Oolala, Moolala
The family was cheerfully gathered around a blazing fire in the fireplace, surrounded by mounds of festively decorated packages ready to be ripped open on that rainy Christmas morning.
“Oh, wow! I hope all my presents are just like this one!”
The lady, who was exercising her turn to open a gift, exclaimed as she unearthed two crisp fifty dollar bills in an envelope that had been expertly disguised, buried in layers of tissue paper inside an immense box. The tissue paper was now strewn about the floor and the box tossed aside as the lady concentrated solely on her very welcome discovery.
“I couldn’t determine what store’s gift certificate would most appeal to you, so I figured I would give you the cash and let you decide,” the lady’s husband explained with a grin.
“I can’t remember the last time I got a gift of cash, but I remember now that getting it makes you feel decadently rich.” The lady smiled lovingly at her husband as she pressed the money in its envelope to her heart.
***************
Amanda, slightly bent over, with matted hair and a dirt streaked face, shuffled along on the sidewalk pushing her shopping cart which was spilling over with the rudiments of a bum’s life. Head down, lost in thought, she made her way to the soup kitchen’s noon feeding asking herself the same question she asked herself every morning. How did I end up a bag lady, just like the filthy dirty wretches in tattered clothes talking to themselves we used to stare at and point at and laugh at when I was a youngster. Amanda didn’t think of herself as a homeless person. She was nowhere near that good. Homeless people had poignant stories to tell about why they were on the streets. Homeless people were featured in articles in the newspaper as pitiable victims of someone else’s dastardly deeds. Amanda was only a victim of her own craven doing. No one could feel sorry for her. She was just worthless. A worthless bum with a torturous toothache.
Leaving her shopping cart in the care of one of the aides de camp, Amanda entered the mission and made a beeline for the “sir” in charge to beg him to help her get relief for her throbbing tooth. A uniformed man was always in charge although not always the same man. Amanda was sure that they were supposed to call the in-charge man something specific but if she had ever known what that was she had forgotten and preferred to just refer to the man in charge as “sir”. That was easy to remember and deferential enough.
After she got her disappointing answers from “sir”, she cleaned up in the communal bathroom and tried to eat the hot meal that was served family style at noon six days a week. Amanda barely acknowledged the dozens of others gathered to be fed and watered. The”brothers and sisters”, as the mission staff referred to them, were generally a solitary lot except when they needed to band together for protection. They might not know each other’s names but they knew what position each person played in their army. Most importantly they knew who carried knives. Those women were highly revered. Everyone had a role in the army and its importance was recognized by rank. Knifers were the generals. Dumpster divers were privates first class.
Taking turns, some guarded carts while the others were inside. When those who were eating finished, they picked up their brown paper sack suppers and went outside to take over the perimeter patrol of the carts, while the former guards went into the mission to perform the same washing and eating ritual. It was down to a science. The same women had been doing the same thing every day for so long that they did it sleepwalking. Occasionally they mentioned to each other that it was such a blessing that no one had either left or joined the group in some time. Leaving the group meant that your body would be found frozen or murdered some days after the group noticed you were missing. Joiners meant that some other misbegotten soul had found herself in the land of nowhere and that always made the regulars sad. They weren’t looking for new members. This was not a club that anyone really wanted to belong to.
Amanda returned to the shopping carts with her paper sack supper looking more woebegone than she normally did. Saying nothing she nodded at the current guard to let her know she was ready to dutifully replace her.
“Amanda, your cheek is all swoll up. How come?” The question came from the woman Amanda was replacing. Amanda didn’t know that woman’s name because she had never cared enough to ask.
“Toothache.”
“Oh my God, girl, I had me one of them! That hurt like the dickens. What are they gonna’ do for ya’?” The woman nodded towards the mission to be sure that Amanda knew whose help she meant.
Amanda reached inside her jacket pocket, pulled out a packet of Advil and held it up.
“That it? Oh my God, girl! That ain’t gonna’ be enough! Don’t they have no dentists?”
Amanda shook her head, no.
“Well, land sake,” the woman exclaimed shaking her head sadly as she made her way into the mission to perform her own ablutions and eat her dinner.
While on cart duty, Amanda tried to take her mind off her throbbing tooth by thinking about what she called her happy stories. She had a collection of memories that she called on whenever she was feeling particularly down. Today she thought about her week at Girl Scout camp when she was twelve. She had gone all by herself since none of her friends had wanted to go. Even though she was scared to be in a cabin for six girls with five girls she had never met before, she was proud of herself for making the decision to go anyway.
