gullible

Day 103: The Sound of Nothing

| Aspergers Girls

Compared to my other posts, this is very mature. Part of my journey to wholeness and self-love has involved documenting events of my past. The short stories are a form of art work to me. They feel like art, as they are scribed through strong emotion and creative flow. However, the words are no longer a part of me. The little girl’s experiences are forever lost on the pages I typed.

This is not meant to be sad, but shared as a possible peer into another part of me—the melancholic artist, perhaps. Or a mature woman sharing her truth, so others know they are not alone. I have many pages of similar events, but shall not post on this blog because of the maturity-level. Someday the missing chapters, I suppose, may appear in book form as a collection of many of the thoughts in this blog.

The Sound of Nothing

My new sitter was Jessica Jensen.  I called her Jess.

She was much the complete opposite of the obtuse and sedentary babysitter Mrs. Stockman.  Jess was a long-limbed, freckled-faced high school freshman with thick reddish-blond hair and a ruddy face infested with whiteheads.

Initially, I wanted to make Jess my best friend, but Jess had different plans.  She wasn’t mean or anything.  She was actually quite tolerant.  However, she was short of being my friend.  During our time together, Jess feigned interest in me, in the form of an over curious stare or raised eyebrow, but within a few minutes she was focused on something else, like her fingernails or the person on the other end of the telephone.  Nothing I said or did truly seemed to impress Jess.  She thought I was smart and funny, and told me so.  But her real interest was in her boyfriends and teenage mischief, all of which I was much too young to understand.

Jess was a roamer, and in a way I was her little naïve sidekick.  I’m sure it crossed Jess’s mind several times to leave me behind somewhere, but to her credit she always kept me in close proximity.  She didn’t know what she was doing most of the time.  She was just some teenager from a broken, druggie home, who didn’t know better, a girl who had far too much freedom.  We attended movies, where Jess covered my eyes so I wouldn’t see the full screen of naked breasts, and then afterward we’d hitchhike about town, bouncing from one kid’s house to another.  Jess was in search of something, maybe an escape or a rush, something to make her forget about where she’d come from and what she’d seen.

I stood by Jess, no matter where she took me, because, like her, I had no choice.  Choices are for bigger kids, once they realize they are worth something, once they know their value, once they can look at themselves and smile, liking what they see.  Jess and I, we just hadn’t gotten there yet.

I followed Jess into a world that seemed a distant land from the home I once knew with my stepfather Drake.  It was a place of no good and ugliness, a world with molding mattresses stretched out under the overgrowth of a beat up magnolia tree, where the backyard fence was bent and broken in all different places, where the house with the peeling yellow paint and exposed boards stank even from the outside, maybe even from the next house over—a raw smell, a dangerous smell that I imagine dogs would whimper and slink away from.

And there, I’d find her oldest brother, or better yet, he’d find me—a long-haired, high school dropout named Rick: a teenager roughened by an absent father and a strung out mother, scraped up all over on the inside like a bristle brush to stainless steel. An aimless boy who roamed a place where beer bottles lined the back porch and stray wild cats, some pregnant, some close to death, slithered in and out of open basement spaces like hairy serpents.

Inside Jess’ house were threadbare couches, half-busted televisions and food, but not the type of food anyone would want to eat, just leftover spoiled junk, crushed potato chips and cookie remnants, and bowls of sugary cereals molding in spoiled milk.  It was the type of house that needed to be quarantined, sealed off with yellow tape and bulldozed down, or burnt into smoldering ash.  No good was in the house.  No good at all.

Rick liked to play doctor, a confusing game wherein he touched me in places a little girl should never be touched.  And Jess, he’d do the same to her, that’s what I suspected, though I never said so.  I just kept my mouth shut, let him do what he needed, and left, went out and found Jess, like nothing had happened.  He never laid himself on me, nothing as crude as that, and he was just a child himself.  He didn’t know any better; just like Jess, he didn’t know any better.

I didn’t feel nothing.  No pleasure, no guilt, no disgust, felt like I would after playing a game of Twister or the Game of Life.  That’s what it was, just another game of life.

