Day 17: Bookends

The summer after sixth grade, my parents drove me up to Natchitoches, Louisiana to drop me off at a one-week gifted camp. Natchitoches, also known as the City of Lights, is not known for much else. It has a small college called Northwestern State (not to be confused, mind you, with the Northwestern University) and Louisiana's School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a boarding school of sorts. Outside of their joint campus, but before you meet the seeming vastness of Walmarts and strip malls that overtake the town, there is a quaint little downtown area. There, in a small brick-front store, I found this set of matching Noah's Ark bookends. To be honest, I have a hard time remembering why I thought I needed to buy them in the first place, much less for the thirty dollars the price tag on the box states I spent on them (a lot when you're eleven and your only income source is washing dishes or sheets, or worse, venturing out into the shed at night to feed the dog, where you know you saw a rat run along one of the shelves). The bookends are cute, I suppose, but more the kind of thing a woman buys when she's pregnant with her first child, before she realizes that babies really only care about things they can eat or play with. It's harder still for me to understand why I held on to them for as long as I have. Sixth grade was a long time ago, and they have no particular sentimental attachment. The time I spent in Natchitoches that summer was fun, but I really only remember designing a basketball gym and a golf course. Oh, and that I was one of only two girls in the basketball group (please, did you really think I'd be part of the sorority that was the swimming pool group?) and that our golf course included little golfers with names like "Leopard Forest." Oh, and I remember listening to my roommate sing opera, which now seems like a weird thing for an eleven year old to do. I remember her being pretty well-endowed, too (to my non-existent chest), and that she would tie up a towel between the bed and desk to change behind. I think she was from Alexandria. I remember a boy asking me to dance with him the final night. He was really cute and nice and listened to the same kind of music I did. He tried to drag me out onto the dance floor, but I refused, instead clinging desperately to the chair I was sitting in. No lie, that chair made it halfway onto the dance floor before he gave up. And to top it all off, I woke up the next morning with a crick in my neck after head-banging with friends at said dance. Serves me right. Poor boy.

I guess there are a few memories hidden in these old bookends yet. May they grace the home of a new mother-to-be, or the room of some other strange pre-teen who has no idea how to relate to the male species or, for that matter, how to properly head-bang.