Sometimes I Feel My Life Is Page Eight, or K and P and T and Me

As you all know, because it seems to be all I've talked about lately, I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago. I was gone, away from my computer, which was a hard separation, but I made it OK and neither of us forgot each other while I was in the Big City.

When I got back home and threw the first load of laundry into the washer, and Mr M and The Teenagers were safely on the road back to B'burg, of course the first thing I did was to sit down at the desk here to check my e-mails, my blog, your blogs, various sites, and, well, get reacquainted, just like one would get reacquainted with that loved one left behind.

And while I hadn't blogged in those five or so days, I noticed that I had a couple of new comments on various blogs I'd written before the trip, so I went in to give them a read. And became quite proud. For my abundant readership of 10 or 11 people seemed to have grown by one. One brand-new commenter.

I looked and read the first comment and didn't think too much about it. "Hmm. Some new person seems to have found the ol' blog." Then I went and read the second one and became very perplexed indeed. Because, while this person was (by name and profile picture) completely unbeknownst to me, that second comment contained a cryptic message.

It mentioned that this new person thought they knew me from some former incarnation, gave a street address, and used the line, and I may be paraphrasing here, "I was a brat who twirled baton."

The address was that of the house across the street from where my sister and I spent our growing-up years, so that narrowed things down quite a bit. During those Wonder Years, there were three families who lived at that address. An older couple with no children, a family with three girls, two of whom were bratty little twins, and the Family Y. The Family Y had two girls, K and T.

So I looked at that picture again, and tried to imagine what the bratty twins might look like all grown up. And also tried to imagine how either of them would ever remember me, as they were some years younger and we didn't play much. I ruled them out. One more look at the picture, and I ruled out both K and T.

Who in the fiery bowels of hell was this person leaving me a comment?!

I clicked the link to the commenter's profile and read a little. Lives in the "Deep, Deep South," four children, and the one that really caught my attention, "Former Trophy Wife." I went and read her blog. Great writing, to be sure, but no clues as to who this person was.

And I couldn't stand it any longer. I have the memory of, well, of whoever has the greatest memory in the world, and I was flummoxed on this one. So I clicked the e-mail link in the profile and sent a missive. "I give. Now, tell me, tell me, tell me!"

I got a reply the next day. And though it began, "Nope. Not gonna tell," she couldn't help herself and let it all out. It was in fact T. T of the Family Y.

It's hard to explain what receiving this e-mail was like. I have no qualms about telling you my reaction to all this, I was home for lunch, sitting there catching up on things and not eating, as I do, and when I read this e-mail, my hands started to shake and tears welled in my eyes. I was about an inch away from a major boo-hoo. And having to go back to work soon was about the only thing that kept me from it.

Because during those Wonder Years, ages 7 to 13 or so, K and P (my sister) and T and me were as thick as thieves. No, wait. We were thicker than thieves. We were interwoven together like no friends nor family ever were. One rarely saw any one of us without the other. Sure, there were other neighborhood kids roaming everywhere through those five or six streets, but the four of us, well, we were a notch above that. K and my sister were a year apart in age, and T and I were a year apart, and there were not one but two sets of sisters, and well, you get the idea.

So think of it this way, friends. Imagine having a long-lost family member, one you'd grown up with that, over time, vanished into thin air, and then *whap!* you look at an e-mail one day and there she is, alive, all grown up, and saying hello. Yeah, I was emotional about it all.

Seems T's discovery of me was, though sudden, a longer and more drawn-out process. She found Betland through that greatest of features, the "Next Blog" button, and something about it just seemed familiar. I mentioned B'field. And B'burg. And clarinets. She e-mailed her sister K and dared to inquire, "You don't possibly think...." Then she went and had a listen to the Hucklebug, and realized she'd found me.

One e-mail later, and the memories came flooding back.

Memories of roller skating, riding bikes, going to the neighborhood park. Of sleepovers, talking late into the night, and listening to the AM radio. Barbies, board games, and, yes, even batons. And more.

Chez Y had the wonderful feature of a porch that ran along the entire front of the house. Perfect for setting up a day-long Barbie session, or Farm Animals, a version of play in very limited edition wherein one basically played Barbies, but instead of dolls the toys were little plastic animals, bought in bags, about an inch or so high. Horses, cows, doggies, kitties, they all lived together in kingdoms (a kingdom being the group of animals any one person owned), and we had names for them and personalities and entire life stories for these little plastic guys.

