Reminiscences

These days Susan works three days a week, in circumstances where (though not necessary) it’s convenient for me to drop her off at her job and then pick her up when I finish my own shift. Today on the way home we stopped at a Mexican restaurant for frozen margaritas and a beef fajita dish massive enough to feed us both. I consumed the entirety of my own margarita; wary of brain freezes, she let me finish hers, then — without my opposition — she drove us the rest of the way home, because I was competent to do the driving myself, but why argue when she had any concerns at all?

During the meal itself, I told her a story from my childhood, parts of which she had previously heard in various allusions but the entirety of which she had never had occasion to have related to her. Just because it came to me, and why not?

***

I was two years older than my younger brother, but due to a minor placement of birthdays I was only a year ahead of him in school. We lived on a farm in a very small town, and went to a very small school. Every day after school one of our teachers would drop us off at the highway entry to our farm, and Matthew and I would walk the rest of the way up to the little farmhouse where we lived.

(In my third grade, my parents moved us to the ‘big city’, not too far from an actual large metropolitan area, but at this point in my life the surroundings were emphatically bucolic.)

On one particular such day, my brother and I were working our way up the road to our house (probably less than half a mile, now that I think back on it, but it seemed a really long way then), and I looked back and saw one of the farm’s bulls starting up the same road in the same direction. He was far behind us, but I observed to my brother that it would probably be a good idea to finish the trip before he caught up with us, so we started hurrying. Well, even an unexcitable bull will increase his pace when he sees hurry in front of him, so he started trotting; and a grown bull, even not in that much of a rush, can move a lot faster than two small boys. The closer he got, the more frantic we got and the faster we tried to run — he’d covered a lot of ground in a dismayingly short time — and the faster we ran, the more excited he got and increased his speed, and the more terrified we became and tried to run even faster, and he was right behind us now —

At this point, Matthew tripped and fell down. On the road. Directly in front of the ‘charging’ bull.

This was several several decades ago, and to this day that remains the most awful moment of my entire life. My brother was about to die. And I couldn’t leave him. And I couldn’t accomplish anything whatsoever by staying with him.

It was at this point that my mother — who had seen the unfolding scene from the window and come running out to intervene — jumped over both of us, landed in front of the excited bull, and announced her determined opposition by the only means available to her: she snatched off the knit toboggan cap she was wearing and smacked the bull on the nose with the puff-ball on the top of it. Thank God the bull was Prince Russ, and not Proud Mixer (that vicious son of a bitch would have trampled us all and then turned around to gore the remains, just for the warm satisfied glow of having done so). Russ stopped, startled by the what-the-hell-was-that?, then ambled off in mild, befuddled confusion, and just like that it was all over.

My brother didn’t die.

I didn’t have to desert him. (Or stay and die impotently as well.)

My mother saved both our lives.

And this was just another day.

Life can be like that sometimes.