One time, in the early spring, I clutched Jess’ hand in her backyard while watching the slimy-brown juices of chewing tobacco seep out the side of Rick’s cocked mouth. “Get the hell out of here!” Rick yelled, fixing his cold-hazel eyes on scowling Jess.

Jess stood her ground.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Rick continued, kicking up pebbles with his muddy old boots and letting loose a wall of dust. “Get the hell out of here!”

“You are an idiot,” Jess said. “It’s my backyard, too.”

“Screw you!”

Jess clenched her teeth.  I stepped back and started counting the multitudes of dandelions.  At the same time, Rick removed a chipped brick from an outdoor wall.

Jess screamed, “You’re going to get arrested!”

“Mind your own business,” Rick said with a heated gaze, adding more spit to the puddle in the dirt.  “Just get out of my sight.  Go back to humping your fat loser of a boyfriend!”  With that said, he pulled out a dented tin box which had been stuffed in the space behind where the old brick had been.  He then opened the box and pulled out a pile of compressed twenties.  He fanned out the money, stopping to toss a smirk Jess’s way, and then shoved the box and brick back in place.

Jess squeezed my hand, and shouted again, “If Mother finds out, she’ll kick you out on your ass again!”

Answering back with a stiff middle finger, Rick headed out the busted back gate. “Whore!” he hollered from over the broken fence. “Stinking Whore!”

Jess turned round to find me.  I gazed up at her and I thought for a moment she might grab some money for herself.  Images of Budd’s ice cream cones and bean burritos danced in my head.  But Jess didn’t take any money.  She didn’t even go near the brick.  Instead she led me inside her house to the grime-covered kitchen.

“Come on,” Jess said.  “Let’s get out of here.”  She grabbed a hotdog off of a plate and took a bite, then proceeded to chew with her mouth open.  My mother taught me to always close my mouth while eating.  I watched as Jess’ food slid about, until the hotdog moved to the side of her blushing cheek.  “Now, what did you see?  You didn’t see anything did you?”  She swallowed and took another mouthful.  A frantic look crossed her face.  She paused between her words to chew. “Because… if you saw… or     heard… anything… anything at all… it’s not… true.”

“I didn’t see anything,” I said, wide-eyed and innocent.  I started counting with my fingers.  I figured there was at least a few hundred dollars in the box.

Jess swallowed again. “Good.  Good.  Let’s go then.  Come on.”

As Jess walked a few strides ahead of me, I could hear her disjointed whispers.  A block away, she stopped and turned to me.  “Never mind,” she said.  “You’re too young to understand.  It’s too late, just too late to do anything now.”

Further up the sidewalk, Jess stopped dead in her tracks.  Her lacy halter flapped up in the wind.  I reached over and attempted to pull her top down.  She didn’t notice, and the wind blew the halter right back up again.  Her sheer pink bra was showing.  I studied the thin material.  Jess faced sideways and cupped her hand to her ear. “Listen.  Do you hear a police car?  Do you hear that?”

I gazed into the crystal-blue of her wild eyes and considered what Jess had said.  I didn’t hear anything.  We waited without moving, stood still—didn’t move an inch, just like those pill bugs do when they’re playing dead.  For a few seconds I believed Jess might well be a bionic babysitter endowed with supernatural hearing.  I waited patiently for the sound of the police siren or the sight of a patrol car.  I waited and waited, but in the end there was nothing.

© Everyday Aspergers, 2012. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. https://aspergersgirls.wordpress.com

Samantha Craft

Day 72: Lessons Learned

| Aspergers Girls

Lessons Learned

1) When a young man says, “I’ll call you,” the statement is often equivalent to “See Ya.” It’s another form of goodbye, where you never see the person again.

2) Just because a man goes to couples counseling with you doesn’t mean he’s not married and also going to couples counseling with his wife.

3) People will most definitely look away and cringe, if you share up close photos of giving birth or breastfeeding. Then they won’t want anything you offer them to eat.

