Damn that Jackie Paper!

Thick green spit lands splat on the pine yellow wood.  This is the first time I remember ever chewing apple-green gum, and I thought it tart and tasty.  Besides, the resulting contrast was brilliant; the stains made invisible cones for this tri-wheeling 3-year-old.  It was early.  I can’t believe I was out just riding around so early on this Saturday morning!  It was cold, too.  No one was awake; the whole neighborhood was quiet and even washed out in the thinness of paraffin-white sunlight just bleeding through the trees.  I was so awake I couldn’t believe it!  There’s an ur-memory of an annoyed and bleary parent opening the garage door.  There was nothing but to make slow 8’s and wait.  I noted that if I accidentally rolled over one of the gooey green pylons, a discolored streak would trace the path of the offending wheel for half an orbit or so.  I was waiting for our neighbors to wake up and let Amy come out and play.

Amy and I were the best friends.  I have no memory at all of her parents, or of her house, really, outside of the 3 or four square feet of new yellow deck receiving now the well-placed expectorations of apple-green gum.  We must have run around all over the place, her backyard had a swing-set.  Most is faded and gone, but I remember that she had brown, rather unkempt hair, that she laughed a lot, and that she agreed that Green Eggs & Ham marked the zenith of Dr. Seuss’ prolific gifts.  We must have had a lot of literary opinions.  Occasionally, an offending book was subjected to ritualized defacement.  She would scrawl over a page or two with some rude nub of crayon and then pass it over to me.  I would admire her handiwork, we’d have a laugh, and then I’d choose a page and draw all over the spine and straight across full lines of text and illustrations.  We sat nearly a whole evening just inside the main hallway of my house defacing a book and laughing about it.  My parents were both singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” along with another couple in the living room, and, indeed, their entire generation, and so we were joining in by drawing odd dragons with overlong necks, whose powerful wings and pointy teeth were goofy against scrawled, happy grins and sugarplum, multi-colored clouds.  Damn that Jackie Paper!