an instant expanded to pleroma

I am getting fuel.

A train horn blares across the street. A fighter jet screams overhead. The traffic from the interstate roars.

It is the choir of industry.

The concrete at this pump is blackened, pocked with baseball-sized voids. A fire in the recent past. I look up and see flashes of a rusted corrugated roof through the gaps between the train cars. Beyond the fuel pump a bright white metal building has been half stripped to its bones by a windstorm some years ago.

The tapestry of labor.

As fuel starts to pump, the pungency of gasoline washes away the acrid smell of burn that clings to the ground and pillars. This dominates my senses until a cloud of odor from a passing cattle hauler wafts over me, flooding away the petroleum haze.

The incense of toil.

I get chills at how familiar it all is. How this particular combination is a blueprint of the place I am from.

It is equally inspiring and debilitating. To know profoundly this combination of things unlocks something in me. To acknowledge it isn’t daffodils and saffron, violins and laughter on the breeze.

All of the sights, sounds and smells appeal to me in a sad way. A boy born by a distorted world.

Of this cacophony of experience, it is the odor of cattle that gives comfort. Perhaps that is its organic source. The one thing closest to what life was supposed to be.

Only in less distilled portions.

I used to hate the smell of cattle trucks. Now, it reminds me of Home. Reminds me of the country. It represents a time of life that was simpler, if not easier. When happiness was easier to find. Or at least Hope was.

It was a time of life when there was the illusion of more potential. More to look forward too. I feel like I’ve reached a place where there is only one hope left.

And I can’t get there except through patience. I can’t force it, I just have to wait.

Older hopes felt like places I could go, people I could see, things I could do—or learn to. But those have all either been done, they are gone, or they are just beyond my grasp.

It feels like now in life that nothing will bring satisfaction. There is no escaping who I have become. My perceived momentum. All I can do is tolerate.

I miss the smell more when i’m someplace busy, like the city and I pass a truck.

A lot of people think it’s gross. It probably is. All that cow poop and dander.

I don’t know—it takes me someplace. A place that doesn’t exist anymore.

And probably never did.

But I wish I could go there anyway.

#childhood #essay #memoir #journal #100DaysToOffload #writing

Discuss...

Little memories eddy in the endless flow of the river of time.

Tales from the Big Blue House

I have a fuzzy memory of my first tricycle. It’s the only memory I have of it, but it comes back every time I see a red tricycle on screen. We watched Captain Ron yesterday and I was transported back fifty years as Martin Short absentmindedly moves a tricycle out of his driveway and into his neighbors yard.

A Radio Flyer Red tricycle. It probably looked like yours—red with white pinstriping, a white seat, and red-and-white tassels fluttering from the handgrips. A gift from my parents, assembled over the course of a few hours by my dad.

In the memory, I’m standing beside our big blue stucco house in the driveway at noon on a spring day. I'm 2 years old. My mother and father proudly encourage me to try the new toy. I excitedly try to pedal but struggle with how much effort it takes. I get my first lesson in physics and the power of leverage.

Likely, had we lived on a typical suburban street, the tricycle would have worked wonderfully on the paved driveway and wide, empty concrete roads. But we lived in an industrial part of town with a dirt road and a gravel driveway. Little-boy me is relegated to pedaling across the lawn or along the dirt road.

It works well enough on the large porch we have, but I grow tired of small circles quickly. I was the kind of child who would wander off into the surrounding streets as soon as I was ambulatory.

There are a few stories of strangers discovering me loose in the wild and figuring out where I lived based solely on how little human settlement there was in the area. The most famous of those stories is the man who returned me after seeing me sweeping the median on the state highway about four blocks from home wearing nothing but a pair of shorts.

Perhaps I have the soul of a gypsy—or a hippie, ditching my clothes was another of my early habits.

But having wheels, I had nowhere to roam.

Not to be deterred, I quickly figured out that the step between the rear wheels was there so you could simply stand behind the three-wheeler and push— not unlike how scooters work. It went from tame to exciting. Especially if I could con my little sisters into sitting on the seat while I pushed them.

Skinned knees and elbows were a given, along with the occasional embedded pebble—and most definitely grass stains.

It was my first wheeled conveyance. White spokes and a chrome fender on the front wheel.


I don’t think I’ve ever owned anything quite as sweet.

Its fate, like that of all children's toys, was to eventually be forgotten. It likely went as hand-me-down to my younger sisters who would eventually forget it as well. At some point, it ended up cluttering the yard, the once bright white spokes spotted with rust and the formerly handsome tassels long-since broken and faded.

In time, it was harvested and repurposed as a welder dolly. Arc welders are just metal boxes with a hundred pounds of copper wire wound in them to charge and discharge high voltage to be wielded in the merging of metals. A simple tool, but very difficult to move with ease. My engineer-minded father devised a small cart from the remade tricycle. Its only visible trace of childhood was the pair of rust-tinged white spoked wheels.

The welder was an anniversary gift from my mother. An odd one, but practical. I can recall the red case and Lincoln logo with a large ribbon around it and a big blue bow sitting on the table. In hindsight, I wonder how she managed to hoist that up there.

My father still has that welder, I saw it last week. The wheels have long since gone the way of the rest of the trike, only a memory. Like so much else in life. Things and moments intended not to last—but to build us. Time repurposes us—not discards, but reshapes. We don’t become tools, exactly. We become something finer: expressions of what we’ve weathered. Not playthings turned practical, but potential turned to art, to beauty.

One day, my own son or daughter will have their first tricycle. I hope it carries them not just across lawns and porches—but into a memory they'll return to decades later. One even sweeter than mine.

#childhood #essay #memoir #journal #osxs #100DaysToOffload #writing