4) When you are a restaurant hostess at a popular night spot, even if your boss says to be honest with the customers about the wait time for a table, do not smile and say: “That will be about 137 minutes.”

5) If one hairdresser tells you that you should always wear bangs, that doesn’t mean you have to wear bangs for the next five years.

6) If a dentist says, “In order to blend in your dead front tooth with your other teeth, the best method would be dyeing all of your other teeth darker,” run and don’t look back.

7) When the orthodontist tells you, as a teenager, to wear the headgear and neckgear for your braces to middle school, don’t!

8) If a boy calls you cow eyes, don’t go home and cry, punch him.

9) When you are little, don’t wear the same hippy dress you love two years in a row for school photos.

10) Don’t play tunnel tag in the short, Italian wool dress your grandma gave you , unless you wear shorts underneath.

11) Tell your mom when you get your period. Don’t wait three months, and don’t use the free, plus-size, super absorbent, expandable tampons that the gym teacher passed out!

12) Don’t buy life insurance and agree to automatic payments from your bank account, and then wait three years to research if the company exists. It doesn’t.

13) If you have just given birth, and you are sharing a hospital room with a new mother who talks nonstop on the phone into the late hours of the night, complain.

14) If you are an elementary school teacher, and spend three hours on a letter of recommendation for one of your fifth grade students, make sure you spell the student’s name correctly, especially if you don’t want to irritate the parents.

15) While a student in middle school, don’t draw pictures of different boys’ body parts, label them with names, descriptions, and insults, and then leave the illustrations behind at your desk on accident.

16) Even if you have dyslexia, don’t put the spelling words for the test inside the pleats of your cheerleading skirt. You will greatly disappoint your teacher.

17) If you have big ears that stick out, and people laugh at them, wear your hair down until you have high self-esteem.

18) If Italian in America, pluck thick Italian eyebrows, and remember Italian only has one letter l.

19) Don’t save a drowning honeybee in a swimming pool; sensing danger, he will buzz super loud warning his friends. His friends will land on your arm and sting you!

20) When a fake blonde, with a fake tan, and fake nails tells you, “You would look pretty with highlights in your hair.” Don’t say, “I prefer the natural look. I don’t like fake things.”

21) If your boyfriend’s mother invites you to a private lunch, with just you and her, and then says in confidence, “Don’t date my son. You are too good for him,” listen.

22) If you have the flu, and are ghastly sick, don’t beg your boyfriend to take you out-of-town to meet his parents for the first time.

23) Don’t date your weight-lifting trainers. Just don’t.

24) If you are getting a haircut as a teenager, and the hairdresser ignores you long enough for your wet hair to dry, before she returns, leave.

25) The movie Fargo is not a good first date movie.

26) Ask Dad before rearranging his entire dining room and living area.

27) Ask Dad before bringing the puppy home.

28) If you are going to miss one day of college for a funeral, you don’t need to write a letter and then cry to the professor in the hallway, in order to be excused.

29) French classes in high school and college are useless as a second language when you live in California.

30) When you have a long-term boyfriend, and you meet someone at the public swimming pool, you don’t give another boy your phone number and say: “I have a boyfriend, but let’s be friends.”

31) When a young teenager says he’s going to travel from his town 100 miles on his bike to come see you, he might just do that. Better to tell him ahead of time, you have a boyfriend and you aren’t interested.

32) If a young teenager says he’s going to drive his car across country to see you as soon as he gets a job, his license, and a car, probably not true, regardless of what he promises.

33) If you write enough letters to a school district office about the hard water from the sprinkler system damaging the paint on your new red Mustang car, when you park in the parking lot at the school where you work, the district will pay for all the employees to have their cars detailed; however, the superintendent of the district will not smile at you ever again.

34) If you consume too much Excedrin, iced tea, and soda at the same time, you will have a caffeine overdose; and to avoid a thousand dollar hospital bill, you will have to convince the health insurance company the trip to the emergency room wasn’t due to a panic attack.

35) If you’re a teacher and the principal says to you, “You should choose between raising a family or being a teacher, you can’t do both well,” sue him.

