Manuscript Excerpt from Winter 1996

As a child I was often forced to go to the Famous Barr department store near our house. (It is now a parking lot.) When I was a very young child and it was near Christmas time, I was taken along with my mother on a shopping trip.

The store was crowded and people were tracking snow inside as they walked and it was melting into puddles near the exits.

We were on our way to the door behind a crowd of shoppers when the fat woman in front of me who was carrying tons of packages, hit one of the puddles. Her feet went straight up, her butt went straight down and her packages went in every direction. She was hurt, I believe.

I, nevertheless, collapsed into a fit of hysterical laughter and ended up falling on the floor next to her, holding my stomach and screaming with fits of mirth.

My mother was acutely embarrassed by my behavior and kept right on walking out the door in hopes that no one would realize I was her kid.

Other forms of slapstick also amused me. My father could be very short-tempered, cruel and impatient. When at the dinner table, he would from time to time drop his fork or knife on the floor and have to get a clean one. Something about the incident tickled me and I would begin to laugh uncontrollabley.

If he were in one of his enraged moods, I would have to leave the room and continue laughing elsewhere in hopes that he wouldn’t know what I was doing. But of course he did.

Once when I was still in a high chair, my mother dropped an egg. I nearly hyperventilated because it was so funny. To this day I lose it whenever an egg falls.


My mother grew up in a small rural community in northern Missouri. On Saturday morning all of the farmers would converge in town. Town amounted to a small strip of ma and pa shops. There was a liquor store, hardware, variety, grocery, and my favorite, the drug store.

The drug store was vintage Norman Rockwell. It had ceiling fans, hexoganal ceramic tiles on the floor and stools where you could sit at the counter and order fountain Cokes and phosphates. It was run by my mother’s cousin and all through my childhood and adulthood, it never changed, although farm failure, unemployment, and the mass exodus to the city has rendered the community a ghost town.

Recently, my mom’s cousin was entertaining her usual group of 3 or 4 out-of-work farmers.
They arrive early in the morning, drink coffee and chat until close, 6 p.m., and go home.

This day, someone remarked that the ceiling was sagging. She said yes, she needed to have that looked at. Then she kicked them out, locked the door and went home. At 6:20 the entire roof collapsed in on the building and within moments it was turned to a pile of dust and rubble. The last in a long strip of hollowed, musty storefront shells —the dark and yawning symbols of decaying rural America—died in this way.