Barbies, well, they were Barbies just like everyone else played, but we all liked to go to K's Barbie City, because she had one of the coolest Barbie items in history. Not made by Mattel, no, thank you very much, but something a family friend had made her that was a real-live green flowered upholstered couch made out of a Tide box. Everyone in Barbieland went to K's so they could visit and sit on the couch. (You know, in what might have been a massive unnoticed case of foreshadowing, about 2 months ago I started seeing a jewelry case at Wal-Mart that was made like a sofa and reminded me so much of K's setee I almost bought it on the spot. I thought better of it, but still go down that aisle every single time I'm in the Wally World. I'm waiting for the price to come down. I want it for Sherman. Sherman would have looked magnificent on K's Tide Couch.)

K and T had the board game Aggravation, and a cool Monopoly set that had better tokens than P's and mine (it had a horse! ours didn't have a horse!), and we had Life and Operation. One of us (which? which??) also had Mystery Date, where you paired Barbie up with her date for the evening and prayed it wasn't the horrid "booby prize" of boys, Poindexter. Between us, we had Parcheesi, Mastermind, Battleship, and probably a hundred more I can't remember. We learned the card game Afghan Rummy, and though I couldn't remember the rules now if you held a gun to my head, we played it over and over, inside and out, at the Y House or the B House. And spades. Lots of games of spades.

We packed lunches and rode our bikes to faraway (well, the end of the neighborhood) places to picnic, and used to pick wild strawberries in the vacant lot up the street that's now long been house-occupied. Both family houses had great back yards, just perfect for pools, but only rich people had pools back in those days. Who cared, though? At our house we'd get out the garden hose and squirt each other, and if we got bored of that, we'd go over to K and T's back yard, where there was a water sprinkler to run through. I think at one time they even had a Slip 'N Slide.

There were always dogs in our families. Our beagle Ringo gave way to Jeff the basset hound. The Y's were Poodle People, and their brown curly ball of fur Cocoa gave way to the black curly ball of fur Fifi. Fifi had the added attraction of going to anyone who yelled to her, "Here, Fi!" and once all four of us huddled in the Y living room and yelled simultaneously, (one - two - three!) "Here, Fi!" and watched her looking around confused, trying to decide who to go to. That was, up to that point in our lives, the funniest thing we'd ever seen or done, funnier than anything anyone had ever done, and we laughed out loud an entire day over it.

But there was one activity the four of us indulged in that was unique. It probably took up more of our time than anything else, because it was fun, it was something we could all do together, and it was both a sunny day outside and rainy day inside activity.

We had our own teen magazine.

Now, to appreciate this (and there's a lot to appreciate, folks, believe you me), you have to understand that our Wonder Years were the big booming years of Tiger Beat, 16 Magazine, and Flip. Filled with pictures of The Monkees, Bobby Sherman, Paul Revere and the Raiders (who we hated), and whatever hot actors and actresses were currently on TV.

And so one (I'm sure) very innocent day we decided we'd get out paper, pencils, and crayons, and just, by damn, make our own magazine. K and T's dad was an engineer, and used to bring them home the best colored pencils in the history of art. They were Prismacolors, with nice, soft leads, in as many colors as there are in one's imagination. And we got started in the Publishing World. We called our magazine "Animal Beat." But mostly, we just called it "The Mag." ("Hey, what are we going to do today?" "Well, come over, and we can work on The Mag.") ("OK, when we get home from school today, everybody meet up to work on The Mag!")

Animal Beat, as its name might suggest to you if you're very keen, was filled with animal celebrities. Why? Well, I have no idea, really, except that maybe men were harder to draw than women. Because while (and this is from memory here) all of our famous folk were animals, some of the women were drawn as, well, women. But all of the men were drawn as horses or dogs or, well.... We'll get to that later.

Our teen dreams became Roan Pony (K could draw a horse like nobody's business, and taught us all how), and Jinky Jee, who was a dog, there was a dog named Bobby something or other whose girlfriend was a flea. Her name was Maria. She was a Spanish flea. There were more, many more of those created celebrities lost in my once-perfect memory, we had a rotating stable (sorry, no pun intended) of regular favorites, then every once in a while a doodle would become a good drawing and we'd introduce a brand-new celebrity into the fold.

There were certain facets of The Mag I remember vividly. Like, "My Life," where we'd take an animal and let him tell his (or her) life story, with pictures of course, over a few episodes. Or "My School Pics" (I think it was called), where we'd carefully rule our notebook paper into twelve even squares and draw a celebrity from childhood through graduation. Or "Premiere," where we'd give one of our Animal Heart-throbs a new movie, then draw the other celebs attending its premiere. That was always fun because we got to pair up new celebrity couples and draw mod and groovy fashions.

And while most of our famous came right out of our imaginations, I'm sure some were modeled after our own favorite famous. If I'm not mistaken, The Beatles made at least one appearance, of course, they were beetles, and though I can't specifically remember it, I'd find it hard to believe that The Monkees didn't show up somewhere or other. Our favorite TV show at the time was "Bracken's World" (Showing My Age Alert!), and there were a few buxom beauties on that show that we had to have tried to draw for The Mag, I'm sure. And Dennis Cole. We loved Dennis Cole on "Bracken's World."

