Life Lessons(William Cline) Life Lessons

When I started the first grade, my best friends were Mike, who lived in the trailer park down the road from our house, and the snakes that lived in the field by the Pancake House. Walking to the bus stop took us past the Pancake House, through the field where the snakes lived, and across the parking lot in front of Bird’s Market. Just up the road from the market was the corner where an old oak tree grew, and the bus stopped to pick us up.

All landmarks etched indelibly into the story of my life.

Sometimes I’d go over to Mike’s trailer in the morning before we left for the bus stop. We’d talk about the episode of Get Smart from the evening before as we walked down the road. We’d run behind the pancake house, past its trash bins, through the field where the snakes lived, pounding a slot into the grass and raising dust on the worn trails leading up to the edge of the blacktop parking lot in front of the market.

We were chasing bad guys, shooting at bad guys, and bagging bad guys with every pull of my finger on the invisible trigger. And bad guys were hitting the dirt: dead right there.

The school bus was like all buses, built to the same specs that followed the universal law of cold hard seats, windows that jammed, and a set amount of screw holes left empty. On the short turn through town we watched the buses reflection in store windows: sometimes it wavered, sometimes it blinked in and out of existence. Watching ourselves go by, we occasionally waved.

My first grade years were in a smaller community, and the school was located on the outskirts of the town. Leaving town, the bus drove up long straight narrow roads past pastures with horses and cows which occasionally did things that made first grade boys laugh, like rolling on their backs or running helter-skelter in deranged fits of energy. Then the bus pulled into the schoolyard, lined up with all the other buses, and disgorged us.

It all reversed for the trip home. It was my first life lesson in being caught in a rut.

In the first grade, though, I discovered that ruts did not last long. Every occurrence was new and requiring investigation, and then a thorough discussion with my friends on the playground. Lori, the girl who lived up the street from the bus stop, who always wanted to hold my hand at the bus stop, was one of those occurrences. The day the Pancake House had a fire was another.

Of the two, the fire in the Pancake House was more interesting.

Mike and I discovered the burned out main floor of the Pancake House on a Monday morning. Normally we would have walked past the back of the building, but that morning we were Blue Angels flying in tight formation. I was forced to deviate from my flight plan because of a mud puddle, and altered my trajectory so much that continuing on around the front of the Pancake House was my obvious course. I hit mach one, making the requisite jet engine noises, as I turned the corner. I knew that Mike was going to come at me from the far side of Pancake House and try to shoot me down. Normally, Blue Angels did not shoot at each other, but we were hard cases. When I reached the front of the building I brought my blue plane to a sudden stop. It took Mike a few seconds to continue his flight around the building and join me.

What an alien landscape the burned out insides of a building are. Blackness throughout, with the bones of walls exposed, tables overturned, chairs tossed about, and the guts and muscles of the building hanging from the ceiling and walls, water dripping into the black pools spread out on the concrete floor amid shapeless piles of cloth and plaster.

It was like nothing I’d ever encountered in my short life. Life lesson: fires do magical things to the inside of buildings.

Somewhere in my young, still-forming brain the synapses were opening and closing like furious little sparks, committing to memory the smells, sight and sounds of that place. Though I would see many more burned out and burned up buildings in my life, whenever I smelled those smells, I would be drawn back to that morning.

The burned up Pancake House dominated the conversation on the playground. Lori leaned in a little closer while I was describing it. This was another life lesson, though I would be forced to revise it when I got older. It was this: women are attracted to men who have been around burned up buildings.

Well, I was close.

Going home from the bus stop, we took our time investigating the ruins. During the day someone had nailed up plywood over the doors and windows, but with a little effort and the ingenuity usually gifted of little boys, we found a way past those barriers and actually went inside. The smell was so overpowering that we left, quickly.

Mike said nothing as we walked away from the Pancake house. As we turned onto our road, he suddenly took off running, saying he had to get home. I wondered, briefly, what was up with him, until I saw my mother in our front yard, working on her tan.

