Double Back Flip

This is my first paper I wrote in college. I seriously contemplated revising but I decided against it. So, please, don’t judge my grammar—it makes me cringe, too. I understand it’s long for a blog post but I think it’s worth your time. Please, enjoy:


Unfortunately, there are only two things I remember about my fifth grade teacher: Mrs. Underwood. I only remember two things because it is nearly impossible for any ten-year-old child to pay attention to an old, grey haired woman who has a brown mole the size of a nickel erupting out of the side of her neck like a volcano. I could have sworn that I saw Thomas Jefferson’s face in her mountainous mole one day. Every time she opened her mouth to speak it was as if I were Charlie Brown listening to his math instructor, “Mwah, wah, mwah wah wah.” The tiny black hairs growing from the second face on her neck acted like little arms waving at me to capture my attention. Her massive mole simply prevented my small finite mind from paying any thought to anything she ever said. I think of Mrs. Underwood and the first thing I remember is her mole, but despite its distractive nature, I can recall one thing she shouted at me from across the playground during recess one spring morning:

“Don’t jump out of the swings!”

“There goes all my fun,” I thought. What else was I to do for recess? It was the most anticipated time of the day. Jumping out of the swing was my life. I lived for it. I was the best at it. Not only could I jump higher and farther out of the swings than any other school boy, but I was the only one able to perform the most coveted acrobatic maneuver: the beautiful, magnificent back flip. Once performed, even the social rejects of the school yard could gain instant popularity. Mrs. Underwood and her potentially cancerous ally were determined to make me miserable.

The very next day at recess Mrs. Underwood was nowhere to be found. I looked across the playground to see which teacher was responsible to make sure the young school children didn’t wreak havoc on the playground during recess. It was Mr. Weir! He was the teacher every child dreamed of. He was young, fun and energetic. He had dark curly hair, a pair of thick, black glasses that sat on his long, crooked nose and a jovial smile that had the ability to brighten even the gloomiest of days. He never burdened or troubled his students with that nasty nonsense called homework. He rarely assigned detentions and his class always watched a movie every Friday while I was being force-fed multiplication facts. How I wished that he were my teacher rather than the Wicked Witch of the West: Mrs. Underwood. However, I knew I would be able to get away with any mischievous mischief with Mr. Weir on duty. “Victory,” I thought as my playmates and I ran over to the swings and once again resumed our typical stunts. We referred to ourselves as the Four Amigos; a fearless band of brothers united by the blood and sweat we spilt on the playground. There was Ryan Sterling, the kid with the picture perfect slicked side part; Phillip Gomezthe kid obsessed with Hulk Hogan; Mathew Vateli, the kid with a loud mouth; and me, the kid who could do a back flip out of a swing. I had just completed a beautiful back flip with a flawless landing when Phillip challenged me with an envious tone, “So what if you can do a back flip! Professionals can do two!”

“Two? Professional?” I thought as I was caught off guard. “I’m a professional!” I instantly replied. “You wait and see Phillip. I’ll do two back flips!” The spirit of pride and competition had once again gotten the best of me. Mrs. Underwood and President Jefferson were nowhere to be found to talk sense into my thick skull. I got back into my swing and pumped my ten-year-old legs as hard as I could sending myself higher and higher into the air. “I’ll show him,” I muttered to myself when I felt I was swinging high enough to perform the “professional” flip. By then, everyone on the playground had heard of the dare and had anxiously gathered around to watch as I was about to make the 1992 Hedrick Ranch Elementary School Hall of Fame. I paid no attention to the assembling crowd as I mentally prepared myself for the master trick.
When I had reached maximum height and velocity, I threw my feet over my head and tucked myself into an aerodynamic ball of talent and flew backwards into the air. I carefully watched my surroundings rotate around me when I suddenly and completely forgot how to count. Had I listened to Mrs. Underwood’s math lectures I would have probably realized that one and a half is far from two; especially when it comes to back flips. Two flips puts the performer back onto his feet, on the other hand, one and a half flips puts the performer somewhere on his head or his face. Realizing that my face was headed for a mouthful of sand and a broken nose, I put my hands over my head to break my fall.