However, sometimes our celebrities were, well, real celebrities. Fred Bassett lept right off the comic book pages to be a star in Animal Beat, and.... And....

Hmmm. Now how do I put this.

So did Mickey Mouse. And that brings us, my friends, to a phrase that, after reading this, I hope you'll never forget.

It was K's doing. God love her. She was doing an "Introduction" article, which we always did when we drew some new character and wanted it to join the Celebrity Roundup. And she was introducing the newest Teen Sensation, Mickey Mouse. She drew, on her paper, a huge head of Mickey Mouse that took up about 2/3 of the page, then gave a little introduction of Mr Mouse underneath.

I don't know what it was about Mickey. He looked like Mickey. He had a fine introduction. But when the page was complete, all we could do was laugh. It was about the ugliest thing any of us had ever seen. A massive disembodied Mickey head, there floating about the page. It was a giant failure. It was the Hindenburg. It was the Edsel.

It was also, however, a completed page, and those were hard to come by, and so it became a part of our issue. As The Mag was going to press - we actually put these things together, people, used a hole punch on the covers and tied them, with our notebook paper pages, together with yarn - we were placing our articles where we wanted them and numbering the pages, and "Introducing Mickey Mouse" became Page Eight.

Page Eight.

Sounds simple now, but you have no idea what the phrase Page Eight came to be in our lives. It suddenly became the euphemism for everything stinko, from bad days to boys we didn't like to ugly clothes to anything else that made you want to hold your nose and retch.

And, well, where The Mag was concerned, it was something of a barometer of fear. "Geez, look at how I drew Jinky Jee. This'll be Page Eight for sure." "Oh, please don't let my Roan Pony School Years be Page Eight!"

When I got that e-mail from T last week, she actually introduced herself as "of The Mag fame." I hadn't thought about The Mag for probably 30 years. And when I did, laughing through those welling tears, two things exploded in my brain. One was Jinky Jee Love Beads, a special mail-in offer we'd drawn ("Send in this coupon to get your own Jinky Jee Love Beads!"), and the other was Page Eight.

You know, I don't know how many issues of The Mag were ever completed. I know how much of our time it took up, how much we all loved doing it, and how it was such a central part of our lives. In T's mail she did say that K to this very day still has "every issue" of The Mag, so there had to have been a few. And it also has to be, as T said, "A slumber party in the making." And let me be the first to accept that invitation. I've already packed my pajamas.

And so K and P and T and me are all grown up. K and T moved away when I was going into the 8th grade, to a town about two hours away. When you don't drive, that may as well be Africa. We'd go see them sometimes, visit for a weekend, but we all drifted apart, as happens in the sad world of Becoming Adults. But for my sister or me, after the move, no one replaced K and T in the Friend Department. That was something that could never be re-created. We all have our own lives now, and it was great catching up on about 35 years in the couple of e-mails we've bounced back and forth. All four of us still have both our parents, and our own homes, three of us have husbands, two of us have kids. And we all have a million memories of each other, secrets shared, and experiences, good and bad.

One of the first things T said to me in her e-mail was that there was something she could never forget about me. It was a time we were twirling batons together and she kept telling me I was doing something wrong. Over and over, until finally I threw my baton down into the dirt and stomped away home. She'd had too much pride to say, "Wait! Come back! I was wrong, I was being a bitch! [though of course neither of us used that word] Please, come back and play!" It had bothered her all these years, and she couldn't wait to set it right.

Funny thing is, I have absolutely no memory of this event whatsoever. And maybe that's because my years had been shaded by the guilty memory of my getting mad one twilight on the Y's front porch and upending the Aggravation game we were playing, and losing one of their marble pieces in the grass forever. I had to apologize and present them with a brand new version of the game.

Yeah, we fought. Just like sisters would. But it was all good.

This past Christmas, I only asked for one present from my parents. And on Christmas morning, there it was, a 120-piece set of Prismacolor pencils, in soft leads, in all the colors one could imagine. If that slumber party ever happens, I'm bringing my pencils. It's time for one more issue of The Mag.

Or at least one final Page Eight.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Acrowinners, we have acrowinners! So, give me your odes to yardwork.
- Honorable Mention goes to Flipsycab with her, "Leveled a treacherous zinnia. Laughed over remains."
- Runner-Up goes to Kellie (with an ie) with her, "Lizard Atop Tiny Zinnas. Leaves Orange. Requiem."
- And this week's winner, the first acro of the week and my favorite, goes to LilyG with her, "Let a tiny zinnia live, o rake!"
- The beloved zinnia.
- Thanks to all who played! You've all done very well!