The Microwave

I think it must have been about 1992, 25 years after the first microwave was released, my parents loaded the family into the car to change how life at home would run for the rest of our lives.

We headed into the darkness, and eventually turned onto the long driveway of some family friends. I have no idea what price was paid, but my dad loaded a hulking microwave oven into the back of the car. Included with the oven was a bag of microwave popcorn, and we drove back to our house, excitement about the new appliance thick in the car.

My dad carried in the giant brown box with a large window and formidable dial into the kitchen. The height of the unit slid just barely beneath the cabinetry, and was nestled into a corner, decreasing the available counter space in the small kitchen significantly. The family dog, still in her formative years, could sense the excitement, and gathered with the family in the kitchen, braving the treacherous footing of the linoleum. My mom opened the plastic of the individually wrapped flat, folded bag of popping corn, the smell of butter filling the kitchen, like a manifestation of the anticipation itself.

Instructions were diligently read from the bag, and the microwave settings were validated, the timer set, door opened, and the bag placed in the center of a serving platter-sized carousel, ensuring the correct side was down. Then the moment arrived, the chrome “push to cook” button was pushed for the first time in an Aillaud household. The oven hummed to life, and the bag began its slow rotation in the illuminated chamber.

Nothing happened.

Like kids waiting for Santa, the seconds dragged on. With tail poised to wag, the dog watched us watch the microwave.

Pop!

The shock of the noise echoed through the house. My mom exclaimed about the magic of popping corn in such a futuristic way. The time between pops decreased, until a cacophony of exploding kernels overwhelmed the house, now brimming with the chemical smell of movie theater popcorn. In a mirrored crescendo, the popping from the now bursting bag slowed. Not having realized the insignificance of pushing the start button, the true moment in which our lives forever changed rang through the house.

Ding!

With as much suspicion as excitement, the steaming bag was removed from the microwave, an intruder into our family's lives that may not be fully welcome. The popcorn was distributed into over sized plastic cups saved from stops at McDonald's on the way home from Fairbanks. Even the anxious dog was served a share in a bowl. We all agreed that it was amazing to have popcorn as a treat of near instant gratification.

My parents had it repaired over buying a new one when it faltered in the mid-90s, and it lasted into the late 2000s. A microwave has been in my kitchen ever since, but sometimes I am reminded of the excitement of the night we got that first microwave. I have attempted to share this memory with others, but I generally have to find an older generation to appreciate the memory.  I know I was not alone in my amazement at the late arrival of the microwave that evening, as until her dying day, the family dog regarded the smell of butter flavor and the ding of the microwave as an indication of shared popcorn.

Fat Kid

I do not remember the first time I was called fat as a kid. I remember in third grade, Danny, a rail thin kid calling me fat mercilessly. I complained to my mom about it, she listened, and eventually offered that I could make fun of him for being so skinny. Offering the quip, “you're so skinny you have to run around in the shower to get wet.” My mother and I laughed about that, but the reality remains that the fat kid gets made fun of, and the skinny kid doesn't.

Like the extra weight that earned my monicker, “fat kid” stuck. Eventually, I would learn to appreciate being called fat over other names, because I was not trying to hide being fat. In fact, I owned being fat. While other kids were fatter, I could comfortably hate myself publicly for not having a perfect body. Beyond the body shape, I think much of it had to do with being bad at sports. My fatness stemmed not necessarily from my body mass index, but from my inability to hit a small leather ball with a wooden rod, or to not be able to put an orange ball through an elevated orange metal ring. Could I have worked on these, my brother did, so probably, but I can think of nothing less interesting than a group of people committed to the movement of a ball on a court or field.

This attitude does not win prized pecking order posts within the school age community. I was picked last for every game in PE, which was almost always matball, a variation of kickball that I was no better at than the original. Even amongst my cousins I was the game loser in the group of four. Fat transcended the states, and while I was certainly the fattest of my two cousins and Jason, it was really commentary on my prowess at the games that we played.

