Cereal Serial 2 (a spray of popped memory bubbles)

…continued from Cereal Serial 1 (historic modesty & stolen fate)

Yes, let’s continue to evoke . . .

. . . returning now to a house with a backyard plot of corn stalks,

purchased from a minister

& also the place where my mother had once ordered shag wall-to-wall from a cottage industry

bargain interior decorator who delivered a roll of the wrong color,

green-ish I think,

but not the same tinge of green as expected,

& took the decorator to small claims court,

with me along,

& after the carpet monger lost, called my victor a “chickenshit" on the steps of the courthouse

but, at least we got the cottage-money back —

same house as my first tape recorder that came unwrapped as if from kris kringle personally,

with blank tapes hung on xmas tree branches like other decorations

& the recorder that I put in a converted rec room at the far end of the house, near the corn —

the rec room with the used pool table that a shifty in-law gave us —

found for cheap — or worse, acquired in some shady situation —

& the room where one weekend there was a tire-store holiday party & the co-workers were drunk & flirting

& they found the tape recorder I’d planted to secretly record them

& they interviewed each other as they mingled,

like improvising reporters slurring on the scene

but, there were also people drinking in the attached garage that was strung with colored lanterns for the occasion

& probably deserted altogether, left hung, when we moved shortly thereafter —

(always shortly thereafter)

but the same garage where, on another night, my father came back from an on-call tire store manager midnight roadside emergency semi tire repair where a trailer had flipped into a ditch

& he came home in the morning with the entire back of his company pickup truck filled with dented gritty Seven-Up cans salvaged from the roadway —

so I guess, specifically, a Seven-Up truck accident —

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t recall purposely having a Seven-Up since —

however, there were hundreds of them in our garage for months

& you had to wipe the grit off the top of the can before you opened it holding it away from your face when you pulled the tab that either hissed-&-spat or popped silently flat.

but back to those rec room reporters:

I remember the parents later playing the cassette of their party —

of their drunk friends taping themselves —

capturing the background noise as well

including a high muttering voice

& the parents laughing that next day, remembering that one of their work-friends had been slumped in a folding chair, lifting her skirt slightly when people would pass, playfully singing “woo-hoo” then slo-mo cackling —

the tape machine that I also used later to record myself for the first time, hammering nails into wood & a cappella-singing that Melanie song about roller skates that was a hit at the time & I loved.

which made me remember where I last saw that cassette, when we moved to a stucco craftsman style in a recurring haunt a few counties north . . .

. . . to be recalled from another dormant time with Cereal Serial 3