growing up: 2

I live in the town where we all grew up white as wonder bread, playing in the mud in the summers and tracking it all over Ma's clean floor. We'd never heard of a murder, and the only TV int he house had a cracked screen, and Dad just left it in the basement.

Wouldn't believe what bad you miss in a town like that. People had their problems, sure, but in the end there wasn't much some good old homemade peach cobbler couldn't cover up. Now that stuff made an ironing board out of your ribs.

The first time I fell in love, we just sat by the river near Cooley Canyon and watched the stars. I still haven't seen anything that beautiful before or since. There's nothing like pure love that's never been touched by hurt.

You wouldn't believe it, but I was the prom queen. Momma did my hair up all pretty and I went with that boy- greesed hair, white smile- in his Cadillac. I hadn't even kissed him yet. There was something too magical about every moment.

The air in my home town really did smell like dryer sheets, and when it rained it felt like Genesis all over again. On the eighth day, God created Htuoy. That's my home town. There's a peeling wooden sign out by the flickering high way that says "Htuoy's population 10,000." I never did figure out who that last person was that made 9,999 into 10,000, and although my Aunt May had two new babies when I was young, they never did change that sign.

Things tasted sweeter in my home town. There was chocolate like you've never dreamed, and that was about the only black-white division we knew. Outside my town, this kind of war waged along that line, but in Htuoy there was nothing balck but mud and chocolate, and really that was just dark brown.

I never did know where babies came from in Htuoy. They seemed to appear at night in closed rooms so I never got to see. It just always seemed like something beautiful to hear that little cry of a baby that hadn't been before.

I had the best of friends. We argued sometimes over earrings and paper dolls, but I always knew they loved me. We used to walk along Ega Avenue towards that bridge at the end of town, but we never did cross. And that wasn't just because Mama said not to. There was something gray about the grass across the water. It just seemed like we'd be losing some kind of color if we walked across.

Sometimes strangers in torn bandannas and overalls like Papa Joe's came leering across that bridge from the grayness, and they never were quite as bright as the rest of us. I didn't understand why they fell and swayed because I didn't know what drink was then, or what could drive a man to do it.

The strangers always stayed a week or two and then drifted off across the bridge. They never qutie fit in in Htuoy. They were too sad or something. I felt bad for them because Dad said they didn't fit in across the bridge either, and where's a man to fit if there's no room on earth?

Sure, I cried in Htuoy. I cried over a bit of pepper in my chocolate milk, a little trickle of blood swinging down from a little pink knee. I cried wthen the birds hit the glass in the general store and flapped a minute on the porch before dying. I cried when I lost my pinafore, and I cried at the end of Little Women. But I never cried like those men from abroad, never stumbled with sea legs on land. truth be told, they scared me a lot. They scared us all. We couldn't see the ocean they swan in, and in a way none of us could ever explain, we were afraid that we might drown in it too.

In Htuoy even the mayor settled arguments with hopscotch, and no one was too busy for a game of tag. That's another thing about Htuoy- we were never too busy to do what we loved. There was always time to be with each other.

There were a few people in Htuoy that had lived there forever, but we never talked to them. They lived in these stringy gray shacks by the river and they hung their wash on the clotheslines in silence whereas our mothers always gossiped. They always seemed like they had something to say, but they could never bring themselves to say it. We loved them because we saw ourselves within them, but we stayed away from the shacks ont he shore.

Really, though, there's ntohing left this side of the sun like my home town. And it's hard to say that I still stumble aweway from the cars and the pain and the noise of this city life back there sometimes, and I walk across the bridge only when I'm drunk like a Russian sailor. Now I understand the drink. Soemtimes it takes that much to let go, even if you're just letting go of the fog and the gray.

I only stay a few weeks, long enough to realize I don't belong there anymore. I sleep in the gray shacks by the river, and there I don't have to talk because I know I'm understood. We were the same, really. They had lived there all their lives, but they'd never really been citizens; I had left there long ago, and now there wasn't much left for me.

When I leave town though on Friday nights, I see the little girls playing hopscotch next to the bridge, and I wonder what made me go and will it make them go and why do we always think there's something better?

There's no going back. There's no going back to Htuoy. But all of us gray folks, whether we admit it or not, miss it with all of our hearts.