So Not Cool

The most embarrassing thing my mother ever did to me was drive around with a fifty pound sack of chicken feed in her car.

My parents had chickens. Whose idea it was to get them in the first place, I don’t know. What I do know is that while my father liked having the fresh eggs and the occasional fresh fried chicken, those were not his chickens. The chickens belonged to my mother. Because they were considered hers, and not his, she had to feed them. And buy the food.

I’m not sure what happened. I suspect my mother said something to my father is a nagging tone of voice and then he probably said something along the lines of “Tote your own goddamn bag of chicken feed.” But at any rate, Dad would not carry the sack to the chicken pen and my mother would not do it because she knew it was a fifty pound sack. Whether or not she could actually lift the sack was completely irreverent. She knew it weighed 50lbs, therefore it was heavy, and she was NOT picking it up.

I think it was my aunt who gave Mom the brilliant idea of keeping the chicken feed in the car. So my mom would go to the feed store and the old retarded boy would carry it out for her and set it in the back in the floor. My mother would then go to the car every single morning and scoop out chicken feed with an old enamel pot and walk up to the pen to feed the chickens. I believe this has traumatized more than anything else in my life.

You must understand first that it was not just the chicken feed. It was also the car. My mother’s car once belonged to my grandmother. It was a Ford Fairmont and even when it was new it just screamed “granny car.” The car was pale gray, so it looked faded even though it wasn’t. The inside was maroon. And vinyl. The ac died so nearly all the windows would be rolled down. Through no fault of her own, my mother had been a car wreck. She was rear-ended by a truck which hit with enough force to knock her car into the one in front of her.

My father, being cheap, decided he could do the body work himself. The trunk was crumpled in the accident and he painstakingly smoothed it out and primed it. But the only primer he had was red. Of course he wasn’t going to buy primer when he already had some at the house.
The trunk latch was broken, so my father tied it shut with hay rope. For some reason, he tied it so that the rope stretched across the outside of the trunk. No one could figure out how to retie his rope after they opened the trunk, so the trunk was no longer used. No repairs were made to the front bumper.

So there we were, creeping down the highway with our legs sticking to the seat and little bits of chicken feed flying out of the windows and pelting the windshields of any unlucky enough to travel behind us. With our primer red unusable trunk and askew bumper, there was no point in hiding behind the seats. The car was too recognizable and even if I wasn’t seen in it, everybody was laughing at my mom, and thus at me.

But it was more than a blow to my image. It was that we looked so white trash. We had the money to take care of things, we just didn’t bother. We looked lazy and cheap. The chicken feed meant that my mother was stubborn and my father was inconsiderate. It meant my parents had a bad marriage and I was terrified that one day they would divorce.

Once, full of teenage practicality, I decided to do something about that damn chicken feed. I picked it up, (proving my strength- no wimpy girlie-girl here) carried the feed sack into the house, and asked my mother where she wanted it.

She got mad with me.

Didn’t I understand that it was convenient to store chicken feed in the car? She never had to pick it up. Whenever it was empty, she simply stopped at the garbage dump and tossed it out before proceeding to the feed store. If she left it outside it would get wet. If she put it in the shed the rats would get it. If she got a storage container then somebody would have to pick up a fifty pound feed sack and pour it into the container. She told me I was very inconsiderate and hardheaded and I was making a big deal out of nothing. Since then I have tried very hard not to interfere with my mother’s business.

Of course, my father embarrassed me, too. But that is another post.