took the time to sit alongside shooting pebbles skyward across dry Carolina grass.
As I grew older, I picked up on some of the tremors still vibrating from this stretch of my paternal history. Grandpa K, a widower, had married my grandmother, Lil, when she was young and not yet twenty. When Lil married him, she was a widow spent. Depression had drained her beauty up and down in cotton rows as a means to cover food and board. At the time of the union, K was nearly forty and his eldest child was around the same age as his new bride. Lil herself towed two orphans. Undoubtedly, the children closest to Lil's own age never viewed her as a mother figure, but along with her own, a couple of the younger began to call her "mother." At the onset a tension seethed early and remained both secretive and caustic among the primary adults and their blended procreation. Years passed before I realized just how corroded we'd all become.
But that hot summer with a slingshot in my possession, and my grandfather's welcome advance, all the nimbleness of Calamity Jane, Paul Bunyon, and even toons' Gravity Girl came together in my hand as Papa K instructed me over and over to, "load, steady, aim, and fire." My mother later told me how often she observed me collecting stones in a sack and stockpiling into a tin bucket for the next sure round of fire.
This week, as I've curled into my new year mental state, both literally and figuratively at night and with once or twice a dusting of snow, I've pulled a cotton throw across my lap. I've reflected some on childhood, some on loss, and some on projectile secrets that are all now but buried. I suppose someday a trio will pull my wooden toy from it's keeping spot and toss it aside, worthless and without a story. I'm good with this loss. I gave them early, steady, breath. Let them vandalize their own hard branch if they want such a trigger.
Image: Public Domain, USDA. (Cotton plant, Texas, 1996. Photo courtesy of USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. ==Source== http://photogallery.nrcs.usda.gov/Index.asp ==Licensing== {{PD-USGov-USDA}} )
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Comments
When I was in my thirties, a woman in the office had her 5-year-old daughter in for Take Our Daughters to Work Day. We all knew her just a little tiny bit, just from normal office comings and goings.
I'm not sure how it started, but I wound up showing her how I've always shot rubber bands. It's a specific technique that involves hooking one on your little finger, wrapping it around the base of your thumb, then stretching it to the tip of your index finger. You point just like a pretend gun, and fire.
The five-year-old, now deep into her twenties, barely knows who I am. But she remembers one day, learning how to shoot a rubber band from me. And she remembers that she could shoot rubber bands better than any of her friends.
She fired one off in church a few weeks later, and I got into terrible trouble.
As always, nicely rendered, almost dreamlike.
yeah well it's still in yer neurons, or your mind,
or spirit , or whatever
it was that
wrote
this
melancholy post.
like my dad's pipes................................
I was glad to see this here tonight, a good and solid thing to read with strong ties reaching into the past. Thanks, scupper.
Maybe time to cut a strip from a bicycle tube & replace the perished sling, refill the bucket, hit the things you never could before.