It’s strange to think how selective memory can be: I remember details leading up to, during, and following this event, but I cannot remember what my punishment was from the courts. I must have been let off the hook legally, but rest assured parental punishment was indeed plotted, planned, and executed.

After the story’s conclusion, you’ll find a list of details that are true events and what was added for the resolution of the story’s sake.

Dirty Deeds Done on Spoon Lane–– Part Two

Mom’s philosophy is that if you’re not early, you’re late. It’s 9:15 a.m. and we pile into the ‘65 Belair and make the five-minute drive into town. She says nothing, thankfully. My stomach bubbles like a volcano of baking soda and vinegar.

The makeshift courtroom, in the Cottonwood Library, scant of furniture and dimly lit, is empty but for us two silent souls. Teary-eyed teenagers with stern-faced and weary parents shuffle in two by two. The air, stale, still, and thick with tension suffocates.  Judge McCabe swaggers in and slides into position. The “all rise” does not come, but we stand anyway. I am surprised that I am first on the docket. I can’t detect his mood.

“How do you plead?” he asks.

I say I am guilty. Every muscle is shaking as I speak.

Mom stuns the room with a request that I be sent to Juvenile Hall.  I want to burst with laughter at the thought ––me decked out in pin-striped prison garb. But I tamp the urge down­ deep. I think the request is ridiculous.  The looks on the faces of everyone in the room echo my sentiments. No one breathes. The judge stares deep into my mother’s eyes and questions her.

“Does she meet her curfew? Does she do her chores? Does she get good grades?” he asks. He looks annoyed.

Mom answers yes to all three.

“Lady, you don’t have a problem,” he announces, “Request denied,” as he whacks the gavel onto the wooden table and calls for the next law-breaker.

The already stale, dull air fills with the sound of air escaping our lungs. Everything is blurry.  I smile at the vindication, and we file out and into the car.

Mom is fuming as she informs me David Wilkerson (a religious leader) will hold a meeting in Redding next week and we are going. I say I’d have rather gone to juvie. She adds that maybe I’ll learn to appreciate her. I say I don’t know why she thinks her own daughter is so bad, when clearly, even a complete stranger can see differently. This escalates her anger to a level never seen in all my 16 years. She drives me to the school and I am grateful to escape. Exiting the vehicle, I wonder how I’ll survive the summer months at home, this being the last week of classes. I consider summer school.

It is dusk as I sit at my cheap, particle-board desk, writing my essay on World War ll for American History. A melancholy ballad about the Edmund Fitzgeraldplays on KRDG, the local pop-rock radio station. Mom and Dad discuss the events of the day rather loudly in their bedroom.  The phone rings and they quiet. I think I am in a déjà vu. Mom says into the phone she thinks that a great idea, thank you and she will make the arrangements. I hear the click of the receiver. They whisper. I strain to figure out why. Mom and Dad say they are sorry to each other. I imagine them hugging and sicken at the thought they might be kissing.

Dad opens the door of my room without knocking. He tells me his sister, Aunt Carol, who lives in Marcola, Oregon, is sending me a bus ticket and I’m to spend the summer with her. I don’t know who is happier to hear the news: Mom or me. I ask if he thinks that is a good idea since the Oregon family is much more liberal than we Cottonwood straight-laced conservatives.

He answers, “Yes, I know, but this is what your Mom wants. She’s adamant about that David Wilkerson meeting, so you’re not leaving until that’s over.”

He stretches his arms out in a big bear hug, a rare event, and whispers he only wants the best for me. As he leaves, he tells me Mom loves me.  I say she has a funny way of showing it.

“Janet, she’s my wife and your mother. You know she comes first with me but that doesn’t mean we agree on everything. I may not agree with her on this latest episode, but we stand together, and I support her regardless,” Dad says with a wistful tone and a sad look in his green eyes.

I close the door, turn up the radio, and do a happy jig to the current tune, Paul McCartney and Wing’s upbeat song, “Band on the Run.”

---

To satisfy the reader’s curiosity, I have listed below the details as I remember them.

These details are true:

• Bus #94.
• My Aunt Pat really was my bus driver at times, although I’m not sure if she was on this particular day.
• I have 56 first cousins, 46 or so on my father’s side.
• My father made me dig in the mud.
• I lived in a yellow house at the end of Spoon Lane, and our area was referred to by utility companies as the Bermuda Triangle.
• The courtroom exchange between my mother and judge.
• The conversations between mother and me.
• My Aunt Carol rescued me from a summer of misery.
• My favorite song at that time was “Band on the Run.”
•  I really was required to suffer through a David Wilkerson meeting
• My mother really did love me, but she had a funny way of showing it.   (I probably      made it difficult for her.)

These details are not true:

• Anyone who knows my father and the older generation of the Spoon family will know that they never say or do that!

Happy guessing. Hint: it’s in the third to last paragraph.