I Tripped.

Toys R Us is a nightmare any time of year.

(On the journey back to getting into writing about my abusive home life, heres another nice detour:p lol)

I used to be a vendor for American greetings a million years ago and Toys R Us was a place we had to service for cards. I dreaded that place but the people were great there.

The first day I was there being trained I was with 2 women who were training me and some associate had left a bike ramp right in the walkway which I DIDN'T SEE.

 I tripped over it, fell down, hit my head,. passed out, and convulsed (Which I've never done)

Next thing I know I wake up and all the employees are standing there staring at me, there’s some ambulance guy standing by me asking me questions trying to keep my attention on him. I turned my head just in time to see another guy coming at me with a needle. I said

"PLEASE! TAKE MY BLOOD! I want my boss to know I'm not a drug addict!”

Next thing I knew, they brought a gurney.  

I was paraded through the store, customers and employees alike staring at the half conscious moron who had tripped and knocked herself out.:p ( Hey…I blame the bike ramp:p)  

They brought me to the hospital, attached these electrodes to my head to monitor my brain, and I met the big boss of the area in the emergency room in a dressing gown. NICE. Ya  gotta wonder what was going through his head. Insane woman? Scammer? Brain damaged moron…I mean, there WERE wires all over my head.

As I’m meeting with him, trying to keep my backside covered some other woman partitioned off on the other side of the room started screaming in this guttural hysterical voice "I WANT AN ENIMA! GIVE ME A ENIMA NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!  Later she was screaming that she wanted her cigarettes, I'm thinking they must have sedated her later so she was finally quiet. My boss must have been thinking uh…”all in a days work”? (I worked with them for another 2 years, so guess I wasn’t crazy after all…Or was I?;p)

I wrote a silly song about it. I’ve sung it with my guitar at open mics just for a laugh…(Not one of my better songs, but it got a laugh out of it) Some of you on facebook who know me from my old open mic days might remember it. One time I even forgot some of the words and I kept repeating “because I tripped” until the crowd joined in and it was one of the most memorable open mics I ever went to, I was laughing so hard.

As I went off to my new job I was feeling pretty hip.

Going to my new job which would teach me not to trip.

I learned about the business, it all was going well.

Little did I know that it would all soon go to hell.

Because I tripped. I tripped.

Went into the toys r us and fell there on my hip.

I could kill the damn associate if I only had the will. Something long thin in the isle I knew then when I tripped.

As I fell I heard the women scream, no one could break my fall.

The anguish the embarrassment, the craziness of it all.

The women tried to help my there I tried hard to get up. But everything went black at once because I'm such a klutz

because I tripped, I tripped.

Paramedics asked If I'm on drugs I told them what the %$^& ??

Because I tripped, I tripped.

So now I'm in the hospital they monitor my brain, they ask me lots of questions

taking blood from every vein

because I tripped. I tripped.

I'm wondering if they just think that I'm really insane. The first day at my new job they should really check my brain.

Because I tripped.

Well, hey…at least I got a song out of it.

IIIII AM A CHILD OOOOOF GOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!

That last blog brought back a memory that makes me giggle.

Just to give you some history…I lived in a small town in Idaho, it’s at sea level, and has completely different weather than the rest of Idaho. There was another town half an hour away, and you had to go up this GIANT hill to get there, driving carefully (Especially during winter, it was quite a curve AND up a gigantic hill, then back down a VERY big descent to get back home.) The weather at the top is quite different from the weather at the bottom. It would be raining down below, and then up above  at the top of this giant hill, it would be snowing. I was glad to be living at the bottom of the hill in the valley. I LOVED the weather. It would get up to 110 for at least a week in the summer, and you hardly EVER saw any snow. I grew all kinds of vegetables, the best tomatoes I ever had on half an acre. My daughter Whitney used to read her children’s books under the cornstalks.

We even grew pumpkins. PERFECT weather for crops.

Washington, I’m afraid, just doesn’t have the weather that Idaho does and I just can’t grow tomatoes like I did there.

And yet I would never go back.

Idaho, when the paper mill REALLY got going in the summer was TORTURE.  

It’s a shame that town has a paper mill. When that thing blew off smoke, it smelled like cooked cabbage, or dog poop, depending on who you talked to.:p

People told me that it was better than years past.

One woman who used to work at the plant there told me that no matter what shoes you wore, as you walked across the room at the plant, your shoes would actually stick to the floor and start to melt as you walked across it. The houses in that town would get covered in sticky, black goo years back. I can’t imagine that could be good for anyone. One person told me that that town had the highest Asthma rate in the country. I never checked on that so I don’t know if it’s true or not, but my husband and I both ended up with Asthma after living there so that’s saying something.

