As is usually the case in big families, I was most often the victim of sibling babysitting. It’s nothing short of a hate crime, trust me. Especially when you’re the youngest…and by a wide margin.

I was subjected to any number of embarrassing punishments (hook rugging only one among them) which, by sheer force of being such a young age, they each ran the risk of imprinting. And now, in this present day, rug hooking has become one of my secret hobbies and guilty pleasures well into my 30s.

My first experience with a hook rug involved an afternoon in which Dodie was commanded to drop her plans (which I’m sure involved nothing but twirling a broom in the front yard; she was eager to be on the flag team. Her cheerleader friends were dumbfounded: why would she want to leave Varsity Pep for the Band? There are some questions with answers meant to elude us, I suppose, to help us build character. That’s what my Papa Leon always said, anyway. Of course, he had polio).

Whatever the reason, I quickly found myself forced into completing a hook rug, in the loose shape of an owl. The rug itself with all its accoutrement was kept in an old collapsible bank box and hidden on the top of a shelf in the second hall closet.

I’d never seen a hook rug before, mind you.

I’d never even seen the second hall closet before, for that matter. I mean, inside it. I knew it was there, but it rumbled. It made scary noises, and I’d been told there was no floor inside, either. It was opened straight down to the foundations of the house. For more storage potential, and to give the “devil a way out.”  Because apparently, the devil randomly visits Christian houses and you better make sure you behave or he’ll get you.

See, in Mississippi, there’s no need for bogey men, or monsters. We cut right to the chase and have the devil get you if you misbehave.

The things I believed, as a child.

I was, like, the best child to lie to. I questioned nothing. The reason for this is that we always told lies in my family with a tinge of truth, that gave it more of an anchor in reality. Because, lo and behold, the one time I braved myself enough to peek into the second hall closet, sure enough, there was no floor. Instead, there was box on top of box stacked two-dwarves-high, from the foundation of the house straight up.

I can say, without political correctness, the term two-dwarves-high. My Uncle Ran was a dwarf; it’s in our genetic pool, but just in the shallow end, only. I’ll talk about him another time, but you should know he built his own car, drank like a minnow (which in his case was equivalent to a whale shark), and was quite the ladies’ man. Seriously.

Also, he could pick up a dime off the floor using his teeth without bending his legs.

I guess that’s what got the ladies.

So, anyway…back to the story: it’s that afternoon, 1980-something, and I’m sitting on the couch with a sad looking, thick-threaded, half-hooked, barely recognizable owl, with part of a burnt orange wing and a sienna brown and yellow beak.

She’d apparently started this project and…that was all. (I am not surprised by this).

I was daunted, to say the least, but with my usual panache, the roots of which were beginning to show themselves even then at the green age of seven, I took to the rug, and dug around in the box and surveyed the “kit,” as it were.

Now, I don’t know what constitutes fancy in the world of the hooked rug, but the tools were, I would say, rudimentary.

However, I loved the weight of that hook needle: the top-half was covered in a sweet-smelling metal, and had a wooden handle, that bulbed at the end, filling the space inside your palm. Its bent tooth, the hook, was perfectly molded, and reminded me of Aunt Ru who crocheted with such agility, I fully believed her needles doubled as spy weapons.

I thought for years that Aunt Ru was a spy. I don’t know why, I just did.

I also loved the small, baby-sized sheers that came with the kit, in the event that you made a near-fatal mistake with an over-eagerly placed, and thus errant, strand of yarn. And to Dodie’s teasing and amazement, as well as that of her cheerleader friends, I sat there on that couch until I finished the blame thing.

I can only assume my ignorant patience as a “quiet child” is what kept me so enraptured with the process of pulling yarn through burlap-encased plastic molding, but, honestly, I have to say that I do remember enjoying it. Perhaps, Dodie thought it’d be a cruel thing to make me do, but I took to anything assigned to me with the relish of a devoted monk, desperate for a sacred blessing.

