My Life is Just Ruined
Monday, October 3, 2005
Sunday had concluded with a two mile walk for Dad, Mom, and Collette, while Francis and Linnea biked past the fields in the early evening sun. On the way back, Francis stopped briefly to talk with three boys across the fence in the schoolyard. Apparently they had been discussing the military.
“Good luck with the marines!” Francis called out to him as they left.
“Good luck to you too!” The boy called back.
And at home, OLeif, Joe, and Rose joined them from youth group and they guffawed themselves silly over America’s Funniest Home Videos before OLeif and Collette left for the evening.
Monday, before beginning Joe and Rose on R.C. Sproul’s everlasting series, “Dust to Glory”, Carrie had to fill them in on the concert:
“Oh, it was awful, just terrible. My life is ruined! I was so upset, I didn’t even take off my make-up last night. He cut his hair, his eyes were rolling back in his head. He dropped the microphone and was tripping all over the stage, just screaming into the microphone. There were only like a hundred people there anyway… But Joseph liked it. And then, the first band that came on – he was just weird. He reached his hand down to me and grabbed my hair, pulled my head up, and just held it there. And everyone was like, ‘OK…’ And then they were bashing Bush, the first band, the whole time. And Joseph was just laughing hysterically. So the guy was finally like, ‘I’m guessing you voted Republican’. And Joseph was like, ‘Yeah!’ So now I have nothing to live for. I think I’ll just die…”
She ended her narrative dramatically.
Everyone else just chuckled.
“It’s not funny, guys,” Carrie tried not to laugh herself. “My life is ruined.”
“Right,” Collette said.
Carrie’s narrations were always humorous anyway, no matter what the outcome was.
“But, then,” Carrie was suddenly revived. “I saw him – the guy from Hot Topic – Trenton. I couldn’t believe he was there. He was the only redeeming part of the concert. He has the best hair, the best hair ever. And so when I saw him, I got my big smile and Elizabeth was like, ‘What, Carrie, what? What’s wrong?’ And I was like, ‘Never mind’, because Joseph was there. But then Elizabeth figured it out, and she was like, ‘No way! No way!’ And then she spilled the beans to Joseph, of course, and said that I was just crazy about Trenton. And then Joseph said, ‘You mean the guy with the —?’” Carrie poofed her hand in front of her forehead to fill in the blank, as Joseph had done, to indicate the style of hair he wore. “He has the best hair,” she said again and sighed.
And Rose had finally found a small pumpkin growing on her vine, the vine which had grown to encompass one entire burning bush and the water pipe, sticking out of the ground.
Meanwhile, Carrie was lounging around in her clothes from the concert and made Rose give her a piggy-back ride, whereupon Rose’s face turned purple. She was often the object of “Carrie-tortures”. And Mom returned from the park with Francis and Linnea, where Linnea had caught twenty tadpoles and ten snails. And then Mom read a new artist book to them while Collette finished her laundry and added more thoughts to the written pieces she had been working on.
Later, Carrie walked around in her new mail-order shoes.
“What do you think of my new snake-skin shoes?” She asked the living room.
They were pretty snazzy, the sort of thing, once again, only Carrie could manage to pull off. Black and white.
“Remember my old snake-skin cowboy boots?” She went on. “I looked everywhere for a pair of those.”
“Yeah and your old…” Collette tried to think.
“White buckskin boots?” Carrie finished for her.
“Yeah, although they were probably brown by the time you were finished with them.”
Carrie was hardly ever seen without the said boots – they were her prized possession at the time.
“Gaily bedight, a gallant knight
In sunshine and in shadow;
Riding along, singing a song,
In search of El Dorado.”
– Edgar Allen Poe