Anyway, every once in a when  you would be minding your own business in the summertime, white stuff would start drifting on by, like it had somewhere to go. It DIDN’T have anywhere to go, so we were stuck  with it getting all over our yards, our trees, the roads, and if you were unlucky to be out in it, your hair, skin, clothes, or anywhere else it decided to go. (WOO WOO!) There was a “Pond” where the stuff would come up and just float away , cover the roads, the town and everything in between. We used to call it P________ snow… fill in the blanks…I can’t, I don’t want to get in trouble for naming the plant.:p

We lived there a long time, and went to a church with some really good people. I worked with the teenagers a lot. I loved how they weren’t “cliquish”. They would stand in a giant circle and everyone was included. My class was no different. I loved it. Years later that changed. It’s amazing how one or two people can change everything and make life better for people, or worse. Teens need acceptance worse than anyone does so it’s a shame when the adults add to the problem.

The really young kids were a precocious bunch. They made me giggle all the time.

Our church would have periodic times in church where the kids would be singing for the main meeting.

They would have memorized parts that they would go up to the mic and say what they memorized.

 As they sang their songs and did their parts everything was going as planned. Then one especially precocious little guy got up, wiggled  around and swung his arms back and forth saying into the mic  at the podium“IIIIII am a CHIIIIILDD  OOOF God”. The next kid got up, not to be outdone saying a little louder “I AM A CHILD OF GOD”. The next ten kids or so got up, getting louder and louder, until the last kid got up, (By then it had been worked up into a fever pitch and was sooooo loud that if anyone would have gotten in the way it would have been like being in the path of the tornado.) the last kid SCREAMED ‘IIIIIIIIII AMMMMMM  AAAAA CHIIIILD OFFF GOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!! “  Their  teacher, thoroughly embarrassed and bright red (Though the rest of us were laughing SO hard that tears were coming to our eyes) somehow got the screaming, jumping,  kids to actually sit down and suddenly,  it was over.

Amen:P

Can't you just SAY it?? ? Singing Disaster

Its amazing what embarrassments parents can bring on a child.

As a teenager, singing was what I loved to do, and I felt that I was pretty good at it. When everything else was falling apart around me, no matter what happened, no matter how many times my sisters would make fun of me singing, (I almost quit singing because of the enormous amount of teasing my sisters did, making fun of my voice.  To my mother’s credit, she encouraged me there when no one else did; so I sang, despite my sisters teasing.) I felt good when I was singing, even when everything else was hard, and life seemed unfair, I could sing. I remember singing Billy Joel’s “My Life” over and over whenever I got punished and I was grounded to my room, or after I got beaten up. They might take what little freedom I had, but they couldn’t take my VOICE!

  I would sing in church frequently, not much as a teenager, but a lot as a young adult.                    

 When I would perform in front of people I would always pray before that and say, “Ok God, do whatever you want with my voice, take it and make it the way YOU want it to be- not the way I want it to be”, that way I wouldn’t be afraid and I knew my voice would be ok, no matter what my voice did it felt like that whatever happened, it was supposed to be that way.. It kinda took the pressure off of me, and gave it to the ultimate do gooder, if you know what I mean.

One year I had decided to do a song that had a speaking part in it, one for a woman, and one for a man. One was a woman talking about an experience with Christ; the other was of a “blind” man who had been healed by Christ.

I thought since my parents were right there, that I would ask them to do that part . ( I wasn’t living at home anymore, but went home when my dad wasn’t there to do laundry)  so I asked my mom if she would do the woman’s  part, and if she would ask my dad if he could do the man’s part.

I went through the song over and over, getting it ready. It’s a beautiful, peaceful song, talking about all the miracles that Jesus did.

The day came to sing the song in Church and I said the prayer I always did, asking him to take my voice and do with it what he wanted to do with it. And I felt calm. I got up and started singing.

My mom got up for her part, she did fine.

Then my dad got up by the podium. He didn’t stand at the microphone, like I had asked him to.

He stood way off to the side of me. He literally SCREAMED at the audience  “I WAS BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE!” AND WITH MORE THAN JUST MY EYES…I THANK GOD HE CAME!!!!!!”

He might as well of  just punched the front row parishioners right in the face the way they were leaning WAAAAY back in their seats looking like they’d just been assaulted.:p

 I was SO embarrassed.

And THAT was the last time I ever asked for his help with a song.