Yikes!

“Hayden, what were you doing in the building?”

Mom was laying out in the sunlight in her bathing suit. She was on a blanket that was somewhat frayed at the edges, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Her hair was neatly combed and her face made up right down to the cherry red lipstick. It appeared as though she were on display. At that young age I did not recognize this, nor would I have understood why if I had. No life lesson to be had.

“I was talking to the snakes,” I lied. Her head turned minutely toward me. Not enough of a turn to muss up her hair, but enough to let me know she was now staring at me instead of up in the air.

“You were in the building. I saw you come around the corner.”

“Mom, I was over talking to the snakes. They were telling me all about the fire.”

Her chest expanded just a bit more than normal, and then contracted. Her shoulders bunched up, which looked unusual with the shoulder straps of her bathing suit hanging down her arms. I would learn later that this was a method for making sure there were no unnecessary tan lines.

“Should I call up Mike’s mom and ask her if Mike knows anything about talking snakes?”

“No. He’s scared of snakes.” Mike had run home because he did not want to be questioned by mom.

“Stop it, Hayden. I don’t want to hear that anymore.”

“But, mom...”

“I don’t want to hear it anymore.” She was getting mad, you could tell. She started breathing just a little harder, and there was a weird color spreading up her neck into her cheeks. “Why do you lie to me like I was some kind of stupid person. I’m not one of your friends who’ll believe anything you say.”

I knew that. She was never like one of my friends.

And suddenly she got quiet. Her head shifted minutely back where it had been, and her breathing slowed. She was done with me, at least for now.

Later that day, after mom went inside, I walked back to the field and sat down at the edge of the tall grass. The Pancake House was to my back. There were two garter snakes watching me from the green shadows, their tongues flickering a hello, their beady black eyes watching my every move carefully. They wanted to make sure I was not on one of my snake hunts that inevitably ended up with one of them, or one of their hundreds of relatives in the grass, being grabbed just behind the head while their long, sleek bodies, with the green stripes down each side, twisted around my arm.

They really hated it when I stuck them out into the faces of little girls at the bus stop. They not appreciate being used as a scare tactic, but also it then required them to slither across the street to get back to their pals in the grass.

“The road is hot, you little creep,” one of them said to me one time. He was not too happy that day, having been used to scare two girls, and nearly run over by the school bus. “I don’t think you understand just how much being held up just behind your jaws really hurts.”

“Yeah,” chimed in a buddy from deeper in the grass. “Makes it tough to eat for a couple of days.”

So I promised to stop. That seemed to appease them.

Three snakes came out of the grass, sensing I wanted to talk, not capture. One had been watching me closely, making sure I was okay. The other two slithered up to me, arched their bodies to that they could see me better.

“Some fire,” one said. The other nodded his head up and down, still flicking his tongue. “It was crazy stuff for a little while here.”

“It was them damn mice,” the third snake said, his squeaky voice betraying the disdain he felt for rodents.

“What did the mice do?” I asked.

“Well, aside from being the pestilence of the entire world, and not worth the energy to keep alive, those furry little creeps go in and chew holes into everything.”

“You are speaking the truth, brother,” said the third snake, coming up and arching with the other two. “Mice should not be allowed to exist. Whose idea were mice, anyway?”

“But mice are so small,” I said.

“Maybe to you. But to us they are pretty big, and they just go around chewing things up, ruining things.”

“Got a cousin who was killed by a mouse. Put up a good fight, but the damn teeth those little creeps have.” The snake sighed. “Nothing you can do.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” The snake turned his head away for a moment, trying to regain his composure.

“It's tough on us all,” one of the other snakes said. If snakes had arms, one would have patted the other on the shoulder; if snakes had shoulders.

“But, you said that the mice had something to do with the fire.” I said.

