Time Travel: Recent Trips by Guran Paula

Author:Guran, Paula [Guran, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-1-60701-439-3
Publisher: Prime Books
Published: 2014-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

THE KING OF WHERE-I-GO

Howard Waldrop

When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.

It wasn't my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight . . .

We were at my paternal grandparents' house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.

This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half-mile away.

Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5¢-10¢-25¢ store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.

But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.

Every two weeks we would get in our aunt's purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents' farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they'd come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.

We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents' place. It was after the Fourth of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather's lower field where they'd had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.

There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparents' house that divided the lawn in two. The house was three miles out of town; some time in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town and the town made a landgrab.

On the left side of the lawn we'd set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off).

My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years.

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