Three Essays

The Day Kylie Jenner Became the Youngest Self-Made Billionaire

“Hi. I’m calling back from
Student Counseling Services.
Is this Rachel?” I turned the
volume up on my phone
because two men next to me
on the train were talking
loudly about how Kylie Jenner
wasn’t “self-made.” I gave the
lady on the phone my informa
-tion and she told me I would
be put on the waitlist. I guess I
wasn’t the only sad, anxious
student at my school who
needed help with their mental
health. The news made my heart
sink. The last time I was waitlisted,
my mental state went from bad to
writing suicide notes. She told me
to have a good day and hung up.
The men on the train continued to
fill the otherwise silent, morning
air with their opinions. 

“Okay your copay fee for
your birth control consultation
is going to be $80, is that okay?”
The waiting room felt stale. I
knew it wasn’t Planned Parent-
hood’s fault that my insurance
charged too much, but it still
stung. It ached when I texted my
dad and asked to borrow money
and prayed we would not have
the awkward conversation about
why I needed the money.  My
phone’s notifications lit up that he
sent the money¾he always does.
Another notification in my dock
was a tweet with the Forbes article
about Kylie. My fingers burned as I
transferred money from my savings
account to my checking. I would pay
him back with my next paycheck. 

“Girl, your lipstick looks so good!
I could never pull that off, could I?”
The lady at the payment counter
was referring to the dark brown
color I had painted on my lips. I
thanked her and told her of course
she could pull it off too. She rolled
her eyes and smirked as she took
my debit card out of my shaking
hands. The fact that I worked part-
time at a makeup store somehow
came up. She asked if I had tried the
Kylie lip products and I hadn’t. They
sold them at the store I worked at,
but I refused to buy them and
help Kylie become a billionaire. At
least that’s what I told my coworkers,
when in reality, I just couldn’t afford
it. Looks like Kylie didn’t need my
help though. 

“How do you all think
consumer culture has
changed in the last 100
years?” My 1920’s history
class was always awkward
with one opinionated student
talking like a God. A biracial
girl and I were some of the
most “ethnic” people in the
class and I didn’t get her. She
often compared the plight of
being biracial nowto a black
person in the 1920’s, which I
never thought was a fair com-
parison. She started going on a
tangent about how Kylie Jenner
created an empire off lip
injections. That she marketed it
as something you could achieve
with a little lip liner. While I
agreed with her, I wondered if
anyone would have been
complaining about Kylie’s success
if she was a man. 

“Rachie! I need you to get two
people to sign up for credit cards
tonight! You up for it?”  I nodded
at my manager and ignored the
awful nickname she gave me. She
squealed as she turned on her heels
to continue watching people she
thought were stealing. It’s not
uncommon for big retail companies
to ask their customers to sign up for
a credit card, but it felt wrong and
saturated with capitalism. A middle-
aged woman came up to my register
with a few Kylie Cosmetic “Lip Kits”
in hand. Her delicate fingers threw
the $29 products on the counter. I
scanned them and informed her
about the in-store credit card. She
interrupted me before I could finish
my half-assed sales pitch and told me
she didn’t need it. Then her card got
declined.

This is so sweet. But why am
I crying? I sent this tweet to my
friends followed by a video from
my hometown. Though every
tweet on Twitter was either
trashing or praising the Jenner/
Kardashian empire that day, there
was a video on there that made me
cry. A basketball player on the team
for the university in my hometown
got a surprise visit from his mom,
who he hadn’t seen in two years
since he left the Dominican Republic.
My eyes overflowed with tears as the
six-foot tall young man sobbed in
disbelief as his mother walked down
the stairs of the empty stadium to
greet her son. I’m not a big sports
person, but it was magical to see his
mom glowing as she got to watch her
son play. Haven’t we gone over this?
Self-made: Having succeeded in life
unaided.

Dictionary.com’s twitter account sent
that message the day after. Even the
damn dictionary doesn’t think Kylie is
deserving of her title. While it was
petty, it made me laugh when I saw it
on my feed. As I walked down a stair-
well, having left class, I saw I had two
notifications. One from Chase, that my
minimum wage paycheck was directly
deposited into my account. It wasn’t
much, but it was enough to pay rent
and pay my dad back. The other one
was an email from Counseling Services.
They sent the list of available times for
an intake appointment for the following
week. I was off the waitlist and my
shoulders didn’t feel as heavy any longer. 

