Examination of a Life

The scheduled power outage for Frog Pond Holler was postponed until next week. We're under severe weather warnings for the day. I love huge storms, I could sit out on the porch and watch them for hours. If I could find room for a chair out there that is. We have the classic hillbilly front porch. The kind you see in those documentaries about people that live way back in the mountains, where you have to clear a path to the door. There's just nowhere to store anything.

I miss the house I grew up in. It had five bedrooms, a big dining room and a decent sized kitchen, complete with breakfast nook. We had a garage with a workshop, a huge yard with a privacy fence and a nice clean front porch with a swing. My bedroom windows fronted the porch, so it was common during my teen years for my friends to sneak up there and peck on the window in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I feel like I'm being punished for ever telling on my dad, like if I had just shut up and taken his crap I could have gone on to college and had a decent life. Logically I know that isn't the case, but every once in a while, those thoughts creep into my head. When the Amazon was a baby, I tried to go back to school. I could have gone to Norfolk State for nothing, between being a "welfare mother" and being Caucasian (there were minority grants to encourage white students to attend mostly black universities) I could have gone for very little money. But because I was under 21, Ma would have had to fill out the financial aid forms. She refused, she said she felt my going back to school would cause a financial burden on her.

I did try, along the way, to improve my life. When we lived in Richmond and the Amazon was in the second grade, I took computer classes at night. I learned WordPerfect before there were Windows, when you had to use the "f" keys to format everything. I loved it and I was a natural. I'd go to the public library and use their computers to practice. By the middle of the semester, I was helping the other students. I even had a job offer from someone in the class, making more than I make now and that was 14 years ago. Within weeks of completing the class, Ma made the decision to move back to Frog Pond Holler. I agreed that the schools were scary there in Richmond and that this would probably be a safer place for the Amazon to grow up, and there was that K9 cop in Chattanooga that I thought I was in love with. Chattanooga is only three hours away from Frog Pond Holler, but about nine hours away from Richmond.

After we moved here I joined the volunteer fire department. It was something to do and by joining I could take EMT classes for free from the local satellite location of the Big City college. I took classes for two years, I was only one step away from making paramedic. I loved riding in the back of the ambulance, starting IVs while we barreled through Big City when I was working with their rescue squad, in addition to our own little VFD. But when it came time to take the paramedic classes, it was just too far to drive. I couldn't work here and drive to Big City a few nights a week, plus do clinical hours in the ER. It was starting to run into too much money.

So I tucked my tail between my legs, quit and admitted defeat.

Sometime after that, I got the grand plan to start my own business. I'd worked in accounting with my current employer for seven years, I had been in a supervisory position at the restaurant I worked at in Richmond and I'd worked in every retail environment imaginable prior to that. I signed up for a "small business management" class. I had huge dreams. I aced the class, my average at the end of the semester was 101.

I still constantly try to think of ways to make extra money, businesses to start that would capitalize on the tourist trade here. There's got to be a way. Recently I've been looking at ways to work from home at night via the internet. There are companies who hire freelance proofreaders over the web, they send you a disc with the documents, you proof them and send them back. They pay an average of $2.00 a page, but most require a degree in English. There are some that let you take a test, but most of those also require that you register and pay a fee.

I could deal with living here a lot better if I could afford to get away from here once in a while. I want to see things, do things. I'd like to at least see my own country before I die, if not others. Lately, I haven't even wanted to travel as far as Big City, not wanting to spend the extra gas money. You have no idea how much good that short weekend trip to Las Vegas did me. Just to see different people, different buildings and feel more like the person I used to be, instead of the festering, moldy growth this place makes me feel like.

For a long time I just held on to the fantasy that I would meet someone wonderful who'd make it all better. That only happens to pretty girls, not cosmetically challenged frumps like me. And in the end, even those pretty girls sometimes end up in a mess. There's a part of me who sees these beautiful women, like Lacy Peterson, who find their Prince Charming and end up in pieces in the ocean, or in a dumpster, a part of me that thinks, if that happened to them, a man probably wouldn't think twice about hacking me up and tossing me aside. Not trying to sound pathetic here, just honest about the things that go through my mind.

I think I'm going out on the porch, clean myself off a spot, drink my coffee and watch the rain.

Later Taters.