Abi: Children of the Night [15/30]

In Arcadia, while I was in Middle School, my mum got a night-time job delivering papers. She had a bunch of machines to fill around the town, and then she had some home deliveries (and a delivery to the mental facility), which took a few hours at night, and half the night into morning on Sunday  (when you’d have to stuff the inserts into each paper yourself… oh, the black fingers we’d have from the ink!).
I ended up going with my mum a lot. I have always had a very good sense of direction (unlike Amanda, who noted that a few post back). So I ended up being a navigator for my mum (this, being a navigator, is a very common theme in my life), especially when we got to the mobile home(or maybe the main one I am thinking about was premade homes or something of the like… they were all white and the same… but I know there was a nice white trailer right near the rear entrance where we had to use the code to get in… ah, so long ago) community down past the Food Lion, with it’s maze of roads.
I don’t recall if it was during the school year, on school nights, that I went with her, but I know I went often (and then on Sunday dad and Amanda would help out as well, dad with the van to carry the mass of papers we had).
These were happy memories (yes, I finally found some that are really, truly HAPPY memories) with my mum before we hit the turbulences of my teenage/High School experiences and started to rub each other the wrong way.

I remember filling machines for my mum while she waited in the car. I remember being downtown, in front of the local office branch of the newspaper, where there are tracks cutting through the city… and most of the doctor’s offices and little businesses were there (and the ‘Hanging Tree’ or whatever Arcadia called it). I remember how quiet it was, being two or so in the morning. The streetlights made everything glow orange… and when the hushed and chilly breeze came through I loved it.
It felt like the world was mine, and I was one with her.
The night has always been my sanctuary.

I also remember nights laying in the back/trunk area of the Ford Tarsus station wagon and looking up at the stars. I would watch shooting stars from back there (or UFOs, which I am sad to say I never spotted), and listen to the music floating from the rear speakers…
My mum has a good taste in music… I remember her records, my favourites: Black Sabbath, Queen, ELO, Michael Jackson (I loved, loved, Thriller), The Eagles, Styx, Rush, and a double set of Harry Chaplin (Cat’s In The Cradle).
In the car, it’s be the radio usually (or I had a few cassettes). Arcadia was a sad selection really, being that the majority of people preferred country music. This is the place where, in Middle School, your wealth was measured by the number of cattle or horses you owned… and if you were not interested in the Junior Rodeo you were uncool.
I remember listening to Classic Rock or an Alterative mix station (I think they were stations from Tampa). My favourite songs at the time, which were insanely popular on the radio were: Kiss From A Rose: Seal and I’ll Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That): Meatloaf… Those songs are like a soundtrack for those nights out with my mum on the back roads of Arcadia… (as well as other things, like the Batman Forever movie and the music video for Meatloaf… a shitload of visuals come to mind when I hear those songs, they are my history, in a sense).

I can, now that I’ve sat down to think about it, recall a lot about those nights… those empty roads… that feeling of cool air rushing through the windows…

I remember the little gas stations where we (and the other delivery people) waited for the truck. I remember the layout inside and out, the little wooded area around the side and back, behind the dumpster… I remember how it was down the road from the camp grounds, out where there was very little street lighting… and I remember walking under the very tall canopy (I think it was a truck stop as well) over the pumps…
On Sundays we’d meet a truck, just mum and dad and us girls, for our papers, but it would be down in front of the shopping plaza right down from where we lived.

I remember stopping my the mental facility (or I thought it was one, it was right near a military type base as well), I want to say it was called RJ Piece (Woods? What the hell ever it was, I might need to Google this IF I can get online today. It’s been years and I’ve forgotten). I remember we’d drive by a little security station on the road in through the gates, and then my mum would pull into the circle at the front door of the main building, or park at the end of it. I’d be able to run to the bathroom in that building, if I needed to (being that, besides the original gas station where we’d picked up the papers, it would be only thing open really).
I remember the fluoresce lights in the bathroom made my eyes (the iris of them) look white in the mirror. I loved that and always wanted to run in to see them, even if I didn’t need to use the bathroom… Never actually told that to anyone before, save for maybe my sister if she’d gone with me there before (which I think she did, I can see it in my head, but that doesn’t mean it happened).

I remember my mum had to keep track of all the papers put into the vending machines. I remember her capital D’s so clearly (and have adapted them as my cursive D’s as well because I thought they were so damn cool), marking the Doughnut place which had a little machine near the walkway to the front. Sometimes we’d come back and run through the drive-through and get a dozen to take home with us.
(When we drove up to the house, if we had doughnuts, my cat Rambo (short for Rambunctious) would come running out of where ever he’d been off to so that he might get a doughnut… I don’t know why he liked them, or knew when we had them, but none of the others cats liked them as far as I recall.)

I remember off in the dark of the middle of no where there was a wooden bridge we’d cross that was supposedly near a cemetery (which I never saw in the dark). I remember my mum found this bridge to be discomforting to drive on… but my mum was always an anxious driver person.

I remember the community/pool building in the second of the mobile home communities (assuming the first one was as well, it’s so hard to remember)… I also remember how sometimes of the year how suddenly you could see from one end to another, when most of the Snow Birds had gone back up north… The roads would lay mostly bare, save for a handful here and there, and along the back of the park.

I can almost see the main bits of layouts now in whole, in my mind, in the night… and I still see the roads, the little reflectors by people’s driveways and the mailboxes, the trees and how they were spaced between the houses… and I can remember how much of a difference it was to see in the light of day (so much so that I couldn’t really recognise the same road come sun up)…

These are such beautiful memories to me... I wouldn’t mind going back there, in time, and living them again…
I only knew the world by the limits of the headlights and street lamps… the world was so motionless and voluminous… and untainted by other humans…
The nights were so perfect there.