That might have been the best week of her life although she couldn’t say that for sure because some of her other happy stories were very close to being the best time of her life too. She swam and sang camp songs and went horseback riding and made lanyards and roasted marshmallows for s’mores and to top if off, she became best friends with all five of the new girls. She was a tumbler and she taught them how to do handstands and cartwheels. That made her the most popular girl in the cabin, maybe in the whole camp. Yes, indeed, what a week that had been.
“Amanda!” A woman, of indeterminate age wearing gypsy style clothing, coming out of the mission called out.
Amanda looked at her in acknowledgement.
“We got someone in our camp who can prolly fix your tooth up. She’s pretty good at doctorin’.”
“Aren’t you way out by the landfill?” Amanda asked.
“Yep. Right next to it. We got some great stuff from there.”
“But how long does it take you to walk here for dinner? It must be a long walk.”
“We gotta’ van.” The woman grinned from ear-to-ear. “We gotta’ old hippie Volkswagen van.”
“You do?” Amanda’s eyes were huge with surprise. “How come?”
“Never mind how come. We just do. So, do you wanna’ see the doctorin’ woman? If you do, you need to come with us now. We’re headin’ back to camp.”
Amanda thought about it while the woman answered the couple questions Amanda had. When Amanda realized that she could keep her cart full of goodies because they would just load that onto the van and take it along, she was sold. She had to admit she was very close to being willing to do anything to get the excruciating pain to end.
Amanda enjoyed the ride in the van immensely. She realized that it had been a long, long time since she rode in anything but the police paddy wagon when they occasionally took her to the drunk tank. Riding in the van made her feel like she was somebody. She sat up straighter and folded her hands in her lap as she imagined real ladies did when they went riding in their vehicles. She was having such a good time that she didn’t immediately realize they were slowing down and turning off the highway onto a side road that had a big sign announcing that the public landfill was straight ahead one mile.
Soon thereafter, Amanda met the doctorin’ woman who was sweet and gentle and Amanda was sure she was a thousand years’ old. The doctorin’ woman looked in Amanda’s mouth and declared that there was nothing to do but to pull that tooth. She soothingly told Amanda not to worry – since the tooth was a molar pretty far back in her mouth no one would notice she was missing a tooth and, she said reassuringly, Amanda would still have plenty of grinding teeth left.
The most surprising thing to Amanda was not that she had just agreed to have a tooth pulled by some ancient woman she knew nothing about, but to find that she was touched when the old woman mentioned her appearance. Down deep, Amanda still cared how she looked and she was pleased to know that she wouldn’t look like a hillbilly with missing teeth. She smiled when she realized the incongruity of that. She smelled to high heaven and she couldn’t remember the last time she combed her hair.
While they were administering anesthetic to Amanda in the form of hard liquor, of which Amanda needed almost three times what they expected, having built up quite the tolerance over her years of alcoholism, Amanda took herself to another of her happy stories. The one about when she won a beauty pageant. She was 18 then and a freshman in college. She had always known she was pretty but she was always surprised at other people’s reactions to her. Evidently she was really pretty, pretty enough that men and women alike looked twice when they saw her. She had loved competing in that pageant and had done the best job she could with her talent offering which was a song from Auntie Mame that she spoke more than sang because she really couldn’t sing. She had secretly hoped that she would win while she publicly pooh poohed the idea. When they announced her as the winner she whooped and twirled and clapped until the host had to stop her.
She couldn’t say that she felt nothing when the tooth was pulled but she woke up the morning after feeling so much better than the day before. Although her gum was tender and her mouth was very sore from being forced wide-open for so long while they yanked on the tooth until it gave way, the severity of the pain was gone. Amanda was so relieved and so thankful.
She spent her recuperative morning sitting in the middle of the camp on a rickety Adirondack chair that had been rescued from the dump. It took her no time at all to get a bead on the camp. The van became clear almost instantly as she saw the comings and goings of the women and the solitary man in the camp. The man had a nice cabin set back from the tent camp, well nice for a cabin in a dump. It took no brains at all to figure out that he ran the place and that the women belonged to him, more or less. The van definitely was his as it was parked in front of the cabin and over the course of the morning he left camp on two different occasions before returning and turning the vehicle over to the woman in gypsy clothes who had brought Amanda here the day before.
That woman and more than a half dozen others got into the van to head to the mission for the noon meal. Amanda was asked if she wanted to go but her answer was a quick no. As good as she felt the thought of eating made her cringe. They told her that they would try and get a bag supper for her if they could and she thanked them for that. For the relative affluence of the camp there was no reason that Amanda could see why they traveled into town to the mission for their meals other than they ate for free there. Amanda decided not to think about that any longer because that made her mad. It made her think of them as thieves and she didn’t want to think of herself as being in the company of thieves.
