In my mind.
When I was in third grade we moved to Kearns, Utah.
I saw my first music video here: Kris Kross "Jump"
I told a boy I couldn't be his girlfriend, at the time a heartache of horrifying magnitudes but looking back a good call as his school box was full of condoms. (You will remember the third grade part... crazy kids.)
In class, we worked out with Richard Simmons. A very distinct memory.
Cannibals lived under our house.
I don't remember the details of what our house looked like, but it was a small, one floor, and white wood-paneled-paint-chipped home. Around back there was a hatch door that opened to the basement. It could have been brand new, but I remember it as a warped board with a latch that couldn't be trusted. It opened to a few cement steps that led to a short basement of dirt. To this day I have NO idea if my parents went or kept anything down there. All in all my house would have been the perfect location for a film about a middle class family that gets eaten by their neighbors or some homeless cannibals that hide in their basement and eat them in the middle of the night.
Completely normal.
Face Palm.
Maybe my mother was correct in her requests that my father stop letting us watch scary movies?
Too late now.
This wasn't just in our minds though!
My sisters and I were out to prove our case.
"The Case of the Cannibals!"
On second thought maybe it wasn't the scary movies, maybe it was just the millions Nancy Drew books we read.
We had a plan.
It was completely solid.
The plan surrounded life savers. We would throw life savers into the open hatch. If they were gone the next day, it was proof that there were Cannibals. Makes sense. Too much sense. Like I said-- solid plan.
So we did. For a week, we threw life savers into the basement. We could see them in the dirt. Circles of lemon, orange, lime and no... not cherry... we ate those ones. Please... we weren't stupid.
The result....
Every day... the life savers were gone! This KILLED us. We were tiny nervous wrecks walking around as if at any moment the Cannibals would emerge donning aprons and knives ready to chew our bones.
We weren't in that house long, but we were very aware that we made it out alive and that we must have been preserved for some glorious purpose. I blame a huge part of my self-confidence on those months in Kearns and 'surviving the Cannibals.'
I have a purpose in life, I must... because the Cannibals didn't eat me.
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