“Damn right they did. They chewed through the walls, the creeps; chewed holes everywhere. Then they go in and build their little nests in the walls; fill them up with dried grass and twigs and little bits of cloth. I mean, come on. Anyone knows you don’t go putting that much flammable material in one enclosed space.”

“You know what the problem is,” said the third snake having regained his composure. “The mice have no instinct. Nothing gets passed on from parent to child, like with us snakes.” The snake looked at me. “You see, when dad learned something important, he passed that on to me when I was born. The entire spectrum of knowledge our species has collected since the dawn of time is right here.” Had the snake had arms and hand and fingers, he would have pointed to his head, to his brain. Instead he just shook his head a bit.

I wondered, briefly, why the snakes were never smart enough to elude little boys.

“Anyway, the dumb mice filled the walls with dried grass and twigs. And, as was bound to happen, one of the brilliant creeps chewed half way through an electrical wire. The only good thing about it was that the mouse probably fried. The unfortunate thing about it was that all the other mice came pouring out of the building when the fire started. You know, they had hundreds of little escape holes all over the place. You wouldn’t think the dumb rodents would think of that.”

“But, what about the building. Isn’t it too bad about that?”

“Hell no. They’ll just build another one. We were hoping the fire would kill us a bunch of them damn mice.”

“So what was the fire like?” That was the question I wanted answered. What did it look like when the pancake house burned?

“Who the hell knows? There were a thousand crazy mice running everywhere. You think we stuck around?”

Mom had not believed me when I was lying, so there was no point in telling her about my later conversation with the snakes. It would only make her mad. And you did not want to make mom mad. That life lesson was learned when I stole my first candy bar.

That is where Bird’s market comes in. Don’t even ask why I did it. If I had any clue of the storm that stealing one candy bar would stir up, I would never have done it.

But, this life lesson began with my grandparents, specifically my grandfather. He was the one who spanked me all the way back home from the store not long after the very unfriendly man who worked at the store grabbed my arm and pulled the candy bar from the front of my pants.

I was crying, or course, sitting in a part of the store I had never seen before, waiting for something to happen. I had never done this before, so I did not know what would become of me after stealing. I was in uncharted waters with this one, including having never seen the look on my grandfather’s face when he walked through the door.

Normally I loved to see my grandparents. They would arrive in the evening, give us all hugs, and then bring their suitcases in to the house. Grandmother always smelled good, and she had gum in her purse. Grandfather smelled like cigar smoke. It was always a big deal for grandmother to give us kids gum. Grandfather went and chatted with mom and dad.

I did not even remember that they were here for a visit until grandfather came through the door of Bird’s Market and hauled me out. We marched down the parking lot, crossed that street, and went through the Pancake House lot, up the street to our house and into our home, where I was shut up in my bedroom to await the return of mother. Every step of the way was punctuated by my grandpa’s hand whacking me on my butt.

Later, in conversation with some snakes in the tall grass, I found that the word had spread quickly through the grass.

“We wanted to be there for you,” one snake said. “If only we had arms, we would have freed you from the tyranny of your oppressor.”

“We’d have sent the old man packing,” another snake added, a look of determination on his tiny little face.

“That was my grandpa,” I said. “He was really mad at me for trying to steal a candy bar.”

The snakes just looked at me, occasionally flicking their tongues. Finally one said, “Did your grandpa know it was bad to steal?”

“I’m sure he did, which was why he was so mad; why he spanked me so much. I guess he was trying to teach me a lesson.”

“But, if he already knew it was bad, then so should you.” The snake kind of squinted at me in a distrustful way.

Word spread quickly throughout the snakes in the grass: humans have no instinct, no storehouse of knowledge and wisdom passed from parent to child at birth. We rely on life lessons.

To them, I guess that puts us at the same level as those creeps, the mice.

It has been a long time since I’ve had the opportunity to talk with the snakes. For animals that are supposed to have ancestral memories passed down to them, none seem to remember me. They always just slither away.

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