The day Kylie Jenner became a
billionaire seemed to be the topic on
everyone’s minds. Was it because she
came from a family of millionaires so
the term “self-made” left a bad taste in
everyone’s mouth? Or did she truly
work hard and deserve the title? Does
it really matter? I imagine on that day,
Jenner sat in her Hidden Hills mansion
with her collection of sports cars asleep
in her garage. I imagine a fresh manicure
and a set of long acrylics glued to her
nails as she holds her baby daughter in
her arms. Her child has no idea of the con-
troversy and comments her creator has
caused. Kylie pays little attention to the
explosion of notifications on her phone.
She only enjoys the company of the storm
she created. 

Origins

5 years old. Leander, TX.

I was wrapped in a beach towel sitting on the edge of the pool. I traced circles with my feet as they dangled in the cool water, and squinted to see from the bright sun while laughing at my family who swam nearby. As I looked down at the small waves I was making, I noticed how dark my legs were in comparison to the bright blue waters that surrounded them. My bright pink towel and swimsuit only seemed to amplify the contrast. I thought my legs looked like hot dogs without buns. My sister, Caitlin, called over to me, saying something about how crazy my hair looked. It was a lot thinner and curlier back then, so when it dried, I looked like a discount, brown Annie. Her smile beamed as everyone laughed at whatever she said. Like always, I ran off crying because I didn’t know how to take a joke. The laughter of my family rang in my ears as my sister tried to call me back over, so I wouldn’t go tell mom.

My brown-ish feet took me back across the hot concrete, up the deck, and into the kitchen. The inside of the house was completely dark as my eyes adjusted to the indoors. My mom saw me, “Hey lovie, what’s wrong?”

I half-blindly ran over to her and tattled on my sister. She started to laugh and contained it. “Why can’t I look more like Caitlin?” I asked between my tears.

Caitlin got the traits I envied from my dad: fair skin that was decorated with beautiful freckles and golden-brown hair, while I got more similar looks from my mom: easily tanned skin and my mom’s dark, mexican hair. My mom was angered that I complained about my looks because, I guess as far as faces go, my sister and I looked “just like her.” She sent me back outside and I went and sat in the shade, awaiting my sister’s apology that never came.

 15 years old. Lubbock, TX.

My arms started to get tired from using my friend’s mini-flat iron to straighten my hair. As I got older my hair lost most of its curl and it became so thick I had to get it thinned out every six-weeks. I was getting ready in my friend Kamryn’s bathroom while the rest of my friends sat down the hall in her room. They were discussing our most recent obsession with a new boy-band. Their laughter echoed down the hall as I yelled at them, cursing at my hair for making me take so long to get ready. Her bathroom was cluttered with all the makeup we borrowed from each other and no one bothered to clean it. The mirror contained my reflection as well as drawings of me and my friends that one of them had drawn with a dry-erase marker. I envied the doodles of my friends that had the hairstyles I wanted, but was told I couldn’t pull it off. I finished the last section and my hair looked just like all of my white friends’ hair¾pin straight.

I ran down the hall and they were all laying across Kamryn’s bed on their phones sending back and forth pictures of the boys in the band that were “our boys.” Rolling my eyes, I reached into my bag to grab my lotion. They continued to gush about the punk boys on their phone screens as I lathered up the lotion and glided it across my skin. I hated the smell of lemons, but I had mixed in lemon juice into my lotion because I had read online that lemon juice made your skin paler. Closing the lid to my lotion, I threw it back into my bag and threw myself onto the bed with my friends. They then showed me the punk band member that was “my guy.” He was really cute but didn’t look like the rest. He had dark hair, small brown eyes and olive-colored skin. The other members of the band were fair and had light colored hair with choppy fringe.

“That one is yours,” Kamryn proclaimed, like she was claiming The New World for me. I pointed out that he was the only one who wasn’t white. They laughed and said that’s why he was mine. I rolled my eyes and joined in their laughter.

19 years old. Chicago, IL.

