The Summer We Said Goodbye [Installment 12]

Pet Rock

There was a lot to unpack with that flocked holiday foliage, the least of which was the meaning of the.

I didn't encounter it again until the following Christmas when we were buying our Blue Spruce for the year, and the attendant, who was busy hosing down another tree in fake snow, asked if we wanted ours flocked, too.

"Oh, no, we don't do flocked," came my mom's familiar rebuttal.

So that's it!

Flocked = fake snow

The episode in the kitchen the previous Christmas had been traumatizing. And I'd spent the intervening months feeling like an outcast.

But the return of the word, along with its meaning, changed all that.

I wasn't the problem. It was the fake show. And I reveled in relief.

I didn't just temper my enthusiasm for flocking; I obliterated it.

"Oh, no, we don't do flocked," I'd boast to any friend unfortunate enough to have a Christmas tree pasted with sodium polyacrylate.

And that was just the tip of the flocked iceberg.

In my zeal for love and acceptance, I made it my mission to catalog and assimilate every one of my siblings' proclivities.

TV shows, for example, like The Brady Bunch, were so contrived.

Fashion items, especially anything worn by one of my sisters' rivals, were complete knock-offs.

And opinions deviating from the family norm were ludicrous, and anyone expressing them, pseudo-intellectual.

I felt truly blessed to have a committee of older siblings willing to show me the way.  And I conveyed my thanks to them by modeling their high standards to anyone who would listen, which included pretty much everyone at school.

My classmates were impressed, to be sure. Their stunned silences at my various declarations were proof.

But then Dean Feldman showed up on the playground one day with his new Pet Rock.

Pet Rocks were all the rage but impossible to find. So everyone Ooh'ed and Ahh'ed when Dean cracked open the cardboard box fashioned like a pet carrier to reveal an ordinary rock tossed in with some sham straw.

"Shhh," he whispered. "He's sleeping."

"What's his name?"

"Chippy."

"What's he eat?"

Oh, for crying out loud!

"This is so bogus," I snapped, using my brother's new go-to word for anything phony.

"Why?" shot back Sallie Mackenzie.

"It's obvious. It's just totally bogus," I said, putting a final point on it.

But Sallie wasn't having it.

"No, it's not obvious, Cosmo. What's wrong with it?"

"Well, it's not…real."

I could feel my grip on them slipping.

"Real? What's real got to with it? If you don't like it, just say so. You're free to your opinion. But that's all it is, and no one cares."

And that was that. The floodgates had opened.

"Yeah, no one cares, Cosmo."

"It's only your opinion."

"Cosmo from the cosmos, ha!"

"Who made you god?"

"Cosmo hates everything!"

"I think Chippy's cute. Can I pet him?"

Dean held out the box with the rock, and everyone elbowed me aside.

Cast out again, by a random chunk of rubble, no less!

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You can find an archive off past installments here.