mmm, bright red, perfectly circle-shaped blood blister on my left heel, these from the infinitely-un-breakin-in-able MBT sandals i got a few months ago. another pair of MBTs literally brought me to my knees on a stretch of sidewalk that happened to be carpeted with shattered glass. that was actually pretty scary. these MBTs mostly induce blisters, abrasions, cuts and gashes and now, blood blisters. they also tone my butt, oh hell yeah, my butt looks good, girlfriend! (high fives). i‘m starting to think this aint worth it, though.

i walked a long way, though, soit‘s fair to guess that,in a court of law, under cross-examination by MBT lawyers and their battery of forensic shoe analysts it might be surmised that bloodblisters and other MBT injuries could have come from any make of shoe when one walked ~12-13 miles all at once, as did i just hither.

…..

i remembered something today about the evacuation from Laos. it‘s an incident i always remembered, but until today i disassociated it with the evacuation, that day whence we got early word that all Americans were to be ordered to leave Laos in 48 hours, but we had clearance to leave ahead of the rest. I have never known why we got this treatment but we did, and my sister and I were surprised to be at school when our names were announced over the intercom, we being told to report to the principle‘s office. we both did as summoned by the voice in the intercom, and when we got to the principle‘s office we were told that we had dentist appointments. Lies! there was no dentist appointment, but our mother told this to the school people and if they questioned it then they didn‘t probe too deep, because the three of us (sister, mother, and i) were out of there in a damn hurry.

some of what followed is not from my memory, but from being told. i remmeber some things, not all, but told all together it‘s a story the truth of which i do not question.

we drove through the center of Vientiane, by the monument, and encountered a large group of angry protestors, protesting what we did not know but when they saw us they clearly did not like us. they pounded on hte windows of hte car, shook the vehicle, yelled at us in some other language (Lao, maybe) and eventually let us pass. If I do not remember this incident in detail then ㅏㅜㅐㅈ ㅅ소솜ㅅ ㅑㅅ ㅗㅁ며ㅜㅅㄷㅇ ㅡㅛ ㅇㄱㄷㅁ므믄 ㄹ래랙

then i know that it haunted my childhood dreams 15 years. i had dreams of mother driving us into a war, with sounds of the invading army growing louder as the vehicle seemed helplessly to drive only into the jaws of the enemy army. the oft-repeated dream sometimes included military music of drums and bugels, accompanied by my mother‘s cursing, her continuous cursing, as she seemed unable to turn the car away from the attack.

we got home and found large dumpsters into which we were told to throw everything we wanted to take back to the states. The states, we called them. The Unitedㅅㅁㅅㄷㄴ ㅐㄹ ㅡㄷㄱ갸걏
States of America (as this Freedom Pro keyboard, ironically, lurches into Korean again and a-fucking-gain)

Until today I remmeber all of this, and I remmebered the next part of the story, but I forgot that the two were connected. I forgot that the following incident occured during the evacuation from Vientiane.

Our “orders“ from mother were to take only what we thought we would need, or what we could not part with. There was only one bin for each of us and space was limited, or so we were told. This turned out ot be untrue, though now that I think of it it might have been on account of mother‘s unexpected reactions upon discovering what I had chosen to discard. Under the circumstances I felt like drastic action was in order. Onlyh the essential objects should be shipped back to the states, i thought. What 7-year-old has any “essential“ materielle to begin with? well, that‘s another story. in the spirit of things, though, i evidently went too far, discarding precious toys and articles of clothing which raised my mother‘s inner panic (usually subdued) to a fresh boil.

she ransacked my bag of discarded objects, expressing indignant, miffed shock at the things i‘d thrown in there.

“This?“ she pleaded, sitting on the floor with the contents of the garbage bag strewn all around her, strenuously clutching a yellow, plastic Fisher-Price toy slide and repeatedly asking “This? You‘d throw this away?“ I think the slide was part of a toy cruise ship. I know the slide was meant to be next to a toy swimming pool. which I think was on the boat. Mother could not believe I could throw something like this away, and as she held th eobject to my face I imagined little toy people sliding down the object and into a pool, smiling in that plasticine toy way. Mother went into overdrive when she found some shirts and pants I had attempted to discard. For reasons never articulated or even attempted to explain I flearend that mother found clothing — my clothing — almost imposisble to part with. I imagine that she felt it captured my growth from infancy, and that the clothing itself possessed childhood, possessed not the mere spirit of my youth but the physical evidence.

The torment went on for what seemed like an eternity. Every object I had discarded was held up for accusatory inspection. How could I throw away this, that, some other thing? “Life Savers? You would throw away a roll of Live Savers?“

i never understood this incident, which would repeat itself in bits and pieces under different circumstances over my ensuing lifetime. the unexplainable shock at discarding clothing from my youth surfaced time after time, with just a “never mind“ offered in response to my questions about what the big deal was. now, i can understand being sentimental about these things, but this seemed to enter a different realm, a realm of darkly maudlin mental rhetoric.

i still see that little yellow toy slide, held up as evidence of my heartless miscreance in the face of the evacuation from Laos. and the shirts, the shirts which did not fit me any more, but which mother thought should be saved forever.

7 or 8 years later, in tampa, the subject of the clothing of my childhood rose again, this time resulting in a slightly more conciliatory but nevertheless vague explanation as to why she felt sentiments so intense for them that i cna only describe the feelings as ugly. “i just have something about old clothes,“ is all she ever said, as she sat on the rocking chair in my bedroom and stuffed my childhood shirts and jackets into a cloth bag.

i don‘t know if the magpie in me endures on account of these incidents, or if they would persist on their own account. who can say… i also do not imagine that there is anything particularly unusual about a mother‘s sentimentality toward her child‘s clothing or other articles. it was the wildly and inexplicably intense reactions to what i thought was my suitably cavalier response to the urgent circumstances at hand in Vientiane that day which set the standard for times to come.

…..