I excelled at everything because of this: church, the Lite Brite Challenge of 1988, Frogger, spelling. And it all started because of the hook rug. At its knee, so to speak, I learned determination, fortitude and the wherewithal to “get even” by “getting the job done.”

I also learned the value of subtle humor, which I think fed my desire to study high comedy in later life: Moliere, Wilde, et al. Being a small child, you can imagine the tableau: I was all but missing beneath the weight and size of the rug, but nevertheless, there I sat, calmly sleeping (I to this day tend to nap when a project is finished) propped up by the couch pillows, cuddled under a brown and orange yarn-owl, now completely recognizable as an owl, when she and the other girls came in from the front yard, with their flushed cheeks and the kitchen broom.

I imagine fawning took place. I was a beautiful child…but when I woke up, the rug, the box, all of it was gone. The family had returned and I was nestled gently under an afghan, still on the couch. I thought for a split-second I’d dreamed the entire thing, had it not been for a stray piece of yarn that had fallen between the cushions.

Orange and dangerous, the color of the wings.

The color of flight.

That right there, that idea of flight and freedom, got to me, even as a child.

And, it’s safe to say, on that idea, I was definitely hooked.

Still am.

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I’m holding up four fingers, at this very moment, even though you can’t see them.

But, that’s it: four items. Four, random though purposeful, inconsequential items.

One of those items was a candy bar. A Kit-Kat, actually, and it was easily stolen because I used to run the “candy store” between class periods, at my high school. 

The smart kids got to do everything fun, especially when it involved cash handling.

What do you want from me? The Kit-Kat logo is copyrighted.

I only stole one candy bar and only the one time because I had convinced myself that morning that I was experiencing the onset of premature adult diabetes, which I think is how most people experience it…very suddenly.

I mean, it can’t take, like, what, about twenty minutes, tops?

I had my assumed hypoglycemic attack right before third period (World History), standing behind that booth in my maroon windbreaker and tight-rolled jeans and I didn’t want to walk all the way to my locker to get my money (rather, I couldn’t. Who would run the “candy store?”) so I just took the Kit-Kat and ate it, right then and there.

I never paid for it.

Then there was the time that I thought I’d stolen ice cream. But, it was at a buffet. So, there’s that. Shan dared me to do it, truth be told. We were returning from a church youth trip where we’d done some noble thing like sing hymns to the homeless outside Wal-Mart, something like that, and we’d stopped on the way back to eat at this restaurant called Quincy’s, now gone the way of the dodo. It was a country-style buffet, so naturally everything was included in the price, even the ice cream.

Still, I thought I was being a rebel. I was, let’s face it, not the brightest bulb in the tool box.

Oh, did they laugh at me.

What was I to do to get even except roll their yards.

During my formative years of high school (when most of my five-finger discount days were lived), there was something akin to an unofficial moratorium on rakish youth purchasing more than one package of toilet paper. Honestly. A policeman, Toby (as it was a small town, we all knew each other. Also, he went to my church) would patrol the aisles, but especially on Halloween and Valentine’s Day.

(Far be it from me to tell you why Valentine’s Day was the other hallmark holiday of choice for Those Who Rolled Yards).

This problem then, as you see, was what led to my next stolen item: toilet paper. Now, I wasn’t about to waltz into Piggly Wiggly and try to manhandle a suspicious amount of TP. I couldn’t risk the scorn come Sunday if Toby caught me.

No, I had to plan this out, accordingly. And it began with a sudden rash of sleepovers. I planned this crime spree out over three weeks, with my cousin Mikey’s help. It was a perfect cover. Who didn’t like a sleepover?

Ninth graders in my town, at my school, certainly did.

If you look closely, you can see better.

We all had freshly minted driver’s permits, which meant you could drive to one of three places, without much issue: Piggly Wiggly, Sonic, and the movies (and sometimes if you played your cards right, the First Baptist Church parking lot across from the funeral home…but let’s not push it). 

The sleepover came in handy because we didn’t all have cars.