36) If an acupuncturist tells you about his failed marriages, his mortgage, his childhood, his parenting woes, and then spanks his wife on the butt in front of you, all while you are under treatment atop the table, don’t go back to that acupuncturist. And don’t feel guilty about not going back.

37) Doctors are practicing medicine.

38) You will offend a LDS person by calling them LSD, even if you have dyslexia.

39) Not a good idea to say, “That pisses me off,” in front of an entire fifth grade class, when you are a teacher.

40) No amount of protesting and letter writing or phone calls will keep a principal from assigning you to teach seventh grade, instead of elementary school, if she thinks you are a good teacher, even if you cry and tell her you hated middle school as a child.

41) If you kiss a mean ugly man enough times, he remains a mean ugly man.

42) When you ask a boyfriend, “Should I get a shorter haircut,” and he says, “That depends.” And you answer, “That depends on what,” and he responds, “That depends on if you are planning to lose weight, or not,” run away from the relationship.

43) The joke: When you’re dancing with your honey and your feeling kind of funny, and your nose is kind of runny, but it’s not, isn’t funny after the age of ten.

44) Don’t read your personal diary to fickle teenage girls.

45) When you are a kid, don’t announce to your seventh grade class you are wearing your first training bra.

Day 66: Fasten8

| Aspergers Girls
Everyday Aspergers
View from our deck today
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This morning, on the way to the gym with my boys, a state trooper pulled me over. He gave me the star treatment: flashing swirling lights and siren. I felt rather important. Especially when I pulled away because I thought the trooper was signaling me to park in a safer place. That’s when the sirens got super loud and made a noise I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.

I felt like a fugitive. It was rather exhilarating and not nearly as scary as I’d imagined. I’m thinking I’d make a good villain or superhero, or someone who dodges the justice system.

I take all the flashing lights as a sign from God that I shouldn’t exercise anymore. I don’t care if you don’t agree. I’m feeling very powerful after my run in with the law.

The second to the last time, I almost got a ticket, I’d done one of my famous incomplete stops at a stop sign, and was pulled over by a young officer. I batted my eyes and smiled. Then I shyly giggled (on purpose) and said, “Oh. My husband is going to be so upset with me!” Then I intentionally stared at the officer’s eyebrows and sighed.

He asked, as if I’d scripted his part myself, “Why?”

And I quickly said in a gag-worthy, sweet voice, “Because my husband is a volunteer firefighter and he’ll be so upset that I got a ticket.”

The officer’s body language eased then. He leaned in with a smile, and suddenly started talking to me like I was his good buddy. The next thing I knew, he’s waving me off with a cheer, and saying, “Don’t forget to tell Bob, I said hello.”

I was pondering on this situation this morning, and wondering if this scenario qualifies as manipulation.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I was only using my survival skills that I’d developed over the years in order to ease my way out of uncomfortable social situations. And since I’ve been easing my way out of uncomfortable situations with exact strategies my entire life—it was only natural to pull out the big actress guns and key words at an opportunistic moment.

This morning, after my three sons were mostly finished with their scoffing, finger-pointing, laughing, and commentary that sounded something like this: Ha, ha. You’re gonna get a ticket. You’re gonna get a ticket. He’s going to read you your rights. Mom’s in trouble, and after the trooper had waved me the go ahead, I said very calmly: “See, the officer saw that Mom had such a good driving record that he let me go.”

My oldest son quickly retorted: “How many times have they let you go?”

“Three, maybe four times,” I said with a wide happy grin.

There were some chuckles.

“Would you rather have a mom who drove super slow?” I asked.

“You’d still get pulled over,” my youngest answered.

“I think he let you off because he saw your handicapped sign and felt sorry for you,” my oldest offered.

I realized, looking myself over, that my son was probably right. A middle-aged, frumpily dressed, un-showered and disheveled-haired woman, with three boys in the van, just doesn’t have that I’m-so-sexy-don’t-give-me-a-ticket charm.

I spent the last five minutes of the ride lecturing my boys on never drinking and driving.

