This is a story about an innocuous piece of furniture in Great Aunt Minnie Efram’s house. It was a little brown loveseat with carved wooden monster feet.
As the story begins, the little loveseat was sitting in the parlor in front of the small black and white television. During the monthly Efram family card party, the love seat was the only place for the two of them to spend the evening. But he was ten and he hated girls. He had a reputation with the guys at school as a girl hater, and he couldn’t have it known that he was sitting on a loveseat with Uncle Henry’s stepdaughter, the one the guys all said they had seen eating her own boogers.
She was also ten, and in his class at school. She liked to watch him more than any of the other boys. But she didn’t know why. She liked unicorns and the color pink, but she also kinda liked the way boys looked at her when she wore shorts. And she liked seeing him in PE class at school, wearing shorts. He was athletic and often won games in PE.
After two years of monthly card parties happening during at least three different months every year at Aunt Minnie’s place, he had discovered that girls didn’t actually smell bad, and this one actually listened when he talked about playing football, and how it made him feel when he scored the seventy-five-yard touchdown. In fact, the more he talked about football, and the closer they sat to each other, the better she seemed to smell. He liked that smell.
She liked that he didn’t only pay attention to her at the card parties anymore. He actually said, “Hi” in public. And she liked his smile, even when he got braces. He let her pick the shows they watched on the old black and white television while seated on the loveseat. She actually worked up the nerve to tell him that she had told Jane at school to ask him if he liked her, and stupid Jane had completely forgotten to ask him, or maybe Jane was just too chicken to ask him and used the excuse that she forgot.
He said that if she liked him, he liked her. But if she didn’t, he didn’t either. “Like” her, he meant. Which he did because she did.
After two more years and six more card parties worth of scootching behinds closer together on the old loveseat, something different had happened. And it was about time too. Aunt Minnie had bought a puppy, and that not only was a bad thing for the seven cats that lived with old Minnie, but it was hard on the loveseat too. One of the little couch’s monster feet was lost, and the numerous instances of terrified cat claws digging in were beginning to have an effect on the upholstery. And that danged dog wizzled everywhere. The loveseat had one purpose in life, and it didn’t want to give in to wear and tear before achieving that purpose.
But the very next year brought disaster. He apparently told the members of the freshman football team that something had happened on that old love seat that really hadn’t happened. The football team was impressed because they all thought she was pretty hot stuff, and he was generally thought of as a lame-o dweeb. She heard about it from Jane who heard about it from Nanette’s boyfriend who was on the team. And she got mad. How dare he say something like that when it wasn’t true?
In January of that year, Aunt Minnie passed away in her sleep. The loveseat was sold at auction to a farmer who liked to do re-upholstery as a hobby. It got re-done in red velvet and leather with wheels replacing the wooden monster feet and sold to a car dealer in Des Moines who placed it in the lobby show-room for customers to sit on.
But the story has a happy ending. She would later make his locker room lie into the truth on Prom Night (fortunately with protection) and then went on to marry him when they both were sophomores in college. Of course, it wasn’t always, “They lived happily ever after,” because they didn’t. They got divorced once and got re-married shortly after… to each other. They had three kids. And the loveseat didn’t ever learn any of that. Because it was a loveseat. You didn’t really think loveseats could know anything, did you?
Dawn in Iowa, Sunset in Texas
The recent Iowa trip has been more or less a metaphor for my life as a whole. I don’t mean to be funny but… wait just a minute! Yes I do. This is corn-shucking humor blog, after all! But the metaphor is still there. I was born in Iowa.
Dawn broke over the farm yesterday where Uncle Harry used to live with his wife, Aunt Jean, and their three kids, Karen, Bob, and Tom. Bob was in my class at school. We got into a fight once over who should be Robin Hood when we were playing with all the cousins in the old brooder house on Grandpa Aldrich’s farm, the farm where mom and dad now live. It was a fight that got so intense that we were throwing broke flower-pot shards at each other in anger. Bob’s hand got cut so badly that he had to go to Belmond and get stitches. Dang, was I in trouble after that. Bob’s version, the shard I threw hit him right in the hand, directly between his thumb and pointer finger and cut him. My version, he cut himself as he threw a pot shard at me, and it cut him leaving his hand. Everyone believed Bob, of course. I’m the nutty kid that always told the stories that gave the girls nightmares. And those stories were never true… mostly. So they couldn’t believe my version.
Mom and my sister Nancy designed and executed the painted barn quilt on the work shed that used to be the chicken house.
Bucolic farm scene to represent my Iowegian past.
But life, like days and car trips, moves on. We had to pack up the little Ford Escort that brought me home and take off once more for Texas. I was a little bit worried about the dog. She didn’t poop as much in Iowa as she normally does in Texas. Well, we figured that out on the way back. She pooped a lot of funny colors at every rest-stop dog park on the way back to Texas because of all the people food she had eaten. She got fed better in Iowa apparently. And it was stuff like stolen Doritos and other stuff that is so not-good-for-her.
But going back to Texas with two kids and a dog is a lot like me after college, moving to Texas via Trailways bus in order to become a teacher. I got a job in Cotulla, Texas, the place where LBJ taught way back when he was a young Texan and still working at being good at telling the REALLY BIG LIES. I think I mentioned this before, but all the kids in the painting above were real kids I taught in my first year teaching (except for the kid sleeping.,, nobody did anything but hop around and yell at me my first year as a teacher… including the principal). Oh, and the window is imaginary. I taught for three years in a windowless concrete box with only buzzing fluorescent lights to keep the monsters from killing and eating me… or each other. Within a decade of that first class, two of the boys had been to prison, three were already dead, and one became a star lineman for the Texas A&M football team.
And over time I got closer and closer to my goal. My skills became bigger and better as a teacher. I grew in wisdom and power. Honestly, the grass in the picture was closer to the camera than I was, so I am looming in the sky above the photographer, not tiny and smaller than the grass. So maybe I better claim the picture was taken by fairies. Yeah, that’s it. Down there in the grass. Iowegian fairies got a hold of my camera and took the picture. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. (See. I never really learned to get away with the REALLY BIG LIES. A teacher, as a storyteller, has to also be a truth-teller.)
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