So, under the guise of liking people I didn’t, I spent several long nights, “hanging out,” driving the “strip” about a million times over for some unknown reason – it always tickled me that I ever did the “strip.” I mean for crying out loud, I saw these people every day, all day, the whole week long.

This must be what they mean when they say that youth is wasted on the young.

Then back at the house of choice, as we all settled in for the night, I’d excuse myself to the bathroom and snatch a roll of their toilet paper; incidentally, you can tell a lot about a family from their choice of toilet paper. Anyway, I’d carefully hide it in my overnight bag, and after a few weekends of drivel and driving, I’d amassed a goodly pile of paper products.

The rest I stole from my own house, which, when all was said and done, was not the best of ideas.

Now…that’s what, like, three items, right?  Well, two, I guess:  the ice cream doesn’t count.

Nor do pens. I’m not sure if you know this or not, but it’s never wrong to steal a pen.

And it’s not always your fault, either, the stealing. I mean, I inadvertently stole one of Matt’s CDs, but it’s only because I borrowed it and forgot to give it back. And that’s been since…well, he moved to DC in 2001, so…oh whatever. Point is: that’s not the same thing as out-right stealing.

This is, though:  I stole a pair of sunglasses, once…again, from a friend. Well, sort of. I didn’t like her all that much.  But she was a friend’s friend, which is the same as being so far removed from my Zone of Concern that she might as well have been missing, and…I don’t know, I guess that’s why I took them.

They were beautiful, large, ovalled, with a beige undertone. I still have them, in my car.

But, here’s the kicker: I can’t even wear sunglasses. I never have. I’d have to spend a fortune to because I require prescription glasswear. However, she got a little too tipsy, one evening as we lay out at the beach, and my being bored coupled with my seeing an opportunity to be aggravating, I took them.

Gas Light (1944). Starring Ingrid Bergman. It's also Angela Landsbury's first film role.

I spent the rest of that week gaslighting her. Making her think she was losing her mind, but trust me, she was no Ingrid Bergman.

To be sure, I am not claiming to be a kleptomaniac; I’m far too anxious a person for that hobby. Though I did know a former preacher’s wife who was one.

For years, I thought a kleptomaniac was someone who stuttered.

And I was amazed that she was being called one by the ladies at church. She spoke crisply and well. When one of these ladies’ purses ended up in the backseat of this woman’s car, though, the picture came a little more into focus for me.

Of course, that particular lady of the church was always losing things, come to think of it. Her keys, her patience, her lipstick, her older daughter. And I don’t really think that the former preacher’s wife stole all of those things. She only drove a Toronado, after all.

All I know for certain is that I didn’t steal them, either. Because that’d make eight items.

And I’ve only ever stolen four, like I told you, but – and here’s where you’ll be disappointed – I cannot for the life of me, right now, remember what that fourth thing was.

Hm.

Imagine that…

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While he drove.

The Bible, children, is always spelled with a capital "B."

We were heading into that infamously, always congested section of highway right outside a town, or village, or tribe, known simply by the wooden staked sign, signaling both the start and the end of what appears to be a mostly dirt road, bearing the mysterious name of Wahalak.

For some reason, and I feel that voodoo has a large part to do with it, they simply cannot get this portion of the road stabilized. They’ve been working in this same exact spot for a solid month, at least. And by they, I don’t mean men from the county jail – that’s who they hire up the road in Macon – no, I mean bona fide employees of the state of Mississippi.

Personally, I don’t mind the decrescendo of their slow progress. I enjoy being a deliberate passer-by of Wahalak because I like to say the word “wahalak.” I do. I say it out loud every morning and afternoon when I drive past it.

Wahalak means “running water,” but that is so unoriginal and less than exciting that I’m going to have to make up a new definition.

