You Cannot Mess This Up

by Amy Weinland Daughters

  Next, she pointed out a blue swordfish, an old-fashioned shiny gold telephone, a brown pipe that stood on its bowl, a stagecoach with a bronze suitcase packed on the back end and a Liberty Bell. All in all, there must have been fifty pieces.

  “Wow, that’s amazing … Can I hold one of them?” I asked, still reeling from Amy’s crime against college football.

  Kim climbed the desk chair and reached up on the second shelf for a brown chess-piece decanter. Just then, Dad walked through the room, advising, “Careful, Kimber, those will be worth a lot of money some day!” Good call, you’ll want to make sure you can cash in on the one dollar a piece Mom will get for those in a 1987 garage sale.

  As Kim came down from putting the bottle away, Mom reappeared with a much-less-exuberant Amy following slowly behind her. Mom looked almost out of breath, but managed a chirpy, “Well, we’re ready to go!”

  Amy had changed into a sweater and powder-blue slacks. Though she definitely looked more suitably dressed—a colorful sweater with a cat perched in front of a sunlit window—she had lost the bulge in her eyes and the hyperness in her step. I was almost positive I knew what had happened when she went upstairs, but, then again, I couldn’t be sure because I wasn’t physically up there. Flashes of memory, impossible to verify or dismiss, made me almost sure that Mom’s message had been delivered physically. But, old memories and a strong intuition weren’t enough to be absolutely sure. Was I really supposed to just let it happen, whatever had happened, or should I try to defend her? Defend us? Defend me? What was I supposed to say, Excuse me, I feel like whatever just happened, well, I think it’s not right. And it should stop. Now. And then what was I supposed to do, without a car, without a cell phone, without any phone numbers? Whisk Little Me away from my home and family, protectively, because I, some random freaking person nobody really knew, didn’t like what was going on?

  This, my implausible and impossible role as the time traveler, meant that I had zero options. I was captive and powerless. It was something I had in common with the younger version of myself.

  Were these the questions Mary had mentioned? The ones that I knew I couldn’t ask?

  Looking over at Little Amy, our eyes locked briefly. She didn’t smile but gazed almost intensely, as if I knew every-thing—what was happening, what had happened upstairs, what was going to happen. Who she was, who I was—who everyone was. It was as impossible as my supposed trek back in time. It was the moment that we connected, but didn’t. It defined everyone, only it never actually happened.

  We exited out the back door, drawn to Dad’s mint-green Oldsmobile Delta 88 four-door like flies to an uncovered tub of pimento cheese in July. I held back as the family got in, again waiting to see where everyone else sat before presumptively taking my seat. Having a non-family member in the car was something I could never remember happening.

  Mom motioned for Rick to sit up front between her and Dad while Kim and Amy piled in the back. The only seat left, my place, was behind Mom. Given that Kim was the biggest, she sat behind Dad, leaving Little Amy to sit between us.

  The car was in excellent condition, not a surprise as Dad kept a clean car and replaced it every couple of years, a necessary business expense for an engineer/salesman. Though it wasn’t as enormous as the Ford Mary and I had taken from the airport, the Oldsmobile was roomy, but not roomy enough to prevent Little Amy from scooting closer to me in tiny movements until we were thigh to thigh, her staring at me wildly. Her characteristic energy was returning in bucketfuls.

  Managing an uninspired smile, I was reminded of how it annoyed me, back in the future, when my boys got wound up. For instance, my younger son’s entrance into the Palm Sunday service at church last year, which made me cringe. He had broken his palm leaf in half and went down the aisle of the sanctuary in an almost dance-like fashion. I wore a similar, underwhelming smile that day, until I realized that given the same scenario, I would have palm-danced too. Thinking of this, I managed to unconvincingly pat Amy on the back, placing my hand on her shoulder. As much as this wasn’t my thing, it was hers.

