When mama got married for the second time to a wanna-be Hell’s Angel with flowing red hair and a ferocious German Shepard whose bark made my soul shiver, my grandmother gifted me with a pair of camel-colored, squared-toe Dingo cowboy boots to help me carry the sadness and worry that were much too heavy for my scrawny shoulders.
The night before I was to move out of the brightly colored apartment, where Big Band music shimmied out of the giant speakers that lined the shag carpeted runway of a hall, where my grandparents, and more often than not, my mom and I lived, she gave them to me. When she did, she took a drag of her ever-present, lipstick-stained Lucky Strike and whispered conspiratorially, “Darlin’, now remember, if anyone tries to take these from you, you kick ‘em. Hard.”
I giggled. She winked. We hugged.
I breathed in her mixture of Oscar De La Renta perfume and black coffee and knew that is what safety would always smell like.
After we moved away from our family, mama, much to my protest, enrolled me in a preschool. I was inconsolable. The only solace I took were in my boots. I insisted on wearing them – no matter the outfit or the weather. Mom didn’t fight me on it, which was unlike her.
I hated the daycare with a fiery passion. I just wanted to go back to my grandparents. I wanted to go home.
However, accepting that I was powerless in this situation, I struck back the only way that I knew how; by refusing to play with any of the kids in hopes that this would prove that the daycare and I should part ways. Most days during recess, I could be found sitting alone atop the monkey bars, making wistful loops in the air with my boot clad feet.
And, then one day, a little girl tugged on one of my legs.
I panicked. And, heard my gran’s single malt voice in my head, “Darlin’, now remember, if anyone tries to take these from you, you kick ‘em. Hard.”
And, that is exactly what I did.
I hit that poor girl square in the chin with the unflinching heel of my Dingo. Blood flew out of her face like candy out of a pinata. And, she wailed like a doomsday siren. I froze, but not until after I raised my boot out of the way of the blood splatter.
I had never been in trouble before with anyone other than my mom and I had no idea what punishment was to befall me. It was not nearly as bad as I imagined. I was placed on the “naughty box” – a wooden box that was inexplicably covered in a jaunty red and white gingham.
By the time my mom arrived, I had worked myself into a proper snit and then fallen asleep, exhausted from my worry and tears. I knew that I had a belt whippin’ coming my way when we got home.
However, much to my suprise, mama wasn’t mad. She scooped me up off the box and carried me to the car whispering that she was sorry that she had ever put me in that place.
The next day she and my grandmother met at a truckstop that was the halfway mark between their two houses. Mom told me that I was going to stay with my grandparents until she got everything sorted out.
When I slid onto the white leather seats of my gran’s mammoth Buick, she again winked at me, rubbed my boots and said, “Glad you listened to gran. I knew those boots would get you home.”
Of course, I am sure that when she gave me those boots and those wildly inappropriate instructions that she had no idea how that would all pan out…but, then again, maybe she did.
I never went back to my step-dad’s house or the preschool. Within a year, mama and her freshly casted wrist joined us. I wish gran would have gotten her a pair of boots too.
This article was written by a guest blogger. The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions of Bob Lacey, Sheri Lynch or the Bob & Sheri show.
Soshally Awkward
Sosha Lewis is a writer whose work has been featured in The Washington Post, Huffington Post, MUTHA Magazine and The Charlotte Observer. She writes about her sometimes wild, sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking past filled with free-lunches, a grimy sports bar, a six foot tall Albino woman who tried to save her teenage soul, felonious, drug addicted parents, an imaginary friend named Blueberry and growing up nestled in the coal-dusted mountains of West Virginia.