In the past three decades, I’ve been in three car accidents, none of them my fault. Twice, old ladies hit me. Seriously old, the last one was. I had to do a triple-take of her driver’s license, after she sideswiped my van running a red light. 1913! I kept thinking I was reading the birthdate wrong.

Only I would get hit by a ninety-eight year old woman! Statistically how many people in their late nineties are still driving? Or even alive? The other time an old lady spun out on the freeway and hit me head on in the fast lane. But I think she was in her forties, then. I’m in my forties now. Back then, when I was nineteen, she seemed super old.

The time after that, I was rear ended at high-speed on the highway by a man who not only had no driver’s license but who was in the country illegally. He was very apologetic.

I’m certain there are angels up somewhere, like in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, whom get a good kick out of watching my life play out.

Sometimes I think I am some pawn in the Matrix, or, at minimum, a major character in some crazy person’s dream.

Speaking of cars. I was a bit naïve a few years back, when I was still single.

I like words. I tend to obsess. And when I bought a red Mustang on a whim, only because I thought the Mustang was pretty, I obsessed about the license plate for three days straight. I wanted the plates to be personalized and charming, and creative. I came up with several ideas. I can still see the long list, and picture myself asking people’s advice. Oh, the old me was so embarrassingly innocent.

It came down to two choices: Red Apple (I was a teacher) or FASTEN8.

I chose FASTEN8 because I thought the word was so clever. To me, the fasten meant to fasten a seatbelt, and the 8 was one of my favorite numbers. And I thought my car was fascinating, and actually that my whole creation of FASTEN8 was fantastic!

My husband was the one who finally explained to me, some two years later, why men would slow down, nod their head and wink at me, when I was driving my Mustang. I thought the looks were because of the nifty spoiler I put on the end of my car or the new moonroof. Did I mention I was obsessed with my car?

My husband was kind when he explained: “When people read FASTEN8, Honey, they aren’t thinking about seatbelts and how clever you are.”

“They aren’t? What are they thinking of then?”

Insert what you think my husband said here: ___________________________

“Oh? Oh. OH!!!!”

I don’t personalize my license plates anymore.

Things LV wanted me to briefly mention about the trip to the gym today:

  1. Why aren’t spider veins in fashion? Almost all the naked ladies in the locker room have them on their legs.
  2. Why do all the naked people choose to not shut the shower curtain when they shower? It’s one quick pull of the curtain.
  3. Oh, this is what a steam room is like. I can’t see. I can’t breathe. Where is the door? I’m getting flashbacks of that bathroom scene in Charlie’s Angels where they tried to kill Jacqueline Smith with steam! At least I won’t see any naked people, if they come in here.
  4. Is this what swimmer’s ears feels like? Can I die of swimmer’s ear? Everything is echoing. “Helloooo.”
  5. As long as I keep my eyes closed, no naked people will come into the whirlpool.
  6. I’m sexy and I know it! I work out!

Sponge Bob I’m Sexy and I Know It!

31 Jokes for Nerds!


Double Rainbow!
Everyday Aspergers
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Day 56: Nothing But a Heartache

| Aspergers Girls

 

At any given time, from the age of fifteen to twenty-seven, I tried to have a best friend and a boyfriend. This pair of people anchored me: the best girl and the best boy. In some ways, people would consider me lucky, as I seemed to attract the handsome boys. But some handsome boys, and boys in general, I later discovered, could be bad boys, too.

Many people with Asperger’s Syndrome have reported that they didn’t have a romantic relationship for a long time, if ever. Me? I instinctively clung to boys starting at the age of five. Probably as a result of the gap I needed to fill based on the absence of my father and the busyness of my single mother. Being an only child in a world of ghosts, precognitive dreams, and extreme sensitivities to people, places, things, while having an acute sense of sight, sound, hearing, and touch, left me longing to cling to something, if only for balance and retreat.

