1. 382 Blue Bayou Drive
Kissimmee, FL
When I graduated high school I was fully confident in one thing: I was going to college. What that would look like or how I would pay for it aside, I could never turn away from the one thing that provided me with comfort, that cushioned the many falls I had taken in my personal life. School saved me countless times, and for that I felt I owed the institution some cosmic debt. I knew it was a serious love-affair when at the end of fourth grade, I cried for hours beneath a tree at Children's Village After School Care alone, while my peers engaged in celebratory last-day-of-school play. It was more than sadness I felt as I curled up in a ball at the foot of that tree. It was pure sorrow, bordering on anguish. I thought of the next three months of my life without the respite of school, and for reasons I was far too young to understand, I felt tense and fearful. I didn't want to be Home, the way everyone else seemed to. I didn't want fourth grade (or any other) to end.
I was born to a house I never really saw, as my parents moved quickly after my arrival. I'm sure it was ranch-style and just...fine. Cape Canaveral is like any other coastal Florida town, with the exception of the Kennedy Space Center. I can only assume that at the moment of my birth, hundreds of shuttles were launched out of respect for my imminent importance. I will settle for just one launch, but I like to believe there were several.
382 Blue Bayou Drive is the place where my first memories call home. It feels right to first note that this house, unlike any other on the block, lacked a pool. Everyone on Blue Bayou Drive had identical cookie-cutter two-story homes, with kidney bean shaped pools and generous screened porches. Though our house was identical to the rest, it lacked these backyard assets. No pool, no porch. We had a small slab of unadorned cement outside our sliding glass back door, and I would lay down towels in summer and roast like a pig in the relentless heat. I suited up for the occasion in my polyester best. When it got too hot to handle, I'd trot to the side yard and hose myself off. Lay. Rinse. Repeat. I could celebrate summer like no other. No pool necessary.
Blue Bayou was a long horseshoe-shaped street. There was a "lake" inside the horseshoe. I always marveled at the randomness of this body of water, fed by no stream or river. It was just a blue dot on a map, and I wondered how it was possible. I knew nothing of artificial bodies of water, retention ponds, or neighborhood drainage needs. All I knew was that there was a lake, I liked to look at it, and ducks loved to breed there and have little ducklings that waddled to our cement slab every time I laid down there. As it turns out, ducklings love white Wonderbread, and we had plenty of that to share.
Our next door neighbors on either side were foreign. To our right lived a filipino family with first names all beginning with the letter J. When I was a little older and their daughter Jessica and I became friends, I used to marvel at the monogrammed towels in their bathroom. How did they find those?
To our left was a rental home, exactly like ours in every way- but cleaner and shinier. Every summer the house was occupied, and in my acute powers of observation, I eventually noticed it was the same people each year. The family was from England and they had the coolest accents of all the accents. It's easy to see why we didn't catch on to their repeat visits earlier, as the oldest child in the family gave us a different name every summer. The first summer, his name was Christopher. The second, Paul. The third, Matthew. My brother and I thought it funny that they were always a family of four from England, but we shrugged our shoulders and chalked it up to coincidence. There was always a daughter named Holly. By the third summer, we were old enough to really "hang-out" and we laughed at their trickery together. We rode bikes and played with our Skip-Its. I accidentally invited myself on one of their day-trips to Universal Studios. Though we only lived 15 minutes away, I had never been. They were sympathetic to my disclosure of this fact, and they buckled me into their rental Lexus and took me along for the ride. I wonder now if my park admittance was cheap, as I was only five years old.
Blue Bayou had four bedrooms, three of which were mine at one point or another. The master always belonged to my parents, naturally. My brother and I shifted rooms every few months, in an ongoing musical-chair like pattern. We started off in a room together, which was by far my favorite arrangement. On Saturday mornings he would peek down from the top bunk to see if I was awake. I always was. He'd eagerly flip on the TV and we'd watch all of the shows that young adults my age now pine for. Pete and Pete. Global GUTS! Legends of the Hidden Temple. The best of these shows will always be, with an off-putting rating of Y-7, Goosebumps. I don't think I need to put into detail what makes R.L. Stine's Goosebumps so enticing for young children- but if I did, I would use the word "gore". My brother and I would later race through Goosebumps books to see who could finish first. I would always win, but he would always fight it. I'd settle for a tie.
The second room was not a room I'd call my own. I slept in my grandmothers room with her, in a large queen-sized bed. The room was decorated with crosses and flowers, the only two things old people seem to enjoy. I didn't understand why back then, but it makes a little more sense now. She'd sleep on top of her covers, and I'd burrow under the blanket. Never the sheets, always just the blanket. Sheets were too much of a commitment. My brother had his own room for a little while, and the third upstairs bedroom belonged to my "Uncle", who was really just a family friend. I wondered, bitterly, why my brother got his own room, until I learned that my mother was expecting a baby. It all made sense then. My brother would either share his room with an infant or be exiled to the couch, and my new sibling would reign victoriously either way. As it turned out, Connie was an epic hot-mess of a child and my "Uncle" would soon overdose on heroin. Somehow or another, we all ended up with our own rooms. Nana stayed put with her florals and trinkets, "Uncle's" (haunted) room became mine, and Cliff's room remained the same. Meanwhile, Connie's room became the entire downstairs. No baby gate or normal door could contain her, only solid wood, homemade, floor-to-ceiling gates with steel latches (on the OUTSIDE) in every door frame. My brother's best friend Jeff fondly referred to her as "that velociraptor thing that lived in the living room". I had to look up velociraptor in the encyclopedia, but I didn't argue when I found the definition. Connie was one Pepsi away from taking flight.
The passing of my Nana, the almost-exodus of my mother to a life with twenty-something Rudy, and a few more GeoWorld pay dates for my father later, we up and left the town of Kissimmee, our ghosts, and our industrial-strenghth homemade baby-doors behind. I was looking forward to shopping at a Publix where English was spoken, as I was only 7 and it was difficult to role my R's with a horrific overbite. Also, my mother promised me that we'd get a real Christmas tree if we lived in St. Augustine. I submitted graciously to the move.
Coming Next week: St. Augustine.