Accordingly, I abhorred the playing of team sports, and really the existence of these sports in general. In high school, desperate to fit in, I shot rifle, a sport that is “team” only once the scores are tallied. While shooting is not easy, the ability to lay, kneel, and stand in one place for many hours fails to convince almost everyone of unfatness. To increase my marketability to my peers, I was talked into playing baseball my freshman year.

For many of the baseball games that season I was player number ten, meaning that my presence on the team ensured that we would not forfeit. The coach could not be begrudged to play me saving the one inning that another player angered him to the point that he put me in to punish him. Given our record that year, there may have been more dignity for the team if they had forfeited, but Jason got to play baseball his senior year, so wearing tight pants, and watching his games was worth going out.

I never actually played long enough to have a record, and I don't think anyone but parents and girlfriends ever came to a baseball game. Accordingly, baseball did nothing to save me from being a fat kid. What did was Landen. Landen was a smart kid with little ambition in his studies, who chose instead to apply himself to the avoidance of school. To help him and his friends, he needed the credibility of a nerdy kid who never did anything wrong. Landen got my services, in an unspoken exchange of credibility. I could give his antics the cover they needed, and in return he could give me a moniker that was not derogatory. Fat kid, fag, and nerd were nearly replaced by Bad Ass.

Bad Ass, a misnomer that fit my initials, and “BA” for short, became more commonly used than my own name. It was so pervasive in the high school that adults began calling me BA to avoid confusion with the other Brians of my small home town. While the names changed, and somehow being known as Bad Ass seemed to trick a few people into perceiving me as being bad ass, inside, I knew that I was not Bad Ass, I knew that I was still the same fat kid that had been ridiculed for his entire public life.

The fear of being found out is, in many ways, worse than the fear of actually being something. While I was never happy being the fat kid in my class, I was not afraid of losing much. I was already at the bottom of the pecking order. Once I became BA, I had something to lose. I began attempting to hide myself even more than I already was. I was no longer trying to preserve myself as fat, but as actually some sort of cool. I embraced the idea of a Chris Farley or John Belushi, certainly nerdy, certainly not athletic, but cool all the same. The problem with this is that I was not cool, and I knew it.

Belushi and Farley tried to be cool so much that they killed themselves in the process, so even my role models saw the flaw in their cover. My escape was not drugs, but college. In the later years of high school I segregated myself from the students that I had spent my life with. I worked jobs with fervor, and avoided contact with people outside of a small group of friends. I took less than a full load of courses, and graduated early to move away from the fear of being discovered. What I had not realized is that I had become accustomed to running.

In university I would restyle myself as a climber, and general outdoors enthusiast. Like today's hipster kids, I was desperate to find a group that would never think to discover my weaknesses. If everything I did was physical, no one would think that I was actually the fat kid. I started riding my bike, and in an attempt to impress a girl, started running. I was active in white water, and a bunch of clubs. I was anything but the fat kid, and I would sometimes start to trick myself into believing my own cover story, like the undercover cop in so many movies.

With time I would find mountain biking, and distance running. These days I do not climb very much, and my mountain bike sits disassembled in a storage unit in Western Washington. I keep running though. My weight fluctuates with other factors in my life, but I have been able to do some long and beautiful runs. Rationally, I doubt many of the kids who called me fat so long ago could keep up, but that does not matter. Out on the trail, running for the joy of running is never far ahead of running away from the insults of childhood. Sometimes I find myself putting a hand against my stomach, comforted and disgusted to find that my gut has not magically faded since the beginning of my run. Instead I feel an extended truffle shuffle, jiggling along the trail with me. Some days this motivates me to push a little harder, to run a little faster to stay ahead of the past, but most days, a voice inside of me says, “I know who you are, you're the fat kid,” and my run slows to a defeated walk.

Matchbox Childhood

Watching the news today, I debated posting something light-hearted.  However, I had been planning to post this today, and upon reflection, I think that evil has taken enough today.  I spent much of the day checking the news, and cried when I read many of the updates.  My thoughts are with the families and friends of the victims tonight.

