Once

I am always late to many things popular and new in our culture: French manicures, podcasts, Heather McElhatton. It surprises me. I feel like our old Illinois bachelor friends, Harley and John, who at 70 and 80 had been sheltered from so much of the modern day. One of my husband's friends sat by the campfire they had all built on Harley and John's farm near Mount Carroll and the friend got smoke and ash in his eyes so he turned to the side a little and took out one of his contacts. John stopped in his tracks and stood transfixed. These things, what are these things you take out of your sockets? He had never seen a contact lens before.

So anyway I never knew what these things "tagged" and meme" meant but now I know. And Juliliquoy (http://juliloquy.typepad.com/juliloquy/) has tagged me. I'm not good at the pass-along unless it involves gardening, then I'd happily dig you up some chocolate mint or anise hyssop for your own plot, so I'll only fulfill half the requirement. And speaking of one-timers, I just saw the enchanting Irish movie "Once" at the Uptown and it gave me the idea to list for you these required 7 things, but only 7 things I've done once.

1. Once. Once I was a mean girl. I liked to think I was only reactionary mean; if people were rude and intolerant I let them have it. We'd go see "Billy Jack" at the moviehouse and then all of us girls would stand up from our seats and hold our fists up in the air during the movie credits, like the black sprinters at the 1968 Olympics. But there are some things I regret now.

A few of us lived near an old man who we thought was evil and misogynist. He never yelled at the town boys but it seemed whenever he'd come upon the pack of us budding girls walking down the alley, some of us smoking Camels, some of us wearing ragged bell bottoms, he'd tell us to go home, clean up, and stay out of trouble. Every time. We knew other people thought that but he was one of the few cantankerous enough to say so.

We vowed to get back at him. Who was he anyway?

One night we all snuck out of our houses to meet at midnight at Patty Jacobsen's house. She lived across the alley from this old coot. He had a prized apple tree in his backyard. We got two old blankets and crawled up and over his fence, climbed up his tree, and tore off every nearly ripe apple on his tree. Then we drug the blankets back to Patty's garage where we sat on overturned pickle buckets and with our teeth yanked off and spit out all the apple meat down to the cores. It took us over an hour and our front teeth felt sore and loose. We piled those hundreds of ragged cores back onto the blankets, hauled them back over the fence, and spread them out in a circle under the old man's tree, a gift for him to see in the morning.

2. Once. Once I tried on all my mom's negligees in her darkened room when she was at work and inspected myself in the mirror. I was 14.

3. Once. Once I served on jury duty and got selected for a gang murder trial. When the desperate defense attorney asked me my opinion of justice I told him I had just read "Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun" by Geoffrey Canada. He picked me immediately. Another potential juror told the same attorney she thought O.J. was definitely guilty. He picked her, too.

4. Once. Once I sat next to critic and essayist Doris Grumbach on a flight to Naples, Florida, and told her I managed Fortress Press. She told me she knew some of our authors, who were also bishops and pastors, and whenever one female pastor in particular came to Maine, she told me "all the lesbians would come out of the woods to hear her preach." And on the entire flight to Naples the stories she told gave me new ways to better understand my work at this theological press as a non-practicing semi-believer.

5. Once. Once I printed this line on my resume, my first out of college, 1984: "Mastery of word processing and the facsimile machine."

6. Once. Once I laid in the shallow part of a lake at Girl Scout camp and let the leeches latch on to my body, neck to toes.

Then I came up out of the lake looking apocalyptic and let the girls pour salt on all the black slugs until they shriveled up and fell off me in heaps.


7. Once. Once I wrote a "play" for a performance my second grade friends and I held in a garage with a makeshift stage and a curtain made of flowered sheets hung on clothesline. It was a two-act play with two sentences and two stage directions: “On the day of thanksgiving they went to the hall and sang.” (sing!) “Then they went home and they sang some more, but only the mother danced.” (sing and dance!)