Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
wasn’t all terrible,” Paul says. “Besides it’s the only childhood we’ll ever get.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Storytellers
It was Saturday morning and my father had promised to take me to the library. I’d been trying to coax him out of the house since early morning but by the time he shaved, and stanched the bleeding—he was a reckless shaver—and took a shower, and lay down to recover from its enervating effects, and combed his hair and admired his own image in the mirror, and ate lunch—all the effort of getting ready had left him famished—and lay down for another brief rest to aid his digestion—it was mid-afternoon. We were finally in the car when he complained of an onslaught of debilitating thirst that necessitated his running back into the house for a slug of the Vernor’s ginger ale he’d grown up drinking. “I don’t know what it is about Vernor’s,” he said, “but it always has a revivifying effect.”
The La Crescenta library resided in a dilapidated old clapboard house a few miles from ours. As we rode, I felt obligated to read every street sign and billboard we passed. Words had ceased being decorative markings, as indecipherable as trees. Everything around me, everything in the human world, cereal boxes with their coupons to be mailed in for toys, the labels on my clothing, even the insignia on our car, had revealed themselves as assemblages of letters demanding to be sounded out phonetically, their meanings released.
A flash of unexpected movement at the right side of the car startled my father out of his reverie, and he came to just in time to slam on the brakes. STOP on the red sign screamed in my brain. A group of girls walked in front of us in the crosswalk, oblivious to the near miss, on their way to Monte Vista’s playground. This crosswalk was the same one I had walked in on my way to school on those rare occasions I was ready to leave when our neighbor Lucy and her siblings knocked on our front door at the remarkably early hour of 8:00 a.m. These children in front of us now walked just as Lucy and I had walked. They were in the same place now
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