Did you know? The name Wahalak refers to madness and amnesia, in the common Choctaw tongue of today’s tribes. During the Mississippian Epoch of the Carboniferous Period, however, the term was often used as a directional indicator signifying various geographical areas within a tribe’s property where the evil dead were buried, having been sacrificed to the gods for their wicked and abusive ways. (i.e., Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, misspelled accordingly). Also, and this part is actually true, Wahalak is best known as the temporary hideout of fugitive Kenny Wagner, who was on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in the 1950′s.

Ahem.

I lie because I needed a hobby when I was six and that was the only thing I was good at.

What I wanted to tell you was that the man, in the Aveo, he was reading the Bible. The Book of Jeremiah, to be exact.

I’d gotten in the passing lane (which, by the way, People, is the fast lane, on the left side), and I had every intention of getting around this man so that I could lead the charge through the orange cones and the death-defying men who paint the dotted lines down the middle of the roads.  They have no patience for you or your car.

But, when I saw that he was reading, I got curious. So, I paced myself. (He never once looked up).

Then, when I saw that he was reading the Bible, I got nervous. Like, this was a sign. (Word to the wise: Anytime someone is reading the Bible in your very presence, it’s probably a warning from God that you’re sinning too much, as of late. Especially, if they’re reading the Bible while operating a vehicle – and you only know that because you’re driving alongside them).

I would have prayed about it, but I had to merge. The left lane was closing, and fast. The accompanying road sign stated that the “left lane would be closed for the Next 22 Miles.” If only I could have kept up with him, I might have gotten the whole chapter read.

Lord knows I need it.

Then, it struck me. Wasn’t Jeremiah one of the Naysaying Doomsday Prophets? (I’ll cross-reference that more, later, over wine…but yes, he was).

Good enough for Jesus, but not Southern Baptists.

So, anyway, here’s this man, reading Jeremiah, KJV-version splayed across his steering wheel, reading glasses on high alert, maneuvering on faith, I suppose, through the treacherous Wahalak sliver of Highway 45…and then, there’s me, trying to read over his seatbelt.

I barely made it around him. A few seconds later and I would have gotten up close and personal with the man on the walkie-talkie…who I might add was also staring at this devout, if his devotion was a little misplaced, Bible Belter.

I also was rather taken with the way he was sitting behind the wheel, like a vice (i.e., the clamp not a form of immorality).

He was scooted so far up to the wheel, itself, that I’m not sure he wasn’t driving with his nipples. I’ve never in my life seen anyone sit so close to the wheel of a car.  It almost triggered my asthma. (Remember: Sucks to your ass-mar, Piggy)?

And then, for the duration of my sojourn into Scooba, all I could think about was what the way you drive a car says about you. I mean, I have no doubt in my mind at all that this man is a tightwad. Albeit, he might be a well-intentioned tightwad…but come on, you don’t drive a car frenching a steering wheel to that degree and not know how to stretch a dollar until the eagle grins.

Here, you try one.

I’ll set the scene: tinted windows, rolled down, clove cigarette, and a seat reclined to such an extent that a) it appears the car is driving itself, and b) your forehead is in the trunk. Now, characterize that driver. Or, what about this: the car is immaculately clean, spotless; hands are at 10:00 and 2:00 (two times of the day that mean nothing to you other than 10:00 is still two of the longest hours before lunch, and 2:00 is just a hateful hour, plain and simple), the shoulders are squared and the neck unable to turn. Who does this remind you of? (Aunt Lola).

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I shifted my position a thousand times, trying to find just the right “feel” of the car against my backside. How did I look while driving? I turned the rearview mirror onto my face (not the first time, either, I assure you) and tried to picture what others see when they look at me behind the wheel.

I was more than pleased, but then again, to be fair, the rearview mirror’s on my good side.

I like to think that I look scholarly while driving. But then, I caught myself hanging my left wrist on the top of the wheel, limped ,and resting my right elbow on the arm rest. That doesn’t look scholarly, at all. That looks like how a Secret would drive, like a husband having an affair would drive…showing off the absence of a wedding ring…I was ashamed of myself.

It's OK if your finger itches, as long as you're not holding a gun.

