March 15, 2012

NOTE: This is my first post for Scintilla, a two-week blogging project. Today’s prompt is: “Life is a series of firsts. Talk about one of your most important firsts.”

It’s easy to be optimistic when you have a bicycle basket full of Twinkies and are 8 years old

You wave goodbye to your small, ranch-style home, to your family’s brown station wagon and to your little world of Huber Heights, Ohio. You don’t yet know that this is a troubled neighborhood with sagging porches, overgrown bushes and lawns cultivated with weeds. A place where you will someday find broken beer bottles in sewers, leering men in the park and a syringe in your friend Stacy’s driveway.

All you know is that this is America’s largest community of brick homes. Highway billboards declare it so in proud, 200-point type. And today you are leaving it behind.

There is hope in your feet, and it makes you pedal hard and strong for many miles — at least three of them — all the way to the AAA travel office.

“Can I help you?” says the woman behind a desk. She wears a nametag and navy blue suit.

You hand over the membership card that you swiped from your mother’s wallet. You’ve been to this office before, planning road trips with your parents to Gettysburg battlefields and Colonial Williamsburg, so you know the drill.

“Hi. I … I mean, we need a map. To Canada. We’re going to Prince Edward Island,” you say.

”You want a map from Ohio to Canada?”

The woman carefully examines you.

“Yes. Just a map. That’s all,” you say. “Um, my mom is waiting in the car.”

You hope this lady doesn’t notice the pink Huffy parked in front of the office storefront.

She sighs and walks over to a display case filled with maps and brochures.

“Would you also like some pamphlets for hotel and entertainment options in Nova Scotia?”

You have never heard of Nova Scotia, which sounds like a terrible affliction of the spine, but you smile and nod anyway.

The travel agent stuffs everything into a plastic bag. She returns the membership card, which you carefully place into your plastic wallet. It is already bulging with the money your grandmother gave you for Christmas and your birthday, plus some quarters you lifted from your dad’s dresser. You’re rich, and you know it. There’s got to be at least $50 in there.

You ride for many blocks. You are on your way to faraway places and wonderful things. The ribbons in your hair are made of yarn and they fly like the banners that trail a skywriting airplane.

The past few years, you have ripened inside a house of books. This is both a literal and figurative statement. Your father always has a book in hand to read in line at the bank or during halftime at the basketball game. Your sister has thick college texts that look simultaneously intimidating and enticing. Your older brother makes you look up words in the dictionary for his homework. You help your mother carry paper grocery sacks full of books home from the library, and then you build forts out of them. You sit inside books on top of books to read more books. And you love them with a passion that you don’t feel for anything else.

Your very favorite is “Anne of Green Gables,” a book that doesn’t read like a book at all but more like a very long letter from an old friend. It is the completely fictional story of Anne Shirley, a plucky, freckled orphan who is adopted by cranky old siblings. They live in a house called Green Gables in the quaint little town of Avonlea, Prince Edward Island.

You don’t believe that Anne is a work of fiction. In fact, you are convinced that you and Anne are exactly alike. While Anne puts liniment instead of vanilla in a cake, you learn not to put hot dogs in the microwave. Anne feels uncharitably toward classmate Josie Pye, and you push Cheryl Lacy off the monkey bars. Anne lets a mouse drown in the plum-pudding sauce. You dunk a cockroach into the ranch dressing on the salad bar at Sizzler. (This is an accident.)

The book feels so incredibly real that you ignore the laws of space and time. It doesn’t matter that “Anne of Green Gables” is set in the early 1900s and you are living in the thick of the 1980s. The only thing separating you from Anne is 1,500 miles. Or kilometers once you get to Canada.

It begins to drizzle. You pull to the side of the road and eat a Twinkie underneath a tree. It is cold. You are not prepared for this. You eat another Twinkie, because you are fat and gluttonous and happy you don’t have to share this food with your sister and brother.

You decide to ride through the rain, because who knows? Maybe it is raining in Canada too. You just want to get there.

You stop again when you get to the highway. You already don’t know which way to go. The cars are too fast and confusing. You are scared.

You turn around and pedal home.

This day is imprinted in technicolor on your memory, but it never even registers for the rest of your family. Years later when you retell the story, none of them remember it happening. It is just another Tuesday.

For you, this is a day that matters. It is your first taste of possibility. It is your first failure. And it lights the fire that burns for escape.