The Alligator and the Paddleboarder

The Alligator and the Paddleboarder

I have an excellent memory. I can prove it too. Think back to your earliest memory. I mean, deep, deep in your mind. It has to be so deep it nearly touches your soul. Because your soul lives in your mind and not in your stomach like most people say. But I know better. I have conversations with my soul every day. They usually go something like this:

Soul, are you there today?

Why, yes, Evelyn I am still here.

Good, that is a relief, because I was afraid I was all alone in here for a minute there.

Nope, not alone. I just get quiet sometimes.

I know what you mean, Sometimes I do too. It’s nice to know you are still there even then.

And it is nice to know you are still there too, Evelyn.

Ok, cool, well, I’ll check in with you a little later, there are a few things I need to do now.

Ok, I will be here when you get done. You might need to give me a little shake to wake me up though.

Are you telling me you want to dance?

Yes, I am. I like to dance, it makes me feel alive.

I will dance with you later then, but for now, enjoy this!:

And I will give myself a little twirl and I can hear my soul cry out: Wheeeee!

So, anyway, have you had enough time to think about your earliest memory? What is it? That goes pretty far back there, doesn’t it? Well, I can do you one better. My very, very first memory is of my hands. They are tiny and I would say white, but white is not really a skin color is it? I mean, who do you know with skin the color of a white Crayola crayon? Yeah, me neither. So, what I really mean to say is that the hands have a light complexion and are a little rosy and A LOT chubby. The fingers are short and clumsy. The fingernails are cut short but a little ragged. There is some sort of stain on my index finger that looks rusty orange. I don’t know how it got there.

My right hand, because my memory is from my own eyes, is reaching for a red wooden ring. It has smooth edges, but you can see the seam that is raised ever so much. I like to run my finger over it because the texture is different from the smooth, painted surface of the rest of the ring. Well, I am taking this ring and trying to slip it over a wooden pole. It isn’t easy. I keep missing. But I also keep trying. Finally, I get the ring on. But then there are four other rings, all different colors and sizes that I need to stack on top of this red ring. It is really imperative that I get this done. It is a truly important task. I pick up the green ring and slide it on. Then the orange, only to discover that the orange ring is bigger than the green ring. That’s not right. I take them both off and try again, orange ring, and then green ring. And that is where my memory ends. I know there are two more rings that need to get on that pole, but my memory doesn’t seem to think that part of the day was all that important. Maybe if I think about it a bit longer I can really remember that entire ring stacking event.

Adults tell me I can’t possibly remember that memory in that way. It is too early they say, probably when I was still just a baby. And no one, no one, can remember things that early, they tell me. I must be imagining a memory and what I think that memory would be like. I must be confusing my imagination with memory. Only, I don’t think so. First of all, I have asked my soul and he/she (my soul is not a girl or boy so doesn’t use either pronoun) says that I am not making it up. He/she was there and remembers it that way too. And I trust my soul more than those adults. What do they know? Were they there? What is their earliest memory? Maybe they need to have more conversations with their souls and they could remember things better, the way I do. Or maybe it is because I am just so much younger than they are and being a baby doesn’t seem that long ago to me. Either way, I know what I know. And I know the difference between my imagination and a memory. An example of imagination is this:

We are at a traffic light. My mom is in a bit of a hurry to get to where we are going. She glances over at me and says, “Make the light stay green, Evelyn.” I smile at her in the rearview mirror. I am in the backseat because the car seat can’t go in the front, my mom says, it isn’t safe. So, I lean as far as I can into the middle of the back seat, my bottom strapped firmly in the car seat, the straps digging into my thighs as I pull. I cup my hands together and whisper a little something to the creature that I have caught there. I tell it to fly as fast as it can to the light and make it stay green, or at the very least, stay yellow a little longer. We have places to be and we can’t get caught behind a red light. And I whisper what a big favor it is doing for us and how I owe it one. I will make us special tea and cookies when we get back home. And I open my cupped hands and I say louder for my mom “Ok, little fairy, fly as fast as you can!” And I giggle in the backseat like I really believe it. Only, I know there is not really a fairy in my hands and I know that the fairy has no bearing on whether the light turns green or yellow or red. But I do it for my mom, because she seems like she needs to pretend.