  Dad backed the car out of the driveway and I was treated, once again, to a slow stroll through glorious Northampton. What struck me immediately on this, the morning after Thanksgiving, was how many people were outside. Since it was Houston, where winter rarely visited for long, there were a handful of suburbanites out on the lawn, raking, sweeping or even hosing down a car, but more telling was the number of youths. Kids on bikes, kids in yards, kids walking on the street, kids sitting together on the curb. There were no sidewalks, no parks, no community play sets, just kids doing stuff, outside.

  As much as things had stayed the same from this life to the one I lived in the future, this thing had changed. The lack of 115 cable channels, Netflix, DVRs, the internet, smartphones and mini tablets meant that staying inside didn’t have a lot of upsides, unless you wanted your parents to notice you were there and subsequently give you some sort of ridiculous job to do to “help out” around the house.

  That’s not to say that we—the children of 1978—were any more intelligent or driven than our counterparts in 2014. No, it just meant that we were tanner, leaner and smellier and had to communicate face-to-face.

  Exiting the neighborhood, Little Amy made a big deal out of showing me the armrest that came down between the two back seats—a nice upholstered feature that was generously sized. Jumping onto it, she collided with Kim, who rolled her eyes, sitting maturely in her seat, cross-legged like a proper sixth grader.

  As Amy continued bouncing around, Dad yelled back, “Amy. This is a car, not a toy.”

  Then it hit me. She was moving freely about the car. We all were. Not only was no one seat-belted in the family sedan, there wasn’t even an option to buckle up in the backseat. They either weren’t included by the manufacturer, they had been removed, or they were tucked down in the seats. I did notice that the front seat had shoulder straps on both sides, but they were left hanging in pristine condition. This meant that my little brother was free to sit on my mom’s lap—which he was—only a few precious inches from the huge windshield that separated us from the road.

  My parents weren’t irresponsible, they were mere victims of their own time—playing their parts, only to be frowned upon by the wise and knowing people of my time. Yeah, my mom had thrown back a couple of beers the night of my actual birth. That seemed so wrong now.

  It made me wonder what my kids’ generation would think of the hours we spent on Facebook, ignoring our own families. How would they perceive an era that prided itself on being “green” only to buy huge-ass Suburbans, five-bedroom houses with media rooms and mailboxes stuffed full of meaningless circular ads that went immediately into the trash, not the recycling?

  It was equally ironic, despite the growing warnings, that they, the 1978 adults, didn’t think nicotine was a big deal. Then, of course, we, the 2014 version, couldn’t stop ourselves from checking our phones while driving … no matter how many shocking, graphic commercials we looked away from on the TV.

  Eventually it would catch up with both groups, it always did. And then some smart-ass twenty-year-old would be there to point it out.

  Out of the subdivision, we began making our way to Interstate 45. Passing the Texaco station, I looked up at its vintage hexagon sign with the company name in bold-black letters, outlined in a wide red stripe. I admired the ’70s design of the building and the clean, professional look of the operation. Outside were racks of tires and stacks of Havoline Supreme Motor Oil. There was still a full-service lane—no option to pay at the pump —and rolling mechanical numbers that tracked the gallons and dollars. Gas was sixty-five cents a gallon. I could have filled up my minivan for $11.70, that is, if I could’ve found a way to drive it back in time. People here would think a 2005 Honda Odyssey was all that. They wouldn’t care that we hadn’t opted for the automatic side doors; here I wouldn’t be shunned in the parent pick-up line; no, I’d be the bomb because my door COULD slide open.
It was so much better than having your eight-year-old kid, in 1978, try to grapple with the 400-pound car door on a Buick Park Avenue.

  I pulled out my notebook and scribbled, with Little Amy’s eyes bulging from over my shoulder, “When was the sliding van door introduced?” and “Are there still full-service gas stations?”

  Next door to the Texaco was the U Totem, a convenience store that carried everything from beer to pantyhose to candy. The sign spelled out the now-insensitive name of the store vertically, complete with a Native American totem pole to the right of the letters. It would eventually become a Circle K and is now, as of 2014, the highly touted “EZ4U Food Store.”