The impact of the plunge managed to pulverize my left wrist, fracturing it in seven locations. I scrambled to my feet holding my broken wrist in my right hand. I pushed though the stunned crowd of anxious onlookers and ran past the basketball courts trying to ignore the throbbing pain while I repeatedly told myself, “It’s just a sprain. It’s just a sprain.” I was obviously wrong. Crushed and confused, I found myself lying on a cold concert planter endeavoring to convince myself that I wasn’t badly hurt. My body was beginning to feel cold and clammy as perspiration was dripping from my small, frail body like a leaky faucet. I felt dizzy. Shock was setting in. I looked down at my fractured wrist and knew it was much more than a simple sprain. I needed help. But getting help meant admitting my fault and the possibility of getting another dreadful yellow ticket for my foolish antics. After three yellow tickets, it’s an automatic detention. I couldn’t afford another one; I already had two. I received one because Mrs. Underwood caught me running though the flowers while playing tag with Matthew Vateli, and the other one because I was late to class two days before. California had recently adopted the “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” policy for criminals. One more yellow ticket and I was convinced they would hang me, for sure.

My poor reasoning abilities (which led me to believe I could perform two back flips in the first place) were now degenerating with my state of shock. Now I believed I was a run-a-way fugitive with a broken arm hiding from a yellow slip of paper. The bell rang and the unbearable pain finally defeated me. “I need to go to the nurse,” I thought. “She can patch this all up and Mrs. Underwood will never have to find out.” I mustered up all the courage a broken ten-year-old boy facing final judgment could, and walked, vanquished, to the front office to see the nurse. After what felt like an odyssey through the scorching desert I stumbled into the front office. I was dizzy, ghostly pale, and completely out of strength. I plopped onto the closest chair to catch my breath when I was greeted with the unwelcoming voice of the irritable receptionist.

“Do you have a pass to be here?”

Of course I didn’t have a pass! I was a recess war veteran experiencing post traumatic stress syndrome and she had the audacity to ask me for a pass? The nerve of that woman! I held up my mutilated hand with my swollen, sausage like fingers hoping it would license a hall pass.
“Oh my Goodness! What happened?” she cried as she ran around the front desk and over to the place I was sitting to examine my battle wound. “Mrs. Murdock! Mrs. Murdock!” The nurse came running out of her office and quickly took control of the situation. She picked me up in her arms and placed my broken body carefully onto the bed in her office.

“What happened?” Mrs. Murdock asked as she wrapped my cold, sweaty body in a blanket, treating me for shock.

“I fell,” I pathetically replied trying to avoid the truth.

“I’m going to have your mother take you to your doctor right away. What’s your name sweetie?”
“Blake? Is that you?”

I knew that voice. I heard it a hundred times before but it couldn’t be. I looked up to see who it was. Mrs. Underwood was peeking head into the nurse’s office with a concerned look on her face. She was in the front office taking care of paper work during recess; she was just on her way out when she saw the commotion.

“You were jumping out of the swings again, weren’t you!” she demanded accusingly.

I could hardly speak. I must have had “guilty” written on my forehead in black permanent marker. “No,” I timidly replied hopping she would believe my poor excuse for a lie. “But it wasn’t really a lie. I didn’t jump out of the swings; I flipped,” I rationalized to myself.

“I’ll talk to you later. I need to go to class,” she disappointedly told me as she shook her head leaving the room. Guilt and anxiety troubled my mind—I had disappointed my teacher not only through my disobedience, but I had told a lie in an attempt to escape its consequences. My heart sank as I watched Mrs. Underwood walk out of the building in frustration because my foolishness brought me great pain. “Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind,” Thomas Jefferson observed. There was wisdom in her mole. My body was pained, my mind was troubled and I was certainly not happy.

Academic Life

One reason for my blog is an attempt to merge my academic life into my personal life. I believe literature is equipment for living and essential for our humanity. So, for those interested, and those not, here are the beginnings of a paper I am working on. Mind you, it’s a work in progress and it’s far from finished.