=======================================================================

Like most American boys, my toys growing up were miniaturized machines (saving my collection of Care Bears and My Little Ponies).  I played with Micro Machines on the school playground with two or three other boys who had also failed to graduate to sports.  I also played with LEGO, which were a lasting passion.  I developed a descriptive nomenclature for the pieces based on their relative dimensions, and have kept that nomenclature into adulthood.  I spent many evenings as a college student with Heidi building LEGO sets.  Travis and I would have LEGO battles on slow Friday nights in Socorro, though I have always preferred the preservation of my creations.  Heidi gave me an Imperial Star Destroyer set, which remained proudly displayed in my home until my ex-wife insisted it find a new one.  Like a loyal pet, I asked my friend Jessi if she would want it, knowing her and Egypt would take take care of it for years to come.  To my knowledge, it has been disassembled and reassembled for each of their moves, and I imagine that one day their child will blossom into a brilliant nerd, and on prom night he and his friends will come home early, and build a LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer (by that time it may have an ere of hipster cred for being "vintage").

I talk about childhood toys to prove a point, I was, and am, a nerd.  Deeply nerdy, chubby, and the youngest of the children whom I was usually grouped with by my parents (cousins and family friends).  This meant that in addition to my natural athletic inability, I was the smallest owing to age.  Even so, I was frequently exposed to traditional children's games and sports that I was terrible at, and constantly ensured a loss for those who had to suffer through being on my team.  When playing Cowboys and Indians, if I was a cowboy, the game would end with me forced onto a reservation.

During the long Alaskan winter, the certainty of being locked inside the house was a blessing for children as hopeless at active games as I was.  Unfortunately, the subjugation of the young nerd extended beyond the backyard.

It seems like all kids had a car mat in Alaska, though they may be somewhat less common in places where playing outside wasn't an ordeal that Shackleton would fear.  Car mats are still sold, though I remember them being less whimsical, generally having a sensible grid of roads printed directly onto a sheet of white vinyl that no doubt leaked as many carcinogens into the soft skin of children as they did into the communities where they were made.

My brother and I often played with our Matchbox cars with Dave.  Dave's car mat had two houses.  The manufacturer saw fit to include a strip mall, a car dealership, and a church, but no apartments, and only two houses.  As with anything, he who is picked last in dodge ball, is last to be allowed to pick his house and car.  Or at Dave's house, this meant not getting a house at all.

Clever and industrious as the three of us were, rather than expanding the car mat to include a house drawn at the edge of town, or converting the church to a chouse, I was instead declared homeless.  Being of no fixed address in a car mat society has some advantages, you need not commute, for example.  While Jason and Dave were busy driving back and forth, from home to work, I was free to feel deeply cheated.  Eventually, my whining would allow me to live in a "shelter" in the basement of the church.  Jason owned the strip mall, every store was his, what they sold is hard to say, as I do not recall anyone ever going to the strip mall other than him.  Dave owned the car dealership, which was essentially a parking lot for Jason and Dave's wealth of cars, as no money ever changed hands, just endless trade-ins of equal value.  They drove gleaming autos, some with sleek lines, some with outlandish tail pipes or paint schemes.

"You're too poor to own a house," they would say when I wanted a shiny car from the car lot, "you can't have another car"!  So I would offer the single car I was issued at the beginning as a trade.  Dave, the car dealer, knew the value of the cars in his lot, and knew that my car did not constitute and even trade.

"You can't trade your car for one of these cars," he would tell me.  Sometimes, he would say, "maybe two of those cars, but not one," smirking that he knew the rules of the game forbade the homeless from owing more than one car.  I would plead a little longer, then my imaginary, miniature self would walk back to my once green station wagon, climb into the hole where a door once was, and drive back to the shelter in the basement of the church, and sulk.