The world was really dizzy. The girls at the party made a drink called “Jungle Juice” that I had only ever seen on Twitter and didn’t know it was a real thing. It consisted of pouring juice, fruit, and roughly 3 tons of liquor into a large container. Needless to say, I had quite a lot of it. It was a cast party for the show we had just closed earlier that night. It was an all black cast and we were all extremely proud to have sold out every night to share the story with others. I was only the set designer, so I hadn’t really had much time to get to know the cast as much as they did with each other. They all laughed at their inside jokes and broke away from the group to have their own conversations. I sat with another designer and gushed to her about how we needed to hang out. The majority of the party sat around the living room laughing and trying to explain the rules of the drinking game over the loud music playing. I was only half-listening and playing with the soft waves in my hair I had recently started to embrace.

The rules of the drinking game had been something along the lines of drinking if a statement applied to you. For example, if the statement was “whoever has been arrested” or “whoever is the youngest,” the person who that applies to would have to drink. They had started to play a few rounds of the game and I would just drink whenever they told me to. I leaned my head back on the wall behind me and started to sing the words to a Selena song that came over the speakers. I don’t know Spanish so I was probably saying the wrong words, but the music was so loud no one cared. Finally I heard one girl say my name over and over and I looked over at her and tried to make sense of what she was saying. “Rachel, you have to drink now” she yelled over the music. She told me to drink again and I laughed and obliged as I asked why I had to drink. “Because it was ‘whoever is white’” she yelled back. I tried to explain that I was only half white, but that my mom was hispanic. No one heard me over the music, so I kept drinking and we all kept playing the game.

Meditations on the Color Yellow

1. I asked my mom what her favorite color was. She told me it was yellow. I made a noise of disgust and asked why. She said it was a happy color.
   
   
2. My sister walked out in her satin, pink, and silver-beaded prom dress. She had decided the day before her junior prom that she was going to attend and it was the only dress she could find last minute. I was about to tell her she looked like a bottle of Pepto Bismol when she started to let all her friends in the door. I had never seen her friends wear anything but jeans and t-shirts and they filed into our living room like troops ready for battle. The girls all had on full-length gowns and I was in awe of the girl with fair skin and light brown hair with soft curls. Her dress was quite large and a pale yellow that reminded me of Belle, from Beauty and the Beast. So I was confused when I heard someone whisper under their breath that it wasn’t her color.
   
   
3. My mom tied my hair up in the tightest ponytail¾like she always did. She yanked a brush through my hair like it wasn’t attached to a 5 year-old’s head. I coughed and coughed as she doused my hair in hairspray, and she told me to stop being so dramatic. My hands were laid on my lap and I played with the skirt of my dress to distract me from the pain. The fabric was stiff like parchment paper. It was a white and yellow plaid pattern that had little yellow flowers sewn into the hems. I knew since it was such a light color I wouldn’t be able to play outside with my cousins. As my mom finished the only hairstyle she was capable of putting my hair through, she grabbed a scrunchie off the dresser that was the same fabric as my dress and put it in my hair. 
   
   
4. We sat around the kitchen table having breakfast and my dad yelled at our cat for trying to catch flies that landed on the cracked, yellow-painted walls.
   
   
5. I walked barefoot down the hospital hall, clinging to the railing meant for the actual sick. My family’s car wreck didn’t do much damage to me, but my seven-year-old body was so sore it hurt to even laugh, though I wasn’t doing much of that. My Aunt Mary saw me coming from the waiting room and greeted me with a relieved sigh¾I think I might have been the first victim of the accident she saw, other than my parents. When I finally made it to the waiting room she handed me a bright yellow Wendy’s bag and told me I needed to eat something. I sat next to my cousin and he asked if I was alright, I might have said yes. Then I threw up into the Wendy’s bag. 
   
   
6. There were baskets that were filled with things no one would normally buy at the raffle contest my neighborhood had. Everyone was putting in their tickets for the basket with candy and DVDs. I put all of mine in a soft-yellow, woven basket filled with jewelry and I won. When I brought it home, my mom kept most of the jewelry because it was “too grown up” for me and told me I could keep the basket. 
   
