epidemic

    I will never be a morning person, and if teaching night classes for tweens was an option, I'd certainly take it. As I came barging through the doors of my beloved institute of punctuation and capitalization this morning, I was met by a little girl whose face was soaked with tears. She was standing beside the door waiting on me because she knew I'd come through eventually. Thank goodness I had nothing in my hands; she just broke on me. The most promising eyes you've ever seen, and that broken heart that only a daughter can have. A tired, terrified child who hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, and hadn't stopped worrying.
    We made our way to my happy place within the building, the furnace room. That dark, musty, enormous room was her place of peace for the moment - a welcome salvation from her own nightmare. I didn't have to ask. She barely had to explain. Another broken soul. Another statistic to add to the ever growing epidemic here and elsewhere in these hills. Her hero and her provider had fallen prey to the numb feeling so many promising futures have crashed into.
    She needed to collapse for just a second. She needed to tell the story to anyone. Not once did she question why; she has come to accept it as her normal. She is one of hundreds children who have stopped asking.
    They know more than adults. They are typically silent, but they seek out peers who know their fear. They rely on each other. They will find an adult to tell. We will listen. Today was my turn. My colleagues share my concern and compassion. There are no state standards that tell us how to deal with this. Nothing in college prepared me for this engulfing hell that is slowly creeping through too many front doors.
And after a few minutes, she could exhale. I reminded her that her only job was to be a smart and fabulous girl. She desperately wants to fix what is broken.
    Carefully, she resumed her daily routine. Algebra. Literature. Social Studies. Science. Language Arts. Library. Homework. She won't miss a step. The things she can make perfect will be.
    Surely you know; I do pray in school...and especially in the furnace room.

Ouija Confession

This is my favorite season of every year. A wise 7th grader once told his language arts teacher that a term called "Halloweenian" might exist. If such a word does exist, then that's what I am. I am a Halloweenian, and I love to write. This month's blog experiment is supposed to let me vent my warped and wicked thoughts to celebrate witches and monsters and zombies, oh, my! Today, the star will be my faithful Ouija board. Oh, I miss it so.

First of all, if you're going to go down that dark and dreary Halloween road that assumes my beloved holiday is about all things evil, let me just encourage you to stop in your tracks. Seriously. My mom was and is a strong proponent of my Halloweenian lifestyle, and she doesn't do evil. Halloween, just like any other holiday, is what we make it. I choose to make it another excuse to never grow up. My mom chose to make it the most fun she could possibly provide for her daughter, and she did that very well. However, I don't think she knows about my Ouija antics...until now.

I was never a fan of slumber parties even though my poor mom hosted a couple. I was and am too set in my ways of sleeping. Slumber parties interrupted my slumber, which made me an ill and hateful girl in the days that followed. Eventually in this blog, I'm going to crack open the great Ambleside scandal of 1989, but you're going to have to wait for that one. Take the time to prepare yourselves now. But back to Ouija.

The Ouija board came into my life during middle school. I'll give you a moment to think back on your life to that time and cringe. Worse than nails across a chalk board; I tell ya. I have no clue where the Ouija board came from. I'm assuming it was either one of Doug's flea market finds or a hand me down from a KISS impersonator. Literally KISS. Long tongues, scary make up, high heels, fake blood. Yuck. I was dressed up as Casper and someone answered the door as Gene Simmons on Chester Avenue...you can figure the rest out yourself. Regardless, the board sat in Mom's basement on the top shelf in the back corner. I never played Clue, but by golly, I could rock an Ouija board.

For those of you who haven't had the Ouija experience, I probably need to tell you that there is an Ouija app for iPhone. Either download the app or Google Ouija. Ignore anything evil about the board. It's made by Parker Brothers. It's a game. It's a toy. It is not evil...unless, of course, I'm sitting there playing with you.

During middle school, I tried to believe the mystery surrounding Ouija. For many hours, I along with other silly girls, sat and held our fingertips ever so gently on the gliding needle heart. We usually sat in dark rooms with candles lit. As if candles serve some magical power to cause a piece of plastic to speak to us Halloweenians. The heart would fly over the slick surface without a bit of traction. The felt pads on the bottom of the heart prevented any sort of friction that might disturb the mighty center pin. We always had a recorder on standby...a person...not a device. We would call out the letters that were "spelled" by Ouija, and the recorder would frantically write them down. After we got tired of holding our hands up like Madge from the Palmolive soap commercials, we proclaimed that Ouija was tapped out, and the recorder would call off the letters and symbols Ouija "spoke" to us. After that, we stayed up until daylight interpreting the results. This is absoultely when I learned about the importance of elaboration in story telling.

I continued to lose my logical mind in high school, but I did have one brilliant idea. First of all, I'm terribly claustrophbic. I didn't like sitting in that close circle with all those other people while we slid the Ouija pin across the board. I could stand it for a couple of minutes, and that was all. At some point, I made the conscious decision to own the Ouija board like no other. I silently declared that I could be the power of Ouija all by myself. Depending on who was sitting with me, I could get Ouija to spell out names that would make any homecoming queen's crown tarnish. I used my fingertips to spell out pure facts that led the guilty to truly believe the powers of Ouija. Sorry guys. It was I. The more I spelled out, the more torn up people got. They could not stand to stay seated for one more minute, thus freeing me from close quarters and a game that I had learned to master.

In retrospect, the Ouija board provided my friends and me with a long list of hysterical antics and memories. The board was never about black magic or supernatural powers. The game is about someone willing to be sneaky (me) and those who are willing to believe. I think my Ouija board is still in Mom's basement in a closet. That is probably its final resting place after I dragged it to college. Ouija in Dupree? Yes, I took it with me.

Here's hoping that you find your inner Halloweenian and enjoy the weeks ahead with great fun, great friends, and glorious children.

My Happy Place...

The checkered flag flew for the last time in 2011 on Saturday at Tazewell Speedway. The end of the race season is here. I need to have a beginning to even out this end, so I'm going to work my way through this blog experience as a rookie. Before long, the spring thaw will arrive, and I'll hear thunder coming from Petty's Garage to remind me that it's time to go green once again. Until then, stay tuned. This is probably the time for those afraid they'd end up in my book to take cover and hang on tight.