As time wore on Amanda got bored sitting in the chair and ventured to the dump itself to see how she would go about finding some kind of treasure for the old doctorin’ woman as a thank you gift. Secretively, Amanda stayed in the shadows as she circled the dump studying all of its components. There was a man operating a back hoe and some senior gleaners sitting on metal folding chairs just outside the entrance. They had piles of junk sitting next to their chairs that they apparently knew had enough value for them to haul out and sell.
Amanda was pleased to spot the sign next to the dump’s entrance declaring, “Dump hours: 7:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. No one admitted before 7:00 a.m. or after 5:00 p.m.” Bingo! Amanda would be back for her scavenger hunt after closing tonight.
Sure enough promptly after 5:00 p.m., the place became a ghost town. Amanda waited a while just to be sure the coast was clear and then she went to a remote spot where she knew she couldn’t possibly be spotted by anyone who erroneously came up the dump road.
Although barbed wire guarded the dump Amanda found a weak spot just as she knew she would. For some reason, it is universally true that man puts up barbed wire knowing it is a definite deterrent and then never bothers to check it again to see if it is still working. Of course, over time, things like limbs of trees fall on it, ground erodes under it, it rusts – there are a number of ways that barbed wire becomes derelict in its duty. Amanda, with her bag lady’s education, knew about barbed wire and she was soon inside the dump taking stock.
Her eye was caught by a green garbage bag, still stuffed to the gills and securely tied. It was the bag itself that appealed to Amanda. She was continuously surprised at the uses one could find for garbage bags and finding one this sturdy and over-sized was a particular coup.
Amanda removed her gloves from their customary home in her jacket pocket, put them on and began to carefully untie the garbage bag. When she got it undone and pulled the sack open, she broke into a grin. The bag was stuffed with the remnants of Christmas wrapping paper, ribbon and discarded gift tags. Amanda gleefully set about emptying the bag, reading the tags, imagining the presents and separating and saving the beautifully designed ribbon. The very best of that lot of ribbon was going to go to the doctorin’ old lady along with the garbage bag itself, Amanda decided. The rest of the ribbon would become part of her belongings and she would use it to beautify her meager camp site.
Every once-in-a-while, Amanda would pause and take another swig from her flask. She always carried three flasks and she was well into her second one. Normally she would be at refill point for all three but she had gotten a late start today having slept in after her “surgery” and then spending a little time getting oriented at the camp. She was a whisky gal and that made her going a little harder than the winos. Even the rot gut whisky cost more than the rot gut wine. She had tried many times to switch to wine but it just didn’t quench her thirst. Somehow she managed each and every day to put together enough money to fulfill her whisky requirements. She considered that a blessing from God.
Amanda pulled an envelope from the depths of the bag and read aloud the word on the outside of the envelope, “Oolala”. Opening the envelope she read, “Moolala” before she was stopped cold. Behind the moolala flap was $100.00 in cash. From a trash bag in the dump Amanda amazingly had found the pot of gold.
Amanda gave the prettiest lengths of ribbon and the garbage bag to the old doctorin’ woman who was tickled to get them. She decorated her tent with the ribbon and carefully folded the garbage bag and put it away awaiting the perfect use.
Without a word, Amanda left the camp by the dump in the middle of the night pushing her overflowing cart. She headed home to her lean-to on the riverbank and decided not to think about how long it would take her to get there. She would just put one foot in front of the other until she got there. And that is just what she did. Arriving at her home-sweet-home, she wasn’t surprised to see that everything was just as she left it. Her neighbor on the riverbank was one of the most proficient knife handlers for miles around and her reputation wasn’t a secret.
Amanda celebrated her recent lucky streak by opening the extra large bottle of Gentleman Jack she had purchased at the liquor store next to the Dollar Store. At the Dollar Store, she had bought a tube of red lipstick, a hand mirror, some shampoo and a hairbrush.
Amanda got roaring drunk and passed out as she always did, but this night, although it looked the same as all the other nights, wasn’t the same. Amanda no longer felt worthless. God had given her Christmas presents and he wouldn’t have done that if she was worthless. No, she was worth something. Amanda, whose very name means Worthy of Love, was going to remember that indeed, she was just that.
***************
A husband and wife were curled together on the couch staring at the fire in the fireplace on this Christmas Eve. Mostly they stayed silent, content to bask in the moment. Once in a while one or the other would comment about something Christmas related.
“You know, I still think about it. It still bothers me.” The wife said to the husband.
“Well, you shouldn’t. What’s done is done.” The husband replied as he smiled at his wife.
“I know. But last Christmas I was so excited about those two fifty dollar bills in my Oolala Moolala envelope. I was just heartsick when it mysteriously disappeared. It probably went to the dump with the Christmas tree and the bags of trash.”
“We’ll never know.” Her husband responded.
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