Read Online My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers - Free Book Online Page A

even though we used it for bottle collections, it always lurched around when we pulled it along the road.
    Robbie was almost a year and a half older than me, so he started riding a bike first. It took him a while to build up his courage to tackle Billy Goat Hill on two wheels, but he was ecstatic when he finally did it. He was changed after that. He seemed older, wiser, taller … well maybe not taller, but certainly more sure of himself. It was a rite of passage for boys in this little town, and Robbie joined the ranks of those who lived to tell. After this initial victory Robbie looked for bigger challenges. He climbed up the water tower a few blocks from our house. It was huge! He had the first skateboard in town; he made it himself out of a pair of old skates. He learned to water ski on one ski, then he mastered shoe skis. Before long he could ski barefoot. But he’d always walked on water as far as I was concerned.
    The high school stadium was just a few blocks behind our house, and my brothers and I had grown up in the shadows of those outdoor bleachers. We could see the lights of the football games from our backyard and hear the beat of the drums and the sound of the band practicing almost every day. We would pedal our bicycles there on Saturday mornings, then crawl through the underbrush to find the hole under the fence to get onto the football field. Once inside we could pick through whatever had fallen out of people’s pockets when they stood up to cheer the Bulldogs. If we were hungry we’d eat from bags of stale popcorn while we were scavenging.

     
    One of the only drawbacks of living right on the highway was that it was too hard to keep our dogs safe. My first dog was named Tippy, a sweet collie who was already part of the family when I was born. She managed to stay out of the road and lived a long and happy life. My brothers and I loved animals, and there were always shoe boxes, jars, and bowls around the house filled with frogs, lizards, goldfish, and tadpoles that Robbie was always bringing home. We even had pet bees that would walk all over our arms. But I preferred the june bugs that we kept in cigar boxes and played with like toy cars. For extra entertainment, we’d tie a string to their legs and let them fly around in little circles.
    For a while we had a pet crow that flew into our backyard one day and started to talk. My brothers were tossing around a football when the bird landed on the clothesline and squawked, “Play ball!” It was straight out of a Disney movie. We fed it, and the bird just hung around. When word spread that we had a talking crow, we got a call from Carson Seago, a warden with the fish and game department who lived down the street.
    “Eddie, I hear you’ve got a tame crow living in your yard,” said the warden.
    “That’s right, Carson,” said Daddy.
    “Well you can keep it,” he said. It turned out that his sons Don and David had trained the bird to talk, but now they had gone off to college. “Our kids have grown up,” said Carson. “Let yours enjoy the crow.” We did keep it for a while, until one day it just took off again.
    Along with the dump, the courthouse square was a great place to find pets. Every Saturday morning, people would park their trucks in the shade of the big old sycamore trees and hold an informal swap meet right in the parking lot. One Saturday morning we noticed some commotion around a pickup truck. A farmer had caught a full-grown alligator out at Lake Lydia and wanted to show it off. The man had taken its nest, too, so there were a bunch of eggs in the truck bed that were starting to hatch. Robbie and I, who were about ten and nine years old, hoisted ourselves up onto the side of the pickup and watched, drop-jawed, as the tiny heads poked out into the sunlight. The man was letting people take the hatchlings, and of course Robbie just had to have a baby alligator. He rode his bike home with one stuffed inside of his shirt and named it