Ohio Girl

She was proclaiming her innocence and no doubt cursing the dirty, rotten, bastard who landed her in jail when I met her, but it was hard to hear past her hair. It greeted me before she did--that wild, bleached entity all its own. It was thinning and coarse, but still hinted at its big, tall, peroxide-filled days of glory.

Lots of people accidentally set beds on fire. Drop their cigarettes when they fall asleep. Far fewer manage it fully conscious with a lighter while someone else is sleeping. But, as she pointed out, it barely caught, and the bastard did not get so much as a first degree burn, and it was an accident, and he goddamned, well-deserved it anyway. Did the hair say that, or did she?

She reviewed her proposed lawsuits in support groups and in-passing as she mopped the jail floors. She told me about the tell-all book she was writing and the people she would expose while she mopped different floors in the state prison. And then she began to say she would be coming to see me when she got out. True to her word she called the morning after she was released.

Counseling was a pre-text more than anything else. We talked. She talked. And talked. Her hair ever nodding in agreement and seconded by bright blue eye shadow and clothes that probably fit before the jail weight, before that man, back when people stared at her bra-free breasts in a good way.

There were still lots of lawsuits to consider. There was still that bastard. There were the friends and family who didn’t give a damn about her and she did not know why except that they were stupid, bastards too. There was also her cat that stood up on his back legs while she took his picture, and oh-how-is-your-dog, and new poems that she wrote, and loneliness. Loneliness was something about which she could be perfectly honest. One of the few things.

There were moments between her fury and her pain, her delusions and her beer, when she was just the sort of person to whom I was happy to listen. One of a few who ever did, she used say. I never realized it, of course, and often felt just the opposite, but i am grateful to have been counted among those few.

If you heard cursing last evening somewhere in the distance, it was me. We had to cover the kids' ears and everything. In the final lap at Talladega--the final few rotations of the tires, really--Junior, the guy who has been blue collaring through the season, who recaptured his restrictor-plate rythym, who was just about to take the checkered flag, was taken out. Booted.

At first glance it looked like Jimmie Johnson might be the culprit which would freakin figure. It turned out to be Vickers, who won, and i can find some forgiveness for him. As did Junior. Johnson on the other hand, well, we can still blame him for something, can't we? He immediately hit the microphone with his sob story about being wrecked by a teammate. His mentor Gordon was on not long before belly-aching about bump-drafting after getting caught up in the big one that almost wasn't.

What is it with their whining?

For Vickers Talladega turned out to be the perfect kiss-this to the Hendricks teammates he is leaving behind. For Junior, wrecked and all, he managed to finish 23rd and advance one position to 6th in the championship standings.

Good for them. Good for Dega.

From my small-town office window—my office actually being a big, old small-town house—I saw from an odd angle what looked like a water tower in the distance. I am talking the extreme distance and rather toothpick-like. I decided water tower by instinct rather than any real sight indicators.

I passed by the water tower a couple hours later interpreting it to be THE water tower again by instinct and some vague abilities related to my internal compass. It sort of leapt out of the yellowing soy bean field as I was driving to forget, or remember. Same difference.

I was driving in the countryside—which is rapidly becoming an intentionally marketed “rustic” version of suburbia—for change of scenery therapy of which I have always been a fan. (Depressed? Try Alabama. Restless? Definitely Texas. Spiritually starved? Well, Indiana works, believe it, or not.)

I drove past yellows and oranges and a 12-year-old version of myself walking down a country lane with a group of girls from a country slumber party discussing rather rustic, country-girl interpretations of sex. One of us—not me—had already given up the soy bean bud and was waxing all flowery over something that sounded as appealing as the mating of a farmer’s bull. Had we even noticed the water tower?

Later I plopped down on the bed—disturbing the dog—having not forgotten a single thing I had hoped would be forgotten. (Or remembered for that matter.) From an odd angle, I could see the moon perfectly framed by the dark of the outdoors and the dark of the windowpane. It was the same moon I had been admiring all summer from that odd, perfect perspective—painted and polished precisely for viewing from MY bed.

It was the same moon I had forgotten all about.