TheBanyanTree: insignificant sticky things

[Julie Anna Teague]

Quoting Tobie Shapiro <tobie at shpilchas.net>:

> 	Hoping I am not boring the living delete keys out of you, I offer
> another couple of stories from my crowded life.  Let me know if I
> should stop, O.K.?

Don't stop.  Stop with the stopping.  Keep going.  I am enthralled.  I 
have a blog and in the description of my blog I say something vaguely 
artsy-fartsy like, "some moments, like small, silvery fish, I'd like to 
capture in the leaky net of memory, before they flash and disappear 
into my deep salty sea."  I've probably murdered an innocent metaphor, 
but, honestly, that is the way it is for me.  There are big, momentous, 
earth-shattering things that have happened in my life which I could 
point to and say, "See?  That's why I am who I am.  What else could you 
expect, after that?"  But mostly what makes a life and a whole person 
are these things, these tiny things which would be insignificant if not 
for their amazing ability to stick to a patch of gray cells and never 
be wedged off by something that, on the surface, might seem more 
important or worth the space.  The story and the self-discovery, I 
think, is lodged somewhere in the WHY of it--why in God's name do we 
remember these things?  Why they stick, still?

For instance.  And this is a most insignificant thing. I went into the 
store room at work this morning, where there is an honor-system snack 
concession for us office dwellers.  Quite unexpectedly, there were many 
cans of Vienna Sausages for purchase.  Sixty cents a can.  It made me 
ponder who would pop open a can of Vienna sausages as a mid-morning 
snack.  I didn't know people just ate them, straight up, out of the 
can, several at a time.  I'd never considered it.

As a kid, Vienna sausages were this rare, forbidden treat.  This was 
the sixties in a tiny town in Southern Indiana where it might as well 
have been the fifties, and we were on the lower end of the economic 
spectrum.  There was a budget and  a food plan matched exactly to a 
headcount, so many per.  My brother could send my mom over the edge by 
doing things like eating an entire bunch of bananas at one time and 
blow the plan.  My mom and dad had some friends who had gone to the 
same highschool, and who still got together for Euchre and snacks 
occasionally.  All of the women had puffy, stiff hairdos and the men, 
except for my dad, were all loud and annoying.  Their kids were 
insufferable, or just this side, I suppose, because my brother and I 
were made to suffer them.  My mom, when she was really going all out 
for an "adult" party, would sometimes make a tray of hor d'oeuvres on 
toothpicks with plastic frills on the end, and on each a tiny cube of 
cheddar, a piece of sweet pickle, and half a Vienna sausage.  My 
brother and were obsessed with eating these exotic treats and would 
sneak them when mom wasn't looking.  But she knew exactly how many 
there were and would scream, "STOP EATING THOSE THEY ARE FOR THE 
PARTY!"  And that's how I knew those little things must be pretty 
darned fancy and expensive.

Now I realize, and I guess I've always realized, that I could whip out 
a tray of these tonight if I wanted to.  I could eat the whole tray.  I 
could take a whole tray to my brother and say, "Here, have at them, all 
of them, and have this entire bunch of bananas as well."  But I've 
never thought, in the past thirty-five years, to do so.

Julie