I also weirded myself out a bit…I mean, who on earth thinks up things like this?? Whatever happened to just “driving to work?” Does everything have to be an adventure, a story, a piece of fiction, a make-believe world of comedy and tragedy, Kris??

Well, I have an answer, so listen up, because I’m rarely this sure about things…but the answer to that question is Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes…everything, and I mean Every Thing, most absolutely, positively, has to be.

And if you don’t believe me, don’t worry: I drive a 4-door.

You just show up, put your seatbelt on…and above all, make sure you bring your Bible.

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Ok, well maybe a thimbleful is left of the mayonnaise.

The thimble in repose.

Ms. Frankie, the sweetest neighbor I had while growing up, God love her, thought it was because people really liked to look at the birds, that’s why they all had binoculars…and that anything other than Blue Plate was sacrilege.

She had a pair, herself, but they sat on the mantle after her husband died and became some sort of an un-dustable relic. And she was sort of correct, about the birds. Some people did really like to look at them. But, that’s only because they were in the way of the neighbor’s house.

Ironically, we had neighbors whose last name was Byrd.  But, they were good, God-fearing people. So, why spy on them? They also lived a little too far down the road.

My Uncle Jum kept his pair on the arm of his swivel chair. He went crazy eventually, so who knows what he saw when he looked through them. U.L. keeps his pair in the cabinet over the oven. But, I probably wasn’t supposed to tell you that.  Aunt Sally’s pair weren’t really binoculars. They held bourbon; the lens caps unscrewed to reveal, ta-da, circular-shaped flasks.

I learned this the hard way. As a child, visiting her in Texas, this was during my Dr. Who-meets-Sherlock-Holmes-and-Jem-Is-Truly-Outrageous-Truly-Truly-Truly-Outrageous phase. It was an awkward time for all, though, it didn’t really get me in trouble until we went to Idaho later that summer.

Anyway…I found her binoculars, oddly enough, in the liquor cabinet. She was nearing 100, so she didn’t bother to lock it anymore…what with “arthur” and all in her hands.

I took them outside, found something innocuous to stare at, like tree bark, something that didn’t really require binoculars, but then that’s not really the point of binoculars, is it?, to a kid…and when I lifted them to “mine eyes,” I poured bourbon, or it might have been liquid fire, straight onto my eyeballs.

“Arthur” apparently inhibited her ability to tightly screw caps back on things like binocular-flasks.

U.L., when he’s not waging some silent war of angry stares at the neighbor on the other side of the road (she sometimes forgets to wear pants when she mows the grass…so, cut him some slack), he actually enjoys bird-watching.

Not just any birds, either.  And never a jaybird. No, he likes to watch for the turkeys.  He particularly enjoys watching them in their frantic and mostly unrequited attempts at flight. Usually over the road.

On his acres of land live many creatures: coyotes (pronounced cow-yotes), racoons, deer (though they’re about to be put on the neighborhood Endangered Species list if they don’t stay out of his hosta), gray foxes (when they scream they sound exactly like an ingenue being murdered), and the lumbersome centerpiece of every Thanksgiving dinner: the wild turkey.

Maybe that’s what Aunt Sally drank.

This is not the pretty part of the turkey.

On a few occasions, when I’ve been back at home, he’s shown me these turkeys in repose, except they’re not at rest. I just like the word “repose.” And I have to be honest: when the falling sun hits their tail feathers, it’s a rather beautiful sight. The underwings of the turkey, as well, are quite purpled with irridescence. I found myself staring longingly after them through the binoculars. It didn’t even matter that they looked like turkeys.

Which are, you have to admit, an odd lot of birds. They have a vulture named after them, for crying out loud. And Ben Franklin…remember him?…tried to outvote the eagle in favor of the turkey for our national symbol of freedom.

Personally, I would have written in a vote, if I’d been there:  for the guinea.