   
7. My grandma drove to my school to bring an outfit for me to wear to my friend’s dad’s funeral. It was the same dress I had worn to Easter mass¾mostly black with yellow flower petals printed on the bottom half. My seventh-grade class walked from the school over to the church and filed into a pew toward the back. I had never met her dad before. It was the first time when they brought him down the aisle in a coffin. The pamphlets they handed out were a faded beige and felt like napkins. It had his picture on the front and inside there were pictures of my friend and her family. Their smiles were beaming. As they walked in after their dad, my friend and her mom had puffy red eyes and her five-year-old sister’s face was blank.
   
   
8. My grandmother on my dad’s side was a character to say the least. Garage sales were her nirvana. The last Christmas that she was well enough to mail out presents, she boxed up random items and shipped them out to her relatives across the country. That year my mom got a fake diamond ring in a black suede box (my parents were already separated), my sister got an expired bottle of purple Listerine mouthwash, and I got a shiny, yellow piggy bank with the word “Botox” written across the side in black cursive letters. 
   
   
9. At my confirmation I picked out a yellow lace dress to wear because I was only doing the ceremony for my mom, so I figured the dress could be for her too. Afterward, she didn’t congratulate me on letting the Holy Spirit into my soul, but how nice I looked in yellow. 
   
   
10. My head rested on my first boyfriend’s shoulder as we sat at my best friend’s graduation party. He laughed at something I said and put his hand on my thigh, like it was a pat on the back for me saying something funny. His pale, veiny hand started to slide under the dark yellow fabric of my dress. He smirked as I allowed him to touch me, he didn’t know I just didn’t want to embarrass him by telling him to stop. 
    
    
11. My drunk, but cute friends went around in a circle to decide on what everyone would be, if they were a color. It was unanimous that I would be yellow. 
    

    
    
    

Lost and Re-found

It may well be true that my son David’s Chromosome 7 is partly responsible for an

overnight journey to Lost Lake in the Mt. Hood National Forest that I recently took with him

and his staff, Jose.  I say this because Chromosome 7 has been studied quite a bit and various

developmental disorders may be linked to its genetic material being displaced, or lost, or

shuffled, or even repeated.  It’s easy for me to blame his condition on something, so I do,

though, of course, it may not be true.

Chromosome 7 represents 5 – 5.5% of the total DNA in our cells.

5% may not seem like a lot, but it is the 7th longest chromosome with maybe 900 – 1500

coding genes depending on whose site you read, so no turning your back on this guy. Here we

were then, away from the city and the group home where David resides in order to show him

new adventures, to shake off any lurking genetic-fate, to make his life look like other

people’s.

This particular Lost Lake in the Upper Hood River Valley, Oregon, is not lost, for it

never goes away, or disappears. It can always be found at the end of a very long and windy road.

There is, however, another Lost Lake in this same state. This one is in the Willamette National

Forest and is so named because it really does disappear into three holes in the ground.  The

Spring run-offs fill the Lake, but by Autumn there is mostly a dry meadow, for there is no more

mountain water to replenish what is lost. It’s not a duplicate lake at all then, just truer to its

duplicate name. Go figure.

According to the Human Genome Project, when the genetic region on Chromosome 7,
called 7q11.23, is duplicated, Autism-like traits and language problems are the result.

David’s absence of spoken language, his low-functioning Autism, require that two

people accompany him for long drives and sleepaways, so it’s not lost on me that his 7q11.23

could be why we made this journey. Jose and I had no way of knowing if he really wanted to go,

but he is the reason why we did go. After we walked around the 245-acre Lake that is never lost,

we left our cabin (easy to lose in the dark) in order to find some dinner in the closest town,

Parkdale, but first had to find a Pacific Pride gas station for the group home’s company car. It

turns out there is a Pacific Pride in Pine Grove, and oh boy I should have known where Pine

Grove is⎯having passed it a million times on Highway 35 from the town, now city, of Hood

River to the village of Parkdale every summer of my life-as-a-youth.

Pine Grove’s business center is one market and one gas station and has looked exactly the

same for ever. It has not gained ground, or lost ground, for that matter, and for this alone it is

unique—at least it can be counted on not to reshuffle itself. One can, and should, say that it does

stand the test of time. You would never know a Pacific Pride lived there; there is no sign, and the

pump is playing possum behind the everybody-can-use gas station.  It’s not lost, but it’s not

easily known, that’s for certain.  If it had been there all those years, then it was invisible to me. I

could have both seen it and not seen it.