  Next was a huge open field, and, much to my surprise, the almost-forgotten Northampton Stables, an amenity that had been offered since the neighborhood was built. I didn’t know when this edifice would be razed and its equine tenants shipped off to another location, but I knew it had to be soon. Eventually, houses and streets would rise from the ashes of the stables, bringing people who would never know they were living their everyday lives on the sacred ground of our evaporating memories. My BFF Catherine and I had walked through the quiet fields and meadows many times, playing on the old fence lines and climbing among the branches of the massive hardwood trees. Once we had found out the dastardly adults’ plan of reclaiming the tract for suburban sprawl, we would exclaim, dramatically, “This is God’s country, it shouldn’t be touched!”

  We probably sang the lyrics to that song Wildfire, where the girl comes down from Yellow Mountain calling for her horse. I wondered if Yellow Mountain was near Yellow River, where the mystical I.P. Freely lived. Either way, the girl in the song died looking for her horse, I think. At the very least, I knew the lyrics were tragic. We cried about them the way young girls do, in the same way they get freaked out when they play that awful slumber party game “lighter than a feather, stiffer than a board.” That’s the one where a group of girls circle the participant chosen to play the “dead” person. Each putting two fingers from each hand under the “deceased,” who is lying flat on her back. The group chants “lighter than a feather, stiffer than a board,” and if everything goes as planned, the “dead” girl magically rises, levitating above the other girls’ fingers. It was the same concept that made the Ouija board both creepy and infamous.

  I pulled out my notebook. “Wildfire song, who sang it? Download it on iTunes.” Then I added, “Lighter-than-a-feather, stiffer-than-a-board game. What was that all about? Google it.” And “Pictures of the Stables—ask the I Grew up in Northampton Facebook page if anyone has any?”

  Next up was the iconic Dave’s Express Store on the corner of Root Road and Gosling, the anchor of what was an early example of the strip mall. According to the white plumes of smoke in the air, BBQ was cooking in the pits behind the building.

  Other than that, there wasn’t much to see. The lack of any sort of business—other than Booger Red’s salvage yard and the M&M Food Market on Spring Stuebner—was because FM 2920 (the main artery from where we lived to Interstate 45) hadn’t even been built yet. It also explained why the folks at M&M’s were, like their counterparts at Dave’s, cooking BBQ behind their store—the total lack of fast-food restaurants in the area. There was no place to stop and grab a quick, on-the-go lunch. These little all-in-one stops were it. It made me understand that I grew up in a rural setting. I hadn’t appreciated that, the isolation, but could now see how my parents would have. That is, until they needed something.

  Even I-45 seemed simpler. Separating the narrow northbound and southbound lanes, only two of each, was a steel guardrail with a chain-metal screen or fence, not a concrete barrier with trash piled up against it. Rather than rumble strips, the shoulders were dotted intermittently with raised reflective strips that I greeted, oddly, as some sort of fond, far-off memory.

  Though I caught a glimpse of the Allied Bank, Krause’s Pharmacy, and Minimax on the east side of the interstate, the other 500 businesses normally visible from I-45 weren’t there. Instead, there were acres of farmland, fields of cows and thick rows of pine trees. No water parks, cheap furniture stores and half-burnt-down motels. No Walmarts, no used-car dealerships and no abandoned antique malls with U-Haul trailers lined up in the overgrown parking lots. It was an entirely different Spring, Texas, one that would be unrecognizable to its many residents of the future, and to the 125 cars destined to be lined up at the yet-to-come Chick-Fil-A.

  Passing Spring proper, but before reaching the FM 1960 exit, I was treated to the most glorious site of all, something I had completely forgotten to remember. It was the Goodyear Blimp Base. The enormous hangar, positioned on the back right of an expansive, well-manicured green field, was painted mustard yellow and white with massive blue letters spelling out “GOODYEAR.” The complex was huge, with a massive amount of frontage, maybe thirty acres in all. A smoky glass viewing area, shaped like two hands folded in prayer, topped the sunken visitors center. The entirety of the tract was bordered by a bright-green chain link fence, enhancing the look of the sprawling, lush lawn.

