VAULTING INTO DECEPTION

Life is funny sometimes, and when you’re ten, you haven’t lived enough of it to have gotten used to its quirkiness. Just when you think you’ve gotten things figured out and can make some kind of intelligent predictions based on chronological occurrences, life will poke its head out from behind a curtain you didn’t even know was there and surprise the daylights out of you.First, your parents won’t take you to get stitches when you bust your head open. Then they start sending you to the show three nights a week. Next you begin to notice that your big sister is always getting studio pictures made for one reason or another but you never are, so you logically conclude that you aren’t held in esteem all that much and begin bracing yourself for more and more rejection. And then suddenly something happens that disproves your theory.

That‘s what happened to me in January when I went pole-vaulting with Johnny Paul over at the high school one Saturday. I had always longed to do anything that remotely resembled flying. I don’t mean just in my daddy’s yellow cub when he would take me up and let me control the stick from the back seat; I mean outside of any kind of craft — just naked-to-the-world flying. Once, a year earlier, Carla had convinced me that she and her brother had flown around their patio by jumping off their house with cardboard casket boxes strapped to their arms. (Their daddy owned a funeral home.) The way she told it, they had flapped their arms a little and just soared all around their backyard, so I strapped the boxes on my arms but decided it would be more fun to jump from the barn next door since it was taller than her roof. I had chipped two teeth and nearly bit an inch of my tongue clean off in that misguided attempt to fly.

Now it was January, and Johnny Paul was apparently still captivated by my mystery, so he agreed to teach me how to pole vault. I had visions of catapulting myself gracefully over a pole ten feet off the ground, so after he showed me how at five feet, I began to practice. Soon he had to go home, but I just stayed there and kept working at it. As I was leaving close to dark, I noticed my disk necklace missing from around my neck. After digging around in the sawdust until black dark with no success, I slunk home much crestfallen to tell Mother. (“Crestfallen” is one of the words I picked up from my nightly dictionary-perusal. When I found a word I like the sound of, I would be on pins and needles for the next few days keeping my ear inclined ever which direction to all conversations hoping to find a place I could fit it in gracefully.) I totally expected Mother to tell me I should have known better than to wear my disk while I was involved in such rigorous activity (just as though there were times when I was involved in any other kind of activity.) But this is when life pulled a fast one on me and shattered my preconceived notions. She took up my plight with a fair amount of sympathy and enthusiasm, admonishing me not to tell Johnny Paul or anyone else tomorrow at church. She had a plan.

On Monday after school, she took me downtown to all three jewelry stores in search of another necklace to replace it. But alas, none of them had one in sterling silver, only in yellow gold or white gold, both of which were way too expensive for a ten-year old tomboy with no sense of responsibility. However, to my surprise she bought the white gold one anyway, since it looked just like the silver one Johnny Paul had given me. I guess even though she believed in playing hard to get, she decided that since I had allowed myself to get caught, I should do whatever it took to stay on the hook and not get thrown back. It was strange to me that a parent was actually teaching me the ropes of deception.I might have learned a little about deception through that situation, but I also learned something good: that even though my mother didn’t deem me worthy of studio pictures, she did still love me and understand my problems and was willing to sacrifice for me in other ways more befitting my needs. What did a kid who wouldn’t brush the tangles out of her hair need with expensive studio pictures anyway?