Jose, a favorite and experienced staff from David’s group home in Salem, GPS’ed a

different route back to Parkdale after Pine Grove and other landmarks appeared, puzzle pieces of

the past tinkering with me⎯Woodworth Road where I rented a house one Summer while setting

fires for the Forest Service plus a sign for the Parkdale Cemetery. The house I hadn’t thought

about for a long, long time, so it was a memory re-found, just like that—a three months’ moment

from 1974. A space, mind you, not particularly relevant to my before-then existence or my after-

then existence, but some mental pictures developed, oblivious to my say-so. My son must think

in pictures. He doesn’t know words in the sense that he can’t say them or write them, but he

knows what a lot of them mean even though he can’t picture the letters in his head, I think.

Three of the genes on Chromosome 7 that may be related to Autism are AUTS2,
CNTNAP2, FOXP2.

The gene, FOXP2, is related to one’s ability to speak. According to Adam Rutherford in

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, “There’s only two changes between the protein

sequence of FOXP2 in chimps and us, and we can talk and they cannot.”  I like chimpanzees,

and I imagine they talk to each other just fine, but I get Rutherford’s point.  This protein

sequence seems agreeably blame-worthy plus I like its full name—forkhead box P2—even if it

might be playing with my son’s genome, lost, misplaced, or shuffled in some way. I have no

real-time words that go along with the house pictures. If only pictures remain, then, in this way, I

am sometimes like David though I can recall certain words, phrases, sentences Jose and I

shared during that time, and my son can’t, I think. David responds in countless ways,

vocalizations, gestures, various signs, so clearly some of the time he does duplicate his hominid

cousins, and nothing wrong with that⎯way too many people talk who shouldn’t be allowed to.

In her 2005 bestseller about Autism and its correlation to animal behavior, Animals in

Translation, Temple Grandin, whose Autism couldn’t be less like David’s, remarks on

her mental cognition as one of seeing in pictures: “During my thinking process I have no words

in my head at all, just pictures.” The academic and well-known author explains that words come

in, but only “after I’ve finished thinking it through” (her itals). These two things then (Temple

and David) prove the Sesame Street song to be true: “One of these things is just like the other;

one of these things is just not the same.”  But guess what? That is not the case because they

(Temple=David) do match according to the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental

Disorders or DSM-5 which is the go-to book for finding out how you are similar and different

from the normal people.

The DSM-5 “diagnosis will be called Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and there no longer will be
subdiagnoses: Autistic Disorder,  Asperger Syndrome, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not
Otherwise Specified,  Disintegrative Disorder”  (The American Academy of Pediatrics). (my itals).

Anyone can see that the problem with the previous DSM-IV was that it was way too

crowded with things that were really not the same but had a few look-alikes—which caused

some consternation and upset the natural Sesame Street order-of-things. DSM-5 erased that

prickly-pear of a problem by simply reshuffling the four into one, Autism Spectrum Disorder,

where a person with a PhD and another person who can’t say or spell PhD are holding the same

umbrella with a big fat sign on it saying ASD HERE. Andrew Solomon rightly quips about the

disappearing disorders in his groundbreaking work Far From The Tree: Parents, Children, and

the Search for Identity: “PDD-NOS—pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified

(which critics claim stands for ‘physician didn’t decide’).” (my Itals). Six words, just like that,

lost forever and why not, it was a mouthful and a tad on the vague side.

Compared to the mentally-neglected house on Woodworth Road, a few words and

pictures arranged or shuffled their way into memory lane when we visited the Parkdale

Cemetery, after finding the gas, but before finding the dinner. The sign demanded our presence,

for my parents are there, and I hadn’t been to see them for several years. In that sense, the house

on Woodworth Road and my parents’ resting place are not the same at all—one was a rental

house I will never see again; whereas, the cemetery I have visited a few times is my parents’

forever-home, since 2000 for my mother and since 2010 for my father. You could say that, like

one of the four disappeared Autism disorders, the House is NS—not specified; whereas, the

Cemetery is VS—very specified.