As I reached my teenage years, I became liken to a high-quality, food storage, plastic cling wrap. I’d seal a male over with my entire essence, and remain stuck there, in full-grip mode. I remember thinking I was experienced with relationships. Keen on how they worked, what to do, and how to keep a “man.”  But I wasn’t.  I was weathered for certain: rusted around the outside like a metal pole set out in the rain one too many winters. But I definitely wasn’t experienced.  I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to take care of my needs and wants, beyond lassoing a male to do things for me.  I was quite pathetic, in an unintentional, hadn’t-meant-to-be, way.

By my early twenties, after graduating from college with honors and starting my first teaching job, I was deeply ashamed of the woman I’d become.  And more times than not, I didn’t know the part of ME that I played in life—didn’t know my lines or even where to find the script. From one moment to the next I was changing.  In one scene I played the role of the dedicated soon-to-be school teacher, and in the next a desperate crazy fool clinging to whatever man she could get her hands on.  A fisherman in the game of love, I’d learned to bait my hook and cast my pole, but hadn’t known to catch and release.

As time passed, each man I met, no matter where or when, who showed the slightest interest in me, soon became my new love interest.  I was fortunate in high school to have had two boyfriends (at different times) that treated me tenderly and with respect. However, later, I dated men from all walks of life, most of whom were extremely damaged in someway or another.  And all who were addicted to something or someone.

The worst of being with a man came in not what they ever did, but what I let myself do.  I made men my bed, and I slept in them while walking through life.  And I fooled myself repeatedly into thinking I was content.  It didn’t matter if the bed was too small, or too big, or if it had lumps.  It didn’t matter if the mattress was missing all together and I was made to sleep on the cold hard floor.  It only mattered I was in the bed, or at least what I’d thought to be a bed.  My mind fooled me.  My heart fooled me.  My logic fooled me.  While all along my spirit wept.

There has never been such a horrible part in my life as the years I walked half-blind to my own wanting.  In essence I was a prisoner, unable to move forward, sideways, or even backwards without pushing, dragging, or tricking myself in any given direction.  Best to stand still in one spot—best not to move an inch—if that was possible.  But it wasn’t.  I had to keep going.  I had to keep stepping somewhere.

The highlight of my dating career had to be the season I spent with the habitual lying, sexually addicted Don—a man five years my senior, who behaved ten years my junior.  At first glance I’d fallen head-over-sandals in love with Don.  The summer day he confidently strode through the Catholic daycare where I worked, I’d tucked myself halfway behind a shelf of books and drooled over his perpetually sun-kissed skin.  He was everything I’d wanted, dark and handsome, and tall enough to look down at me with his bedroom eyes.

The times Don and I were together weaved in and out sporadically through a span of half a decade.  When I first met Don he was separated from wife number one; when I last reunited with Don, he was struggling to patch it up with wife number two.  I was the in-between, but one Don swore up and down he intended to marry.

The majority of our relationship played out like an ill-plotted soap opera, with me as the dimwitted, star-struck mistress, and Don as the notorious villain. I can laugh now, find many lessons in the journey with Don, even thank him for the crash-course in what-not-to-do ever again; but back then, having no other models for beneficial love relationships and no avenue for escape, I was stuck in the mire of pain and misery, a self-invented trap that I had no idea of how to release. I cried daily. I wrote dark or needy poetry. My focus from morning to-night was Don. My life was Don. My reason for living was Don.

There was the time I dialed his number obsessively, about twenty times, just to hear his voice on the machine; the time his lover called me and said: “Just so you know I’ve been sleeping with Don every morning after he leaves your house. I’m those ‘business trips’ he’s been on.”; the time he totaled his uninsured truck out-of-town, and called me to come get him from the hospital, even though he’d been secretly rendezvousing with another that day; the time Don and I threw a Halloween party (which I obsessed and over planned about) and no one came (except a few of my teaching program college mates), because all of Don’s “friends” didn’t respect him; the time I drank an entire bottle of wine and slammed my finger in the closet, because I’d yet again been waiting for Don to show up.

He had a habit of just not showing up. Just not being there. I’d come to expect it. To recognize the raw acid-burning pain in my chest that signified the abandonment soon to come. There was pain continually lurking behind the wall of my psyche. I’d be in bed, the only one awake, and ritually would cry up to the heavens, begging for a way out, for understanding, but mostly for a way to make him love me.

