aag

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. You could also get new content delivered directly to your inbox. Thanks for stopping by!

The kids and I stood at the base of Hoover Dam. We craned our necks back to watch the first slim stream slip over the edge. Soon we heard the unmistakable sound of cement cracking.

I picked up the babies, one in each arm. “Grab on to me,” I told the eldest one urgently. The little ones whimpered. The eldest one began melting down, as she is wont to do in situations such as this. “Be quiet!” I demanded of her. “Grab on to me and don’t let go!”

I’d barely gotten the words out when the water broke past the cracks. In the moments since the drama started, I’d hoped that it would rise gently enough that we could hold on, that we could float to the top, that we would not be crushed beneath its weight.

But no. In my overly fertile imagination the water shot free in a drenching torrent that bowled us over instantly. The children were knocked from my arms.

My mind jumped ahead. I sat in my doctor’s office many months later. “I couldn’t hold on to them,” I told her. “I tried, but the water was too strong.”

“No one could have held them,” she assured me. “You did the best you could.”

Then my thoughts stopped hard as I noted the changes in my body. My heart was racing. My hands were clenched in two little balls. I forced myself to breathe deeply, to calm down.

I opened my eyes and flopped over in bed. I thought back…had I taken my medicine? I had indeed taken my medicine.

Then where had this grim fantasy come from, I wondered? How had I gone from relaxing bedtime to visions of death?

I tried to retrace the mental steps. Something had made me think of dams, but what was it? Had I recently read about dams? Was there a show on the television?

I stepped carefully backwards. Hoover Dam … old New York state canal system… Northwest Passage … Panama Canal … southern passage …

Ah, that was it.

As I laid down to sleep my mind still spun on how to write about a certain butt-toy I’d recently tried out. I wanted some other way of describing what I’d done with it other than saying (essentially) “I stuck it up my ass.” Because, you know, that sounds crass.

I cast about for suitable euphemisms. Should I say I put it in my back door? ‘Round back? In the back hallway? In the back passageway? In the southern passageway?

Southern passage…wasn’t the search for a southern passage what eventually lead to the building of the Panama Canal (cut me some slack—I was half asleep)? No, I blearily thought. There was a Northwest Passage but no southern passage.

My mind then flashed on old canals I’d once driven past in Upstate New York. I thought of my woeful lack of understanding about canals, dams and the like. I made a mental note to read up on them. Was it possible, for instance, to have a dam without a lock? Were the two inexorably linked?

How about Hoover Dam? Surely it did not have locks. You couldn’t take a boat past it. Could you? I thought of standing at its base, and my children appeared in the picture, because no one’s going to the grocery store, much less Hoover Dam, without a kid, and then…

There you have it. From anal-play to Death at Boulder Dam in a dozen easy steps.

Sometimes it’s really lonely in my head. I’m glad I have all y’all there to keep me company.