Old Man Caser, and this had to be back when I was six or seven, lived across the road, directly in front of U.L.’s house. He was a nice man if “different,” (as in when his wife died, he didn’t tell anyone, and so there she stayed in the chair up against the front parlor window – also, I met his sister, after he fell in his house from a heart attack. He died. But, get this, so had his sister, like almost ten years earlier, back in 1978. I’ll save that story until Halloween. Nana was there, with me, that time, but she’ll never admit it. Never).

Old Man Caser had a hobby of collecting guineas. He had over the years, until the county took them all away (the ones that cars didn’t take out from running over them, that is), varying numbers of guineas…but never fewer than thirty, I would imagine, at any one time.

He had a great deal of land on his side of the road, and on that land were many, many trees, but the guineas seemed to prefer the most dangerous one: the water oak that grew over the road. Right by the mailbox.

I’m not sure, but they might be the dumbest birds that have ever lived. (And they didn’t live long in our small church community of loose youth in love with drag racing and little old ladies in Cadillacs).

From the top of the water oak, they got a pretty good look at the inside of U.L.’s kitchen, and I don’t know why, but they were forever trying to cross the road to get into it. I used to think it’s because he has such a large picture window over the kitchen sink, and the way his house is designed, with larger picture windows framing the den (these windows go all the way to the ground), it appears, at least to birds, that they can swoop down and fly through it. 

Or, they could have just wanted some cornbread dressing.

I buried probably, like, a million birds as a child, though, because of those windows…birds that had lost their lives to the glass-trickery that was U.L.’s kitchen-and-den architectural combo. Heck, I’d even walked into the windows, myself. Now, add to that, the fact that from the southside of the den looking toward the kitchen are three identical doors, each right after the other: one to the carport, one to the utility closet, and another to a separate part of the yard, out back of the house. People came to visit and stayed a whole extra day because they couldn’t figure out to leave the house. 

Anyway…so, we’d be sitting there quiet as can be, watching Wheel, or Lawrence Welk (please note that I never watched Lawrence Welk, but family time was family time, period), and Whomp!

Into the shrubs would fall another bluebird, or cardinal, and one time, a very angry, disillusioned cat.

But nothing whomps a window quite to the same tune as an 8-pound guinea trying as eagerly as the turkey to get off the ground.  Even without taking flight, a guinea with a well-intentioned run can kill itself by hurtling face-forward into plate glass.

This particular unfortuante guinea hit the window so hard it dropped an egg. 

Yet, I was fascinated by them. The best part, I think, was how loud they were. I mean, these are some noisy fowl. They were quite handy when company you didn’t prefer came over. All you had to do was pretend to be very interested in working in the yard, and after a few minutes, most of the time, the company just got tired of talking over the flock, and left.

Oddly enough, it looks a little like a turkey.

Thankfully, the guineas never really did anything by themselves…ever.  Every now and then, one might cross the road alone, but he always went back to the tree with the rest of them, if he didn’t get caught under the tires of a Buick. And, I mean, one could make some noise, by itself, I imagine, but you really needed the whole kit and kaboodle to get that delicious cacophony.

It’s an unusual childhood memory, I’ll give you that…and there’s a lot more attached to it, but still, I miss those birds. I miss nothing about their avian qualities, per se, but they were a definite freedom-encouraging symbol of my upbringing: make your own kind of squawk, but keep your family near; live on the edge but keep to the shade of the tree, you know cliche things like that.

I told Amanda and Erin that these fowl had impressed their birdy ways onto my core, my psyche, and because of them, one of my grown-up dreams was to, one day, own a small publishing firm. I said I was thinking of calling it The Guinea Tree Press, and just as I was about to show them the logo I’d put together on Adobe Illustrator, Amanda informed me that “guinea” was an ethnic slur against Italians. So, probably, I’d want to re-think my name.

I just looked straight at her, and then straight ahead, and you know what I did?

I said, “Damn.” I’ll have to go back through all my of my childhood and wipe it clean with a politically correct cloth because, all my life, I had no idea about the history of the word “guinea” as a slur.

Plus, now I’m worried sick that “hoop cheese” is next on the list.

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