Cleaning Up

Here's to Belle Star.
Do you remember her?
This is what she told me.

She told me once about her dog. Her dog had eaten a battery. Her dog was going to die. She was so upset with her dog for eating the battery she threatened it with her foot. She screamed things at her dog she wouldn't scream at a person, but out of love, despair. Sometimes, this can happen. And well, Belle Star was (is) a firecracker. Do you remember? She said, That f**king dog had me going f**king nuts! Then she poured peroxide down its throat and the battery came out steaming and the dog never looked so ashamed. Her dog, the dog that did this, had long ears. Its ears were so long that when it shook water from its coat, it hurt itself with its ears, Belle Star said. The way Belle Star kept butter bothered me. But I was too scared to say that butter should be served fresh, not stowed away in boxes in the freezer. Think of the insults she would have hurled my way. I think of her today because time does funny things to memories. I wonder what she's up to, but only a little bit, because if I knew too much more than that, I'm sure it would make me sad. Everyone has a little sadness in a side of them. Mine is in the past, and the past is in my face, I like to think. You can see it.

One summer, Mom took me and sis to a high school carnival and the woman running the fortune telling booth was my future gym teacher. But I didn't know then. I wouldn't know until a few years later when she blew a whistle in the high school gymnasium and introduced herself as Ms. Hill. She didn't look into my palms or a crystal ball, but at Mom's face, and it was enough for her to stop cracking pistachios on the table and really look. She told Mom that things were going to happen, some good and some bad and that there would be some luck involved. It was eerie, how spot on she was.

That summer, a boy I knew drowned in a pool because his heart had suddenly given out. The news upset everyone I knew and there was a jump rope marathon in his honor. We jumped and jumped and I thought about him, and I knew then that death was something that could happen to the old and the young. That's when I came to truly fear death.

Belle Star, that might have been your son, the boy who died in the swimming pool that summer. But it wasn't. But what if there was something like that that made you the way you are.

What were you thinking when the battery came back out? How long did it take you to clean up?