When I Was A Teenager

 

 

old with plums to cut

flatten them into diamonds

for the butter crust baked just so

back then I wanted more sugar

back then and now I need less

too many plums to use to freeze

I was old back then just a song

but true for me back then

Slinkys

 

Up in Nome we had Slinkys so at the rez when we got new ones they didn’t have the same impact. We brought along our Barbies but I left the pink dune buggy behind, it would have taken up half the metal trunk that we each got to put stuff in for the move to the desert. Mom ordered me books that were hardcover, Island of the Blue Dolphins and also Summer of the Swans, two contradictory stories. We also got Sasha dolls from Sweden that we loved because of their thick hair. Later I realized that Mom got us things she wanted that she never got as an orphan in Germany. She lived her childhood through ours yet never actually played with our things. Even the kid-sized guitar I know she was interested in. She just observed for a little while and walked away, impossible to read her emotions.

That Was Just My Job

That was just my job when I was ten. I babysat kids in our goverment housing neighborhood on the rez in Nevada. The year before, up in Nome, I was the one who had a babysitter. I studied how to conduct myself in this job and while I learned as I went, I got used to the idea that all my jobs would somehow be just like this in the future. Mainly, we played together and since I would be more grown-up at eleven and probably finished with babysitting forever, I played with Jenny and Jeffrey like crazy while I could. 

The adults had a dance party going on at our house and Pam's was four houses (mobile homes) away. I could see our house and hear the music blasting across the dried up grass full of bullhead stickers that was our house and the neatly green patches in front of the mobile homes where the doctors and their wives, and another social worker lived. Nothing happened while I worked and when I was woken up on the couch when Pam and Tom came back home, I was only pretending to sleep, I eagerly awaited how they would manage to wake me up. What would they say? What would they do?

The couch was below a self-portrait of Pam done in thick oils. It was rather large and I studied it as I fell asleep and waited for the party to end, for them to return home, for me to not be a babysitter any longer. 

Jenny and Jeffrey didn't say much, didn't speak all that much at ages one and three. Jeffrey had cat-like eyes and wanted to wrestle around on the lawn, which we did. Jenny was small and delicate. She cried easily, so I took it easy with the wrestling with her and didn't really but my heart into it in order to protect her.