Why did you pick that one?

2004-07-23 02:16 PM CST

"What was that? Something blew up!"

(She) No, I saw a flash! It looked like it was in the back yard. Maybe it was the transformer.

I get up, still groggy. Open the bedroom door, and Jesse's in the hallway by his room.

We go outside. The dance studio business behind our house is dark, and normally there's a mercury vapor light on. Looks like the one of my palm trees must have gotten into the transformer. (Big surprise.)

Over the course of being awakened and the fact that Jacque was somewhat panicked about it, I'm no longer groggy. Instead, my heart is beating hard and slightly fast.

At 1:30, it's still beating the same way. I'm not sleeping. My mind is doing it's weird "take a trip down memory lane" thing.

My heart doesn't want to slow down. I'm guessing it was going around 85-90, and I can feel my pulse on the left side of my chest and in my left arm, still, after an hour. I can't summon the mental strength to force myself to relax.

Here I am, remembering a momentous occasion when I was four or five years old. For over an hour! I can't get it out of my head.

I finally go in the living room so that I won't bother Jacque. Her sleeping is more critical than my own. I take a Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride tablet, knowing that that's going to make it hard to wake up in the morning. But that's better than not sleeping at all, and I do go to sleep on the couch after a little while.

One of those traveling carnivals was set up at the Jefferson City shopping center in Port Arthur. When we think of strip centers today, we think places that take up about a block.

Jefferson City was seven blocks long, running between 32nd and 39th streets. J. C. Penney anchored one end. At that time the center only took up about half of the space, I think. Henke and Pillot grocery (that's Kroger) was on the other end. There was a Luby's cafeteria and a "The Fair" clothing store, and a courtyard section called "The Mall" where Swicegood Music and Ted's Record Shop were (among other stores).

Anyway, we had ridden some rides, and my parents had two tickets left. They told Larry and me that we could go ride the airplanes. I think Tammy had ridden something that we were too short for ;-).

So off we ran! This ride was one of the "biplanes on chains" swing-out-because-of-centrigugal-force rides.

When I got up on the platform, I remember that the planes I wanted to get in already had kids in them. I always had a hard time making up my mind anyway.

At some point I figured that the ride would be starting soon and I had better make up my mind, so I got into the nearest empty plane.

So why would this occupy my mind for so long? Why was this occasion so momentous that I remember it forty years later? It was what happened afterward.

We trotted back over to my parents and sister, all smiling and happy. Then my mom asked me a question, and my dad appeared really interested in the answer. It was one of those questions that, as a little kid, you feel obligated to answer properly.

The implication here was that I chose it because of the color. I needed a good reason! The only thing I could come up with was "Because that's my favorite color".

And so it was. I had chosen a favorite color. And I stuck with it! For several years after that, when asked my favorite color, I would claim yellow. I had to: I had chosen it, and would have no way to explain any change.

For this reason, when it came time for my parents to buy me a new 20" bike for my 6th birthday, they got a gold one. It was the closest thing to yellow available at the time. (This was a Sears J. C. Higgens bike, styled like a Schwinn Stingray, and gold was really popular at the time, so that was fine.)

The fancy cowboy shirt I had in first and second grade was yellow, too. Larry had claimed white as his favorite color, and so his sixth-birthday-bike was silver, and his cowboy shirt was white. That's just the way favorite colors work!

I really preferred red and blue, and I don't know that I cared for yellow very much. Funny thing is, I really like dark yellows a lot now. The yellow they used on the 1980 Corvette, not the 1986 Corvette.