NEEDLING

“Did you catch anything?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s ok.”
“Yeah… I guess.”
“Next time,” she said. “And what about Mr. Sams?”
“He didn’t catch nothing either.”
“So you see, it must have been there wasn’t any fish in the water.”
“I guess.”
“You’ll go again soon.”
“But I never catch anything… it don’t matter where it is or if there is any fish in the water.”
“Now, why would you say that?”
“Because I know.”
“You know, uh?”
“Yes.”

Mr. Sams was this old West Texan who was the father of the maid who worked at the motel where I lived as a kid. She lived about fifteen minutes away on a bicycle, if you weren’t in too much of a hurry and you rode by the clinic then you kept going through that dirt alley with all the flowers - bushes and bushes of gardenias - but you couldn’t be in too much of a hurry. She had a house and a garden and she grew vegetables in the garden. They were poor people and there was lots of junk in the garden but I liked it because they had a garden and we didn’t. We had a parking lot and a swimming pool that would get clogged several times a year. When it unclogged, it would empty in the tool shed / tornado shelter underneath the parking lot. Somehow, we never figured out that plumbing problem. Finally, one year, my dad got the bright idea to fill the hole at the bottom of the pool with silicon rubber. That fixed the shelter / tornado shelter overflow problem, but the water couldn’t be filtered – cleaned – anymore and over the next few years, it became a cesspool of tadpoles, frogs, and other small aquatic creatures.

Also, the maid had lots of cats and white squash in her vegetable garden. I’d never seen white squash before we moved to West Texas. My mother sent her my underwear to sow up the holes. I hated the hole in the front of my boxers and I refused to wear regular underwear so my mother bought me boxers and got the holes sowed up. I would ride my bike to go pick up my sowed up boxers and sometimes the maid would give me some white squash to take back to my mom, who didn't know what to do whith them.

(Paris, France, 1998)