Dear Navel Diary, Are You Listening? by Diann Logan

Author:Diann Logan [Logan, Diann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Runaway

I ran away from home once. I ran away from home but only once and not for very long. A few times, in fits of childish temper, I had threatened to do so. When that happened my mother would offer to help me pack. She would drag the train case out of the closet and set it on my bed and say, “Call me if you need help.”

We called it a train case, but I don’t know why. It was the makeup case that came with the set of hard-sided luggage, the small rectangular clunky box with a tray that fit in the top after everything else was in place. At elementary school age, I certainly didn’t have makeup but I did have a lot of things that I wanted to take with me to wherever I thought I was going. I would start piling things up that I would need: toys and books, my favorite doll and several puzzles, my roller skates, maybe an extra pair of shoes and my hairbrush. Even I could see that all my things would never fit into that train case. By then I had forgotten why I had been planning to run away, so I would tell my mother that I had changed my mind and the train case would go back in the closet.

Later, in the throes of those volatile teenage years, I did run away—on Christmas Eve. It was the year I wanted something different to happen on Christmas Eve. We were church people, so Christmas Eve always meant attending church services, coming home to snowball cookies and cocoa, and opening the few presents that Santa had left while we were at church.

It was a mystery how Santa knew we were gone, a scenario that repeated every year. After we were in the car, ready to head for church, Daddy would remember that he had forgotten something. My mother and I would stay in the car with the heater running while he had to go back in the house because he’d forgotten his wallet. Some years he forgot if he’d locked the back door and had to go check. Other years he thought maybe he’d left the light on in the bathroom. One year he had to go back inside and comb his hair after my mother told him he had a rooster tail sticking up.

By the time I was a teenager, I had figured out how Santa got in the house, but the ritual of forgetfulness was still being repeated. I thought it was really stupid how my parents kept it up, like I was a child or something. The year I wanted something different to happen on Christmas Eve, I picked a fight with Daddy after we got home from church, told him how stupid the whole thing was, and then ran away from home, slammed the door against Daddy’s huffiness and my mother’s tears, and took off running. No coat, no boots, just took off running down the snow-packed street.

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