The cemetery was much smaller than memory said it would be. Alongside Mom and Dad

are four others⎯my paternal grandparents, and a paternal aunt and uncle, which was a

surprise because I had forgotten they stayed there as well. The cemetery has a dramatic natural

backdrop, Mt. Hood, and in a society under siege by the war between sameness and otherness,

it is something of an egalitarian residence given the equal payout of grave markers

for the dead by the living. No stone edifices here, no outsized monument to one father and husband,

no statues to mother and grandmother. If you have a choice for one last place

to live, you can do a lot worse than this picturesque cemetery (from GK koimeterion ‘dormitory’

from koiman ‘put to sleep’). Going to sleep with like-minded people in a similar environment

under the watchful eyes of a majestic mountain, what’s not to like?

I showed David his maternal grandparents’ places, and he jumped and hopped on them,

unmindful (no, mindless) of who, what, or where, or why we were there, while my mind saw the

lost years fly by. The quiet dormitory is surrounded by an apple and pear tree orchard, and a deer

glided through some trees, and looked at us⎯at me I was certain.  Yet who is to know

what a deer sees, or thinks?  He stopped right in front of us, and I held David’s head, trying to

force him to sight this wild nature, this deer.  He didn’t, of course, and my mindless

determination to make him see what we saw has ever been a lost gesture, yet who knows what

David actually sees? While Jose, David, and I all have the visual apparatus to sight

the young deer, maybe only two of us really did see something that, to us, was just the same.

Chromosome 7 has 159 million base pairs.

Sure, that sounds like a lot, but these building blocks of DNA in Chromosome 7 are the

most highly studied of all the chromosomes, and the mystery of lost words or unsighted

deer may be uncovered here. The inability of this man-son with healthy eyesight and hearing to

be able to focus on close-up or middle-distance images, never mind a far-off flying hawk,

is a never-forgotten reality of the low-functioning kind of Autism, and I don’t mean the other end

of IT⎯pretty much anyone can fall under the Autism Spectrum Disorder. And fall under it they

do, although presumably far from any trees one can see. Statistics reveal Autism to be so

common but really, then, where are they all?

There is no photograph that proves the deer, and only two out of the three people there

could talk about it the next day, or the next.  But that too falls apart because the words and the

pictures in my mind and in Jose’s mind cannot also be the same.  Any meaning, if there is one

for Jose, a thoughtful artist, is his alone, and must be different than mine: he, too young to

dialogue day-to-day with mortality as I do; he, who did not know my parents; he, who has not

lost a parent. Older people seem to be mired in deathscapes, and, if they don’t like the mire, they

may be unable to stray far from it. Mire, related to swampy or boggy ground, but also⎯and so

more true to my mind⎯to be involved in a difficult situation, that is a mother who will one

day not be present and a son who will not understand why she is absent.

This deer followed me fondly for the next few days knocking on my moody

metaphysical door and kicked up a memory of another deer in the film Three Billboards Outside

of Ebbing, Missouri. The character, Mildred, is planting flowers next to one of the billboards

where she has placed an ad that is a pretty clear demand to the Sheriff to find the person who

raped and killed her daughter. She is silently thinking of her loss, and a fawn materializes out

of nowhere, stops, and looks at her. She says to the deer: “Well, you’re pretty. But you can’t be

her. She got killed, and now she’ll be dead forever. I do thank you for coming up though.”

The mother’s loss is and will continue to be profound, and the writer fuels it by

this act of suspending disbelief⎯who sees a deer staring at her when life stops at sorrow and

mortality?  Should justice prevail, Mildred’s words reveal the finality of her loss:

daughter’s death, no afterlife, the deer “coming up” as though it resides in the underworld.  

Even so, life’s grace and fragility are equal to the young, pretty deer that is not her

daughter but has given the mother the only positive response to her words on the billboards,

which have pitted the town against her.

But this clever brain-storm happened much later, after dinner, after walking through Parkdale,

after seeing the old wood church dating from 1911, the place where I was told I was baptized (maybe

1950) obviously too old at the age of three for religion to stick around and, appropriately enough, no

mental pictures or words rise up from that at all. None. No one has ever talked about it, a Not

Otherwise Specified event certainly. Come to think of it the only people who can testify to this not-

properly-a-memory are together in that dormitory.