So, you see, I know the difference between memory and imagination. And if I ever did get confused, which I have not, I could just check in with my soul and ask if I was getting confused or not. So far, my soul agrees that I know what I am talking about and that he/she remembers things the same. So, when I tell you I saw a man paddleboarding on top of a live alligator on the pond the other day, you know I am telling the truth. Only, the adults don’t believe me and tell me that it must be my imagination gone wild. But if it were my imagination I would know because I would know I was just playing pretend. I really did see a man on top of an alligator, just like I really did try really hard to stack those wooden rings just right.

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She means well, I’ll tell y’all now, she doesn’t have a mean streak in her. Sometimes I think her imagination gets the best of her though. One day she came over here and told me she had made cookies and she wanted to share them with me. “Well isn’t that precious!” I remember saying. And she was precious, it seems she had gotten all dressed up in order to present her creation to me; with ribbons in her hair and pretty little patent leather shoes on. She was holding a dinner plate covered in a kitchen towel in her hands. It kept wobbling as she tried to hold it steady. I considered taking it from her to keep it safe but I didn’t want to offend the child so I let it go. In the back of my mind I was already making excuses for her to her mother so the cute little thing wouldn’t get in trouble when it dropped. I inquired what kind of cookies she had made, expecting the standard “sugar” or “chocolate chip,” maybe, just maybe, “oatmeal raisin.” But instead, wouldn’t you know, that girl takes the kitchen towel off with a flourish and cries out “Ta-dah!” I looked down, a big smile on my face, not wanting to disappoint her and there on the plate weren’t any kind of cookies one would recognize. No, they looked like globs of mud! “Go ahead, take one!” she said proudly. And, well, what was I supposed to do? So, I took one, trying to keep the smile on my face from fading. “Go ahead, taste it!” she said, her eyes sparkling. So, like any good adult indulging a child I pretended to take a bite of the so-called cookies and said “Mmmm, so good, you must give me the recipe.” That girl just smiled at me and said “It’s easy, just go in your yard, turn on the hose, get everything good and wet and ball the dirt up in your hands. Anyone can do it,” she added, laughing. And with that, she took a “cookie” from the plate and took a big bite out of it!

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Yeah, I just don’t know about that girl sometimes. I keep telling her that it is bad to fib. No one likes a fibber. And I ask her, do you know the difference between a fib and the truth? And she says, “Sure I do. The truth really happened and a fib didn’t.” Then this girl turns to me and asks me “Do you know the difference between a fib and imagination?” I have to admit I hadn’t ever really thought about it and so my response to her was a little slow. And as I paused she looked at me with eyes that were growing bigger and bigger like she couldn’t believe how little I knew. “A fib,” she continues, “ is when you don’t mean to do right by someone,” and here she seems to pause for dramatic effect, “and imagination is when you are making someone feel better, even sometimes just yourself.” She goes quiet for a moment and I think she is waiting for me to say something and then she says “But it’s all pretend.”

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The day I saw the man on the alligator I didn’t believe it myself. I mean, who ever heard of an alligator in central North Carolina? I heard once they have them down in Charleston and I don’t really know exactly how far away that is but it feels far enough to be far. So, like with anything I am unsure about, I checked in with my soul.

Are you seeing what I am seeing?

Are you seeing an alligator?

It might be a crocodile but I don’t know the difference.

Then we are seeing the same thing.

Do you think that’s strange?

I do.

How did it get here?

How did anything get here? It walked or swam or flew or….

It did NOT fly!

No need to get indignant, I mean, we are looking at an alligator, why get particular about it’s travel habits?

Well, if it flew, where are its wings?

Maybe it borrowed a pair and gave them back.

Don’t josh me now.

I’m not!

Well...maybe it took a plane.

How did it buy the ticket?

I don’t know, maybe there was some sort of sale on tickets from Florida to North Carolina.

Hmmf.

Well, do you have any better ideas?

I guess not.

That’s what I thought.

Do we tell anyone?

Adults don’t take kindly to things out of the ordinary.

True. Maybe we shouldn’t then. I don’t want to get it in trouble.

And I thought that was that. Only, I kept seeing that alligator everywhere. I saw it swimming in the pond, I saw it crossing the road-and I swear it winked at me!-I saw it sunbathing in the neighbor’s pool, I saw it making a bed for itself in the mud. Then, one day I saw a man standing on its back as it swam from one side of the pond to another. The man didn’t seem to have much of a say in where they were heading. He even waved at me when he saw me notice them. The day after that, the man got wise to the alligator’s ways and he got a stand up paddleboard paddle. And he stood on the back of the alligator like the day before but now we could tell the alligator where to go by putting in the paddle on one side of the creature or the other. The alligator didn’t seem to like this situation as much as the day before.

