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It's 9AM

How do you make better choices?

Chris Lowry

May 13, 2025

Transcript

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I took my daughter to Pine Bluff, the city where I spent most of my childhood.

We rolled into the Bluff when I was four, or the verge of the Bluff since my 23-year-old mother was trying to skirt past the city on our way to California.

But her old car broke down and the only people she knew in Arkansas was my dad's mother and step-father, Mamaw and Papaw.

She called Papaw and told him we were stranded on the side of the road. He drove out to pick us up, piled us into the back of a giant Buick and dropped us off in the front half of a duplex he owned, a place I remember as home for most of the first decade of my life.

My mom always talked about California like it was some sort of golden land of opportunity, but I wondered why Arkansas wasn't also?

After all the plates on the cars called the state the land of opportunity.

The duplex was tiny, two bedrooms, one bath.

It didn't have air conditioning for the first couple of years, then Papaw put in a window unit.

There was an old Formica table in the kitchen, a giant oversized space heater in the living area and two tiny bedrooms that maybe measured 10 x 10.

My brother and I shared one bedroom in the back while my Mom had the front bedroom.

I remember on Saturday mornings we would get up to watch cartoons and eat cereal, and at 10:00 when Soul Train or American Bandstand came on, my Mom would escort us out either the front or side door, lock the screen and we were on our own until dark.

In winter we wore coats and sometimes tube socks as gloves, in summer we wore shorts and little else.

We played with the neighbors who had two little girls, one my age, and one a year younger than my brother.

We climbed trees and rode bikes and played in a shed that her father had bought as a playhouse for her.

She was my first kiss, my first love and first heartbreak when she started liking someone else in second grade.

The house was only two blocks from my grandparents, so their home became like ours and is a central part of my memories growing up.

My mom, always in search of something, moved us away almost every other year.

We tried Birmingham, and Atlanta, and Warren AR, always spending a school year in someplace new and then coming back to Pine Bluff.

Maybe there were better opportunities in those places

Maybe she fought with my Papaw on how to raise the boys

It was tough for an uneducated single mother going through a string of men in the seventies, each with some weird peccadillo.

They were all drug users.

My mom was an alcoholic and cigarette addict who smoked at least two marijuana joints a day.

The kinds of people she brought through the door on a consistent basis define the words white trash.

That's the basis of my opinion about Marijuana.

If it's so good, why do so many losers use it?

I associate the drug use with it.

Some of her boyfriends beat us, some tried to molest us, some ignored us and tried to get her to pawn us off onto my grandparents.

And my mom, so young and desperate to be loved, uneducated and mostly scared, opened her heart and our doors to a lot of people.

She couldn't qualify for a job that paid much.

She had a high school degree but consigned herself to secretarial and office work and didn't try to improve her lot in life.

She worked as a bartender, for awhile, while my brother and I were watched by a black family, who called us their other kids.

Their daughter was my second crush.

She was a teen, on the younger side of it, and liked to cuddle on the couch and tell me I was cute.

The bartender job paid cash, which allowed her to get out from the duplex, and we moved into a trailer on the south side of town.

She had a velvet painting of a Senorita on one wall, whose eyes watched you as you walked across the room.

One Saturday, I was left to watch my brother.

I couldn't have been four or five, and he two or three.

He was hungry.

So I poured the last of the cereal into a bowl, but we didn't have milk.

I used water on the Frosted Flakes and we shared the bowl.

After an hour or so, he was hungry again.

All we had were eggs.

I carefully cracked two into a bowl and whisked them with a fork.

I got the pan out of the cabinet and put it on the stove.

Then I needed to light the burner.

I wasn't allowed to use matches, so I rolled up a piece of paper, just as I had seen her do, and lit the paper.

I turned the front burner on and moved the paper to it and it lit with a whoosh. Flame spread up the paper and singed my finger.

I dropped the paper onto the linoleum floor and it caught fire.

The plastic linoleum burned fast. Like it was made from solidified gasoline.

I jumped off the chair I had been using as a stool and got water from the sink.

I poured it on the floor and put out the fire, but now there was a big patch of ruined linoleum.

We avoided disaster, but I knew I was going to get a spanking when

Mom got home from wherever she was.

And my brother was still hungry.

So I scrambled the eggs and fed him.

I cleaned up the water off the floor,

And when Mom got home I got my ass beat.

I know now it was because she was afraid of what might have happened.

Perhaps she was even mad that she had been at work, or out with friends while we were home with so little.

I can't even say she tried.

Maybe in kindness I could say she tried her best.

But food was never a priority in the house.

The shopping list ran cigarettes, beer, weed, bills, then food.

In that order.

I see it in others when I go to the storie.

It must be a white trash or poor people mentality.

Beer, cigarettes and whatever is left use for life.

It doesn't make sense to me.

My father was the same way.

We moved back into the duplex shortly after the fire incident. As an adult I realize that the proximity to my grandparents allowed them to check on us when we were left alone.

That proximity was also the reason my mom constantly ran away.

Papaw didn't approve of her lifestyle or choices and was constantly trying to help her, with conditions.

And like I said, Mom was not very good at making good choices.

But I try.

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