Next appeared the building where my sisters, mother, and I went to the movies, oh-so-

long-ago, and I recall to this day, my first cinema-seeing, my painful entrée into the two-faced

Janus of comedy and tragedy. The grandfather’s orchard where we stayed every summer was a

few miles away, and for an evening excursion, we went to the local theatre, although I only

remember this one time, so maybe it did not occur often, or maybe it occurred only once,

historical facts being notably lean on the ground this trip, as anyone can see. I remember it

because the Native American women in the audience wore traditional clothes, had long braids,

and really-and-truly had babies on their backs in papooses you now see only in books.

But that is totally not why I remember it. The birthplace for this memory is because the

film scared me to death. If you want to look up The Long-Long Trailer (1953 Fox) starring Desi

Arnaz and Lucille Ball, you too will find this Hollywood artifact, perpetrator of a singular, albeit

cloudy, snapshot that I can bring to life as if it occurred yesterday, which isn’t much it’s true.

The year is probably 1954, which makes me seven and seemingly too old in today’s

terms (technology having made innocence and naivete obsolete) to be so distressed by a movie

where the characters are in peril of driving their very long trailer off the twisty-turning high

cliff road to die a terrible death. But that isn’t correct either. This is comedy, pure and light.

There is no reason, from any normal perspective, whereby the trailer could actually fall off

the cliff, crash, and harm the two comedians.  Zero. Not going to happen.

No flip side to this at all, no gray area, no dark humor. Desi and Lucy will never die, and

no one in that theatre in Parkdale, Oregon, thought they would (except me).  What I can’t prove

is that any of it is true, nor will anyone be able confirm this scene that I have incubated through

time. It is my memory and no one else’s though I would prefer it had become lost along the way

because it clearly hasn’t done me any good.  I’ve been blaming it on my fear of heights ever

since then, so I can’t back down now.  The inside theatre is no longer there, (of course,

obviously), but I remember exactly which building it was located in, and I proudly pointed out to

David and Jose, as a good tourist guide would, where I saw that movie.

Some weeks after the Lost Lake adventure, I was reading Ed Yong’s breathtaking page-

turning study of microbes in his 2016 book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a

Grander View of Life. He colorfully shows that individuals are pretty much tethered to the

microbes in their system.  Microbes in the intestines affect people’s immune systems, and it

turns out that “Many conditions, . . . are accompanied by changes in the microbiome, suggesting

that these microbes are at the very least a sign of illness, and at most a cause of it.”  Wow is what

I thought because Autism is one of those conditions he lists.  If I can just reshuffle David’s gut

bacteria, maybe he too can see the deer.

Yong writes “that we have around 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion microbial

ones. . . . ”  Microbes “. . . the brainless, microscopic, single-celled organisms that live inside

us have been pulling on our strings all along.”

Microbes in the human body outnumber every single human cell!?  Brainless they may well be,

but if it is microbes (not David’s Chromosome 7) that spin his existence, and by

extension mine, and the people who work with him like Jose, then there is more blame

to go around, which I am quite happy about.

Our next trip is to find that other Lost Lake. Jose and I have decided David

would love to see it, we mindful, but really mindless, of his true desires and so off the three

of us will go, pulled by the genes in chromosomes or by not-so-brainless bacteria or just by the

luck of the draw.  There won’t be a lake then at the end of August, just a meadow.  The water

will be lost underground and no one knows, year after year, exactly where it goes.

The three of us together will see that there is no Lake there. We will share a

similar reality as we walk through it, because the ground won’t be underwater, and maybe we

will all see a deer.  Jose, David, and I will not see what, in the past, was there and what, in the

future, will be there again.  In this way, we three will be the same. And when the mountain water

fills the meadow up with a lake next Spring, this too we will not be there to see, even

though it will be true.

_______________________

Jane Babson has a master’s degree in African Languages and Literature and a doctorate in Comparative
Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She often writes about her son with low-functioning
Autism (Neutrons/Protons Magazine) as well as her travels in Africa, Greece, and Viet Nam (Cargo Magazine).
For the past twenty years, she has taught literature at Western Oregon University.