  Luckily, and much to my immense delight, in front of the hangar was the mother ship itself, the America, the blimp … our blimp. Held to the ground with an enormous yellow pyramid structure, which attached to the blimp’s front-facing red nipple, it was captivating, shiny and silver against the bright green field and blue sky. Its four fins were red, white and blue.

  You can’t imagine what growing up with the Goodyear Blimp in the ’70s was like, unless you had. Our neighborhood was only a moment’s flight from the hangar, meaning that on long, hot summer days, the blimp’s crew would often fly slowly over our street, waving and sending messages on the rolling display on the side of the magnificent silver bird. “Have a Nice

  Day,” the blimp would tell us, or, “Go Astros!” or “Happy Birthday America!” or “Quit Hitting Your Sister.”

  The low buzz of the engines would signal its arrival, calling us to run from wherever we were—inside or out—to look up in the sky, waving wildly. The rest of the country saw it on TV. We were literally friends with it—it belonged to us. We knew that the pilot lived nearby, and almost everybody claimed a family member that had been aboard for a magical flight.

  For all that suburban life in far north Houston wasn’t, the Goodyear Blimp was something special.

  The delicious incident passed too quickly. And, again, like a bunch of other stuff, I was faced with the reality that I would never see it again. Never. Our blimp base—along with my own childhood—were both torn down in the early ’90s. Both ultimately relocated to Ohio. I had forgotten how much I had missed both, that is until I smoked crack and went back in time.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  DON’T LIGHT A MATCH

  After exiting Greens Road and turning under the overpass, we entered into the Foley’s parking lot. I could hardly believe that this was the same Greenspoint Mall I had driven past last summer. To say it was clean, sparkly and glorious would have been a major understatement—it was only a couple of years old and lived up to its billing as one of the finest, if not the finest, retail center in the country. Houstonians have short memories, as do Americans at large, which made a fresh look at the young Greenspoint Mall—referred to as “Gunspoint” in the future—as mind-blowing as walking into one of the new casinos in Las Vegas, awed by a seven-story crystal chandelier with a multi-level bar inside.

  We parked relatively close, especially given that this was the day after Thanksgiving. Yes, there were lots of people and cars, but nowhere near the hysteria that would overtake Black Friday in the new millennium, an auspicious event that actually started on Thursday morning, prior to any nonsense about being thankful for what we already had.

  We entered via the east entrance to Foley’s, headlined by a smoky glass, paneled awning with lighting that gave off a subtle disco effect. Passing through the double set of doors and into the store was like literally being transported to a magical new world, only this fantastic realm was lace
d with unmistakable déjà vu undertones. I had been here before, but never like this, with hair on my hoo-hoo. Pausing just inside the entrance, Dad cautioned us to stay together while Mom warned the group that touching anything was a punishable offense. Before I could even exhale the fragrant retail air, the kids lined up behind the parents, and with me in the rear, away we went.

  On sensory overload and desperate to stop every couple of steps and absorb everything I was seeing, I attempted to take mental pictures. If I had a smartphone, even a first-generation iPhone, I would have been taking photos uncontrollably. It was better than being in the best museum in the world, only I couldn’t stop and look at the displays. It was like I was at the Pro Football Hall of Fame with people who considered sports absurd. I got that, I understood it, but it was killing me. Softly. Since in reality I was still an adult, I suppose I could have signaled ahead to Dad and told him that I would catch up later, giving me an opportunity to put on a cashmere beret and twirl around in the couples’ Western Wear section, but that wasn’t going to happen. Somehow, I was scared to do anything but follow. I was still that unsure girl from the South, who would never, ever want to inconvenience the rest of the group, or the rest of the world for that matter. That—other people not getting what I perceived they wanted because of me—would be worse than me not getting what I wanted. It was true even if I didn’t really know what anyone really wanted—myself included.

  Crap, I really was screwed up.

  The walls were done in a deep bronzy-orange color, with chrome accents and a dizzying array of lighting. Most of it was big naked bulbs with hardly any room between them, the kind of thing you would have seen in a bathroom in the early ’80s, stuff you would want to rip out in the future.