![]() My mother dropped her bag with the manuscript inside it between her feet and put her hand over her mouth. Burkett!” I held it up for her in front of my face because I didn’t want her to think I was looking at her stuff. Because he looked sad and I wanted to cheer him up, but also because I was so proud of it. I could see most of her stuff right through it.īefore he could say anything back, I showed him my turkey. Burkett was dressed in a nightgown and her feet were bare. English and European Literature, I later found out. I always called him mister, but he was actually Professor Burkett, and taught something smart at NYU. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair was all crazied up in gray spikes. Burkett was smoking a cigarette, which I hadn’t seen him do before and was illegal in our building anyway. Burkett were standing outside 3A, and I knew right away something was wrong because Mr. We went up the stairs to the third floor, where there were two other apartments plus ours at the end of the hall. Everything good old Regis wrote was about Roanoke. “Do you even have to ask, Jamie?” Which made me snicker. “You have to tote your own burden in life,” I said. She said, “Sweet offer, but what do I always tell you?” I asked her if she wanted me to carry her bag, which had a manuscript in it like always, that day a big one, looked like a five-hundred-pager (Mom always sat on a bench reading while she waited for me to get out of school, if the weather was nice). Last grin for her that afternoon, I can tell you. “Hear what?” I said, which got me another grin. I may change my mind when I’m older, but I really don’t think so. When the fickle finger of fate points at you, all roads lead to the same place, that’s what I think. Because check it, stairs or elevator, we still would have come out on the third floor. ![]() I think that people who say life is all about the choices we make and the roads we go down are full of shit. You could say things might have been different if it had been working, but I don’t think so. We got to our building and the elevator was still broken. When you’re little and it’s your mom, you say okay to everything. “You don’t talk to anybody about this,” she said to me later that day. Which must have been sort of a relief and sort of not. The day I’m telling you about was the one when she decided for sure I wasn’t crazy after all. She thought she might be raising a crazy kid. Later on I found out part of the reason was me. I loved it when I could make my mother grin because even at six I knew that she took the world very serious. So I go yeah yeah yeah, which earned me a poke and a grin. Also, “You play or watch Barney and The Magic Schoolbus when we get home, kiddo, I’ve got like a zillion calls to make.” You knew that, right?” We were almost to our building by then. I said, “I used Forest Green because it’s my favorite color. It used to be her brother, my Uncle Harry, but Mom took over his business a year before the time I’m telling you about. She was probably thinking about one of the books she was trying to sell. I showed mine to Mom and she’s all yeah yeah yeah, right right right, totally great, but I don’t think she ever really saw it. When it came to the head, you were on your own. What you did, see, was put your hand on a piece of construction paper and then trace around it with a crayon. I was so proud of mine I was practically shitting nickels. In the other hand I clutched my turkey, the ones we made in first grade the week before Thanksgiving. I was coming home from school with my mother. Later-and not much later-I found out it was more like the stuff that comes out of the cat’s ass. My name is Jamie Conklin, and once upon a time I drew a Thanksgiving turkey that I thought was the absolute cat’s ass. ![]() I’m twenty-two now, which makes this later, right? I suppose when I’m in my forties-always assuming I make it that far-I’ll look back on what I thought I understood at twenty-two and realize there was a lot I didn’t get at all. The word is later, as in “Later on” and “Later I found out” and “It was only later that I realized.” I know it’s repetitive, but I had no choice, because my story starts when I still believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy (although even at six I had my doubts). I learned a lot of four-letter words from my mother and used them from an early age (as you will find out), but this is one with five letters. I don’t like to start with an apology-there’s probably even a rule against it, like never ending a sentence with a preposition -but after reading over the thirty pages I’ve written so far, I feel like I have to.
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