I didn’t know any better. No one had taught me. And Mother, though I love her, hadn’t prepared me. Everything I’d learned from romance came from Mother or movies, or maybe from watching soap operas or another person. I didn’t have standards. I didn’t know what standards were. And I didn’t know why someone wouldn’t or couldn’t love me. I thought everyone was good, everyone just, everyone honest, everyone sorry.

Day Thirteen: The Jokes on Me

| Aspergers Girls

 

It’s well known that people with Asperger’s are sometimes a bit gullible, especially when it comes to jokes. Here’s a special story for Day Thirteen…my absolutely favorite number in all the universes! Good to balance the deep and profound with some light-hearted laughter, every now and again. Enjoy.

I was a bit naïve when I was a young adult, very gullible, and easily confused by jokes. Those were my vulnerable-gentle years, where I feared life more than explored, and often hid in the house afraid of the stream of emotions I experienced when I was around others. This isn’t to say I didn’t appear normal. I was a good actress, after all.

While walking one summer day on the sidewalks of my suburban town with my dear college friend Jodie, my gullibility shined bright. We were newly friends then (soon to be best friends), with so much to learn about one another. I remember the exact place we were on our path, when Jodie fooled me. I remember because, even now, I still chuckle about the event.

During our stroll Jodie informed me that she was from Washington. On hearing her pronounce the word Washington, with a tongue-rolling r-sound (Warshington), I laughed. Jodie guffawed, raising her brow, as if I’d done something entirely incorrect and worth admonishing. “Why are you laughing?” she asked.

“Well,” I stammered. Not sure what to think of this inquiry. “I just thought it was funny the way you said Washington. How you made it sound like it has the letter r—there’s no r in Washington.”

Jodie was unmoved in her expression, if anything she appeared more stern. “What do you mean?” she asked. She hit her thigh slightly, and the crease of a grin edged upward on one side of her face. I watched with curiosity. Jodie continued: “Oh, you think I meant Washington D.C. No. No. No. I’m talking about the state of Washington. The one up north. You know there is a difference, don’t you?” Jodie faced me with a full smile, reading me with her green eyes.

I shrugged my slight shoulders, and debated about what to say. Before I could speak, Jodie continued. “Don’t you know the state of Washington is spelled with an r?” She spelled it out slowly and surly: W-a-r-s-h-i-n-g-t-o-n. And she said it again, but this time super slowly: “Warsh-ing-ton!”

I blinked quickly. “What? No, it isn’t,” I answered, with my trademark nervous giggle.

Jodie continued, stating her case in a matter-of-fact way. She was so sure of herself. So confident. So…..so…..experienced! I reasoned I’d always been a bad speller, mixing up letters, omitting consonants and vowels, why not now? And here Jodie stood, from the state of Washington; she’d had to know what she was talking about. Didn’t she?

Jodie continued. “A lot of people get the two Washingtons mixed up.” She winked.

“Oh, wow!” I said, feeling a bit relieved that I wasn’t the only one who’d mistaken the spelling. “I never realized that.” I breathed in, evaluating Jodie’s expression. She seemed pleased with herself, but there was this awful silence. I quickly added, trying to save face, “Good thing to know, since I’m going to be a school teacher.” With my last words, I settled back into the walk, glad to be corrected, and thinking more on my tanned legs than anything that had verbally transpired. It was nice having an intelligent friend.

Jodie nodded her head in agreement, and picked up the pace of our walk. She held her silence for some time, at least a few blocks, before, after a brief moment of noise that sounded like a toad caught in her throat, Jodie broke out in a husky, rip-roaring laughter. “Oh, Honey,” she said. “I can’t make you go on thinking that.”  She laughed some more, trying to catch her breath. “It was a joke. You were right before.  There is no r.  It’s just the way I pronounce it.”  She laughed some more. Her face equally as red as mine.

I took a second to evaluate the situation, before busting up myself and shaking my head in disbelief.