Smashing flashlights
I was the costumed bumble bee, a nod to Blind Melon’s No Rain. You know, the ‘90s music video of a plum-shaped girl dressed as a bumble bee, eager and seeking her place in the world. Instead, she discovers the world’s underbelly, shame. Then in a fortunate twist of fate, she arrives at an ornate iron gate leading to an open field: home to a gang of familiarly offbeat bee people.
I felt at home in the image of that girl: glasses, chubby, naively confident with more faith in the world than it might come to deserve. Black and yellow were my stripes. And black and yellow were the synthetic colors of the half gallon flashlight my father chucked like a Rawlings baseball at a speeding car on Halloween night. And who are we if not what we do in the dark, even when the neighbors are watching?
My vampire brother, our father, and I cut across the front yards along Route 286, the backroad highway dividing the farmland-turned-suburban sprawl of our home on Peachtree Drive. From a half mile away, the speeding car flickered awkward shapes of artificial light through clusters of fall leaves in the night trees above us. It sped toward us with a ripe teenage violence.
Our father played baseball in high school and college and was offered a pitcher position in the minor leagues. Rumor has it he fiercely opposed the terms of the contract, that something about it was laughable to him. Despite turning it down, he kept the offer letter tucked safely away in a drawer for us to find later. He got a corporate job with Sunoco that led him to a career in real estate for drug stores. His family nickname went from “Joe College” to “Mr. Corporation.”
Baseball career derailed, his pitcher arm remained. As the headlights neared, he lifted his front knee and leaned back in a single slow motion as he wound his right arm. And with one rapid crank, he pitched that six-volt lantern flashlight the size of my head into the front headlight of the speeding car with bullseye precision. The bone-deep smash echoed through the nearby corn field neighbors had plowed into a maze.
“Slow the ***k down!” he clamored. Our eyes bloomed. It was awesome. Blind Melon’s lyrics looped through me: All I can say is that my life is pretty plain… You don't like my point of view…
We stayed put on the front lawn of a red brick ranch home as our father retrieved the shattered plastic from both lanes of the road, muttering the remaining edges of the F word under this breath. He tossed the shards of flashlight shrapnel into my brother’s pillow case, creating an unlikely Chex Mix of gold-foiled Reese’s Cups, snack-size Snickers, SweeTarts, and one very high-value, full-size Butterfinger.
We later told our mother: “Poppa threw a flashlight at a speeding car and it shattered everywhere!”
And depending on the day, she’d have responded one of two ways: 1) call our grandmother, stretching the coiled phone cord from the kitchen all the way to her bedroom down the hall to whisper about our father’s violence out of our earshot, or 2) sip a deep long drag from a Virginia Slim and nod in agreement that speeding cars on Halloween night near so many children deserved it, and good for him.
Either way, the smashing flashlight stuck with us. It followed me to California. As I dropped my son off at school nearly 30 years later and witnessed a speeding Chevy Blazer rip toward the crosswalk that moments earlier was rivered with parents holding children’s hands, I protruded my pregnant belly for show, stepped off the sidewalk into the street’s far edge, and screamed “Slow down!”
I’ve puffed my chest at the drivers and passengers who litter from their cars in our neighborhood. I waved one down to suggest they turn around and pick up what they’d left behind. I make that sound kind. I was not.
My husband tells me not to be a vigilante, to err on the side of caution, jot down their license plate number instead. He’s said, “You never know the character that’s behind the wheel, what mood they’re in.” He reminds me that I am a mother. I say that's exactly the point.
Maybe it’s that I am a woman that I can act fearlessly in these moments. That I am unafraid of the people behind the wheel. What’s more, when you’re an obvious mother (pregnant belly), it sends a message: I am a protector. Hear me. If you won’t cease this for me (for this person I’m growing, a fresh one), then who?
Once at a stop light in our hometown, two teenagers whipped a bag of McDonald’s food trash out of their passenger’s side window. Without a word, my father opened his door mid-traffic, slammed it shut, picked up the bag, and pitched it into the face of the teen who’d thrown it without remorse. I watched with wide eyes, like the night of the flashlight, thrilled by his heroism, by his brute force – the way he wordlessly delivered a message on behalf of the world, the earth, its children.
I do like watching the puddles gather rain. And on nights like Halloween our lives are indeed pretty plain – the excitement defined by full-size candy bars, speeding cars, and perhaps more than anything our superstar father’s reaction to them. Whether he accepted the spot in the minor leagues or not, we watched his moves through the next half decade of his life – what he had left – like his name was always flashing across a baseball stadium’s jumbotron.