007 - The Taste of Soap (1 - Brentwood)

The Last Apricot Tree Under the Mountain

I must have liked the taste of Dial soap. Yellow Dial. They still sell it. I still use it. For showering, not snacking.

We lived in the fairly new two-street neighborhood of Pippo and Sherwood Avenue. “Housing development” was too generous a description as you could ride your bicycle through the whole thing in five minutes or so. Bigger developments and strip malls have now replaced the walnut orchards, lettuce fields and open spaces that surrounded our haven. It was a great place to earn my first mouth full of punishment, because there were a ton of kids there who fired my taste for shenanigans and the stories and fables that sprang forth from their inspiration.

One late summer evening around the age of eight, I was racing home past my appointed curfew: the moment each evening when the street lights flickered to life. The supervision during the day was light, but you needed to be home before dark. It is true that I was blessed to have a lot of babysitters who ended up being in my life, my whole life. They are the only ones that get to call me Jeffy. But they were not above spilling the beans to my folks in order to keep me on the straight and narrow. This particular night, when Roxy Geddes asked me where I was, I dutifully reported, blurting out the first thing that popped into my head:

“My friend and I were playing bow-and-arrows and his mom was shot right through the eyeball, and we weren’t sure who shot her because the arrows were flying all around. It was so sad.”

I still see Roxy all the time. I love her. She loves me. So I guess I forgave her when she wasted no time ratting me out to my parents, as I would forgive her again when she tattled after spying on me in middle school. A story for another time.

This time got my mouth washed out with soap. There is a weird moment when the dry bar is going in your mouth but hasn't touched your tongue yet. Then your own spit starts to melt the bar and the flavor hits you. Nothing that biting or bitter had been in there before. Then Dad ensured a forced tooth scrape on the way out. Is there a class that teaches this parenting skill? Or was he an expert by instinct? It was impossible to contemplate that he had been eight once and had earned his knowledge through experience.

The yellow sticky globs were hard to get out of my molars. The consequences were so effective that I didn’t lie again for several months. That is until the great field fire fiasco at the corner of Balfour and Walnut. A couple of then young pine trees are all that remains of what we considered our private twenty acres of free range adventure land. The sentinels still tower over the shopping center nearly fifty-five years later. I’d like to blame my friend for what happened. He had recently lost his mom to a deadly arrow attack after all. But that would be another, well, you know.

We found ourselves with some matches that I had accidentally found high up on the shelf that you can only reach with a ladder in the garage. There was a hole under the pine trees. There was a lot of dry grass. There was a war dance and some singing. And then, through no fault of our own, the fire got out of the hole. I am telling you and anyone that will listen that it was under control. Luckily, some older boys from across the street saw the spreading fire and hustled over to help put it out. We tried to get away but no amount of crying and begging did the trick. The boys dragged us and our bicycles all the way home.

I should have either kept my mouth shut or told the truth. I guess I wanted the soap, because I made up some hoboes, a campfire and some heroes that looked like me and my friend. I must have had really deep molars. Sometimes I can still taste the soap back there.

Editorial and Advance Reader Contributors: Mark Wallace, Alisha Price, Heather Bergevin of Barrow Editing, Mette Ivie, Bonnie Wach, Francoise Boden, Mark Berg, Mike Hammer and Kathy Toelkes. Special thanks to Bill Davis for a kick in the pants that only a friend from your old stomping grounds can give you. Mt. Diablo and Apricot Tree painting by the talented and local artist, Greg Hart.