Thirst Knows No Season: Mythic Ideology of Coca-Cola in McCarthy’s The Road

“Wherever you go you will find Coca-Cola to refresh the parched throat, to invigorate the fatigued body, and to quicken the tired brain.” Not even the apocalypse debunks this prophetic advertisement of Coke’s 1905 ad campaign. Coca-Cola, America’s iconic symbol of mass consumption, is as wide reaching as the unknown catastrophe in McCarthy’s latest fiction. In the world of The Road, names carry little consequence: names of colors, birds, and things to eat, have slowly fallen into oblivion. But Coca-Cola makes a triumphal début:

By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola. (22-23)

The man and his son, in what appears to be a commercial pulled straight from Coke’s archives, bond over the drink which momentarily refreshes their parched throats, invigorates their fatigued bodies, and quickens their tired brains.

From its concoction in 1886, Coke has promised its consumers elixir-like qualities; originally brewed as a medication, the beverage was advertized as the “Ideal Brain Tonic” (1897) capable of curing headaches and relieving mental and physical exhaustion. Creating their own mythology, Coke has run one of the most successful ad campaigns in American history. The company has worked to forge an ideology for its customers, one that promotes the product and its consumers as a part of a global family of happy, peaceful, refreshed drinkers. Over the last century-and-a-half, Coke consumers have been told: “The Pause That Brings Friends Together” (1935); “Happy Moment of Hospitality” (1945) and perhaps the most famous, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” (1971). In the stark world of The Road however, the hollowness of these promises are ultimately realized. The mythology the red can of Coke invokes when the man and the boy bond over the soft drink is but 140 empty calories as black and colorless as the world around them. Using Coca-Cola as a general representation of the false realities of consumerism, The Road taps into Coke’s mythic past and juxtaposes it with the novel’s horrific present to seemingly criticize consumer culture as a whole.

My paper will be a significant contribution to McCarthy scholarship because, utilizing Cultural Criticism as a framework for my ideas, it will examine the mythic ideology of Coca-Cola and place it into the context of The Road. Just like McCarthy’s fiction, Coke has its genesis in the South. An understanding of the historical context of the Southern soft drink will inevitably bring new insight into McCarthy’s writing. Coca-Cola plays a vital role in the novel and its presence is worth our scrutiny. After all: it’s the only proper noun in the narrative.

Well, what do you think?

Memory

Eight Months. Too fast. Gone.
But where. Eight months ago I held
My son for the first time. That moment,
Like the past eight months, is only a memory;
Swallowed into oblivion. For the first time
I don't want him older so I can play ball;
I want him little again.

The Road

In McCarthy’s fictional post-apocalyptic world, desperate drifters wander through a “barren, silent, godless” landscape toward inevitable death. The world in The Road is a frightening one: “the frailty of everything revealed at last,” survivors of an unknown catastrophe have banned together in cannibalistic tribes in a violent search for depleted resources. The sky is always grey and color and life are never to be found. In this darkened hostile world, however, lies a hope for redemption. A father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” travel the desolate roads towards the coast where they hope to find a more hospitable environment. What they encounter along the way challenges the core of their beliefs and the heart of their humanity.

And it demands we do the same.

Like much of McCarthy’s fiction, The Road requires its readers to face the harsh realities of life without offering much resolution. Why, then, do I love this novel? The first time I read the book, humanity’s capacity for evil left me frightened, overwhelmed, and horrified—yet it also left me bewildered and intrigued. So much so, I wanted to read more of McCarthy’s work. Coincidently, BYU offered an English course featuring Cormac McCarthy this semester.

I signed up. Evidently, for a ride for my life.

I’ve read the McCarthy cannon and I’ve read article after article of what the scholars have said concerning his work. Frankly, it’s the best literature I’ve come across. Currently, I’m working on a paper about consumerism in The Road that I hope to present at the Cormac McCarthy Conference in Texas in October. But more on that later.

When I had read through The Road a second time, instead of being discouraged by the dark side of human nature, I was inspired by the goodness and beauty of mankind. Thrice I cried. Listen to the tender response this father gives his son:

Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.

When I read this, I couldn’t help but think of my own son. Will I have this same conversation with him when he’s a boy? A frightening, yet beautiful thought. In a world smothered in darkness, there is light. Hope is in the hopeless. Life is in the lifeless. And God is in the godless.

Read the book! Goodness triumphs. "It always has. It will again."