Time Traveler’s Haibun: 1989

In the grassy space between the wings of the elementary school and the trailers housing the fifth grade’s overflow classrooms, girls flip their hair in imitation of Cindy Crawford, sing Iko Iko. None of you know what it means or where the song comes from.

It’s honor-roll season, a time of outings to TCBY and Outback Steakhouse. Your mother warns you against filling up on bread, but it’s hard to resist the little brown loaves brought warm to the table with soft butter – a luxury that cannot be imagined at home, with its always-refrigerated margarine and Pepperidge Farm sandwich loaves.

Everyone knows what’s popular but nobody knows how to act. At ten, you lack any context. The world swims before you, and it constantly stings. Its favorite barb: “everybody knows that.”

Beyond the grassy space of girls is more grass, a quarter-mile loop of track, a church with a painfully white spire, a fence, and a neighborhood maybe a little less nice than yours, crammed between the school and busy Great Neck Road. The fence is of chain link, instead of wooden slats. That’s how you know about the niceness – that and the something hard, like a grain of sand, you feel in your mother’s voice, when she takes you to the school’s Spring Fling, where you win another goldfish. They always die, but you’re getting better. Now, it takes a while.

Loblollies shiver
In May heat. The world’s ending.
The world’s a mirage.