Family memory and passage from "liars club"

Christmas Eve was a chaotic time in my family. By 9 pm us kids had acquired several new toys and were in the smoke filled basement, ignoring the adults, and the record player blasting Elvis. We were gathered around the pool table. It was huge, or at least seemed so to my 8 year old self. It covered most of one half of the room. Grandpa was upstairs; Grandma was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the other side of the room. The blue carpet seemed like an ocean dividing the kids from our dads, grandma, and moms. Lauren and I were dressed in our cute Christmas dresses. (At least at the time we thought they were cute. Looking back, not so much) The boys were dressed in Christmas sweaters or dress shirts, and nice jeans or slacks. Of course this was still back when we let our parents dictate what we wore. Our newly acquired treasures were by