I made the mistake of mentioning it to the adults, even though my soul and I had agreed that it probably wasn’t a good idea. The next door neighbor, the one who wouldn’t eat my cookies, just raised her eyebrows at me and said “Really, now?” like she didn’t believe me. But, her house is directly on the pond. How did she not see it too? I told my grandfather, who lives a couple doors down, and he went on and on again about fibbing. I got rather angry with him and just walked away. Even my mom, who seems keen to believe all sorts of crazy things, asked me if I was sure it wasn’t a dream I had had. But I know what I saw.

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If you ask me, I think the girl may be a little touched. You know what I’m saying? I mean, for heaven’s sake, the things she does. The other day I saw her in the sandbox in her backyard. And I thought to myself, now isn’t that sweet? She had her play tools and sandcastle maker out. The cat was rubbing up against her and she was petting it so gently and nicely. Then, that darned cat walked over to the other side of the sandbox, lifted its tails, squatted on its haunches and proceeded to pee and poop right there next to the girl. What did she do? Did she cry out “ew, gross!” like a normal child? Did she get up to move herself away from the filth? Did she admonish the cat and tell it “no, no”? No! She laughed! Can you believe it! She laughed! And the cat walked back over to her, rubbed up against her, and sat at the edge of the sandbox, watching her. The girl looked back at the cat and it seemed like they were having a silent conversation between the two of them. And the girl laughed again and stood up and went over to the side of the box where the cat had just defecated, hiked up her dress, pulled down her panties, squatted just like that cat did and peed right there in the sandbox too! I mean, really. I can’t even begin to speak of teaching the girl manners when she first needs to be taught to be less feral.

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I have a soft spot for the girl, I will admit it. I have a hard time punishing her. She just has this way about her. Even when she does wrong, it really seems like she is completely innocent. Like she truly didn’t know any better. And she will look at you with these eyes, these big eyes that don’t have questions in them, they have answers. And suddenly you feel like less of an adult and suddenly you are less sure as to whether you are right after all. One afternoon, she was in the kitchen making a lot of noise. When I round the corner to see what she is doing, I see every can in the cupboard on the counter and more than half of them already open, their contents being emptied one by one into a black trash bag. “What on earth!?” I cried and, naturally, I began to try to clean up the counter and put the unopened cans back into the cupboard. “What do you think you are doing!?” I cried out in a voice that was probably much too angry. She turned to me and looked at me like I was the crazy one and said “Feeding the alligator, of course.” I slid one more can into the cupboard and smiled a little to myself. What a fun game, a pretend alligator, I thought. Changing my tone I said to her “And what is your alligator’s name?” She looked at me with her eyebrows furrowed together “How should I know, it is not my alligator, I have never even spoken to it. I was going to make friends with it by bringing it dinner.” I continued to smile “And where does the alligator live?” I asked. “In the pond.” She responded, and emptied another can into the black trash bag. “Well that is a good place for an alligator.” She twisted the trash bag opening up into a knot “Yeah, I know, so does the man who rides it.” I laughed at that “The man who rides it?” “Yeah, there is a man who stands on it like it is a paddleboard and has a paddle to guide it where he wants to go on the pond.” “Well that’s funny.” I said. “It’s not funny,”she pouted, “it’s true, I saw it just the other day.” “Are you sure it wasn’t an inflatable raft? You know they come in all kinds of shapes now, unicorns, flamingos, I bet alligators too.” “I know what I saw” is all she said and began dragging the trash bag towards the back door, wetness from the various canned goods seeping out and creating a gooey trail across the tile floor.

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I don’t know what happened to the paddleboarding man or to the alligator. When I got to the edge of the pond with the alligator’s dinner I didn’t see anything. The pond was more still than I had ever seen before. The sun was starting to set and it turned everything an orangey-red color, even the surface of the water. I sat down in the mud at the edge of the pond and pondered what to do now and what I was going to do with all this food. I undid the twist knot and stuck my hand into the bag to get a handful for myself as a snack. And so, I checked in with my soul.

You don’t think the alligator will mind do you?

No, I don’t think so. But it is kind of gross.

Not really. And I am kind of hungry. And mom says not to waste food.

Well, alright then. But we should go home, it is getting dark.

Wait!

Wait, what?

Out there, do you see it?

See what?

A paddle is floating in the middle of the pond.

Oh, yeah, I do see it.

I bet no one will believe me.