Eventually, I would drive my station wagon around town for lack of anything else to do.  Jason and Dave would be commuting, wheeling and dealing, and generally having a grand time.  Eventually, they would grow tired of their nine-to-five grind.  They would realize that homeless, doorless brian was driving around the town freely, while they had to spend some arbitrary amount of time at work.  It was simply unacceptable that I was free to drive my jalopy around the grid of white vinyl streets.

"How are you buying gas," someone would demand?

On a good day I could invent some way that I could afford gas, or that my car did not need gas.  If the Matchbox wights were with me, this would suffice, more often than not, the inevitable boredom of imaginary middle class life would demand that the issue be investigated further.

"This is your last tank, and you just ran out."  My car would be forfeited on some road, and I would be forced to walk back to the church.  My car would remain there, abandoned, until it was impounded.  The impound lot was also the car dealership.  My station wagon would sit, lined up with the fanciest cars available, imaginary rust growing on its mostly paintless body.  This would continue, until I would decide to steal my car back.

Stealing the station wagon would have been easy, I imagine.  The car lacked a door, and I would have had the key.  All my car mat avatar would have to do is run to my car before anyone could stop me, jump in, and drive off.

We all know what happens if you steal a car from the impound lot, a car chase ensues.  Sometimes I would not need to steal the car from the impound lot, because rather than mess with the running out of gas business, I would just be accused of stealing gasoline.  No matter what the crime was, the outcome would be the same, my car would be impounded, I would go to jail, which did not exist on the car mat, but unlike a third house, we could imagine it.

Sometimes, knowing that jail inevitably came after the car chase, I would rampage the city rather than be caught.  I would ram my all steel, American made, V8 station wagon into their luxury cars, drive through their yards, and crash through their businesses.  In time, my rebellion would be put down by two older, stronger boys.  The game would be over.

If there was an adult present, we would be ordered to put our toys away, and I would be lectured about acting civil, and playing fairly.  If not, I would be pummeled into submission.  Either way, we would move on to another game I was sure to lose.

=======================================================================

In all fairness, this should be regarded as childhood satire, rather than absolute fact.  Like almost anything, you can buy a worn, green, station wagon Matchbox car on the internet.

Changing a Tractor Tire

When I was in high school I worked on a farm.  When people think of farms it is often idyllic pastoral imagery.  This was not that kind of farm.  There was no livestock, meaning no the happy cow in front of a red barn.  The barns, if they could be called that, were steel buildings shoved full of a hoarder's dream.  The farmer went to an Alyeska auction once and came back with two trucks and what may have been a reel to reel computer, I do not quite remember.  The trucks needed to be waxed, a job best done not by Turtle Wax, but used automatic transmission fluid.  It was a different kind of place.

I could easily say that every day had a story, but most days were rather monotonous, and somehow one gets used to crazy.  When I first started, my task was to drive a quad around a giant field picking up sticks (logs) that were once wind rows that the farmer, Ken, had decided to plow into the field.  When the trailer behind my quad was full of sticks I used a mixture of diesel and gasoline poured out of a jug and a lighter to light the pile on fire.  Ken was not without precautions.  When he issued me my jug of diesel-gas fuel blend, he made sure I was using a long handled barbecue lighter, for "safety."  As fire season came on, with no rain and high winds, lighting 10 foot tall piles of wood on fire seemed a little risky, until my assignment one day was to try to start a forest fire in an island of trees that the original land owner probably pictured would be a perfect site for a his house.  With that, it proves that crazy is easy to accept, I just wrote that we were trying to start a forest fire, so the risk of starting a forest fire is already small potatoes.

One day I was sent out to run over six inch diameter aspen trees with a tractor.  For a week my job was to burn weeds (trees), a weed burner that had been affixed to a 500 lb propane tank on a trailer.  I dangled on a rope from the back of the tank, setting the world on fire.  Another day one of the farm trucks (with a broken gas gauge) ran out of gas.  Rather than putting more gas in the tank, Ken decided the truck needed starter fluid, not more fuel.  He turned it over, while I sprayed ethanol into the carburetor.  When the truck turned over, I stopped, and the truck would die.  We switched roles, as I obviously was not using the aerosol can correctly.  Ken sprayed the carburetor with the volatile aerosol until the engine compartment erupted into flames.  With crazy becoming normal, my own risk acceptance grew, and my ability to deal with "normal" monotony waned.

Driving a tractor, or any heavy equipment, is boring.  Some of the fields I would mow would take eight hours to make one lap of the field.  My day would be something along the lines of:  drive to the tractor, take lunch and water into the tractor, lube the tractor, start the tractor, drive two hours, turn right, drive two hours, turn right, stop for lunch, drive two hours, turn right, drive two hours, drive back to the barn.  One simply cannot alternate days between being tied to a bomb and sitting in a tractor cab keeping the wheel straight.  So I would come up with my own crazy ways to entertain myself.

Once, sitting in the cab, having done nothing for the last hour, I realized that the tractor drove itself.  The throttle could be set so that the tractor would drive at a constant speed without an operator.  The steering was stiff enough that on level ground the tractor drove straight without my touching the steering wheel.  I looked at the dual wheels, then at the mower behind and it occurred to me that I could jump out of the tractor, and clear all of the danger.  I slowed the tractor, then leaped from the hot, exhaust filled cab.  Clear of the danger, I proudly looked at the tractor lumbering along without me.  Then I realized I had to get back into the cab.

The story that I most enjoy from the farm, though it has been years since I have attempted to recall it in its entirety, is how to change a tractor tire.  Anyone who has been to a tire store has seen the various machinery available to change a tire.  There is a machine that breaks the bead, then an attachment is added, and the tire is pried off the rim.  Bicyclists are familiar with doing this process by hand, or with small nylon tire levers.  For heavy equipment there are similar machines, but these machines are expensive, and the Co-op was a long ways away.

Without the hydraulic driven machine to break the bead, farmers can use a momentum driven device, where a heavy metal sleeve is hoisted by hand, then slammed down a metal rod with a chisel-like head.  Using this tool is time consuming, physically demanding, and in no way dangerous.  Instead, Ken liked to use a 4x4 piece of lumber, and a truck.  One end of the board was jammed into the tractor tire next to the bead, the other was put wedged between the license plate and bumper of the truck.  The truck was then reversed into the tire.

"Careful," I was warned the first time we changed a tire, "if that slips it will kill you."  In addition to death by slipping lumber, I had already considered death by breaking lumber, death by being crushed between truck and tractor, and death by tractor falling off jack.

I stood clear of the operation.  The truck backed-up, the board slipped, and profanity flowed from the cab.  I reset the apparatus, then stepped away.  The truck backed-up, the board slipped, and profanity flowed from the cab.  I put the board back, and, reluctantly, held the board in place, awaiting certain death.

The bead broke, and I knew that from then on, I would have to be in the center of the operation to facilitate changing every tire.

Back in the tire shop, a tire iron-like attachment is slipped under the bead, and the machinery pulls the bead over the rim.  On the farm the first tire iron is slid into place, then a second, then a third, then profanity flows freely as one slips and all three go whipping through the air.  This is repeated until either the tire is off, or there is a human casualty.  Victory never went to the tire when I was a part of the mission though, and the bead was always pulled off the rim.

At this point, the tire is half on the rim.  Tubes could be replaced, and foreign objects could be removed.  Occasionally though, the tire needed work done on something that could not be reached with the half mounted tire.  The tire could be either be pried completely off the rim, or the youngest, smallest worker could climb into the tire.  Another farm hand would pull the bead wide, I would exhale, and squeeze inside.

With the tire fixed, the bead would have to be reset.  While this operation always included prolific, creative profanity, most of the really dodgy work was done.  The tractor would be sent back into service, and I would set about another task.  Like the time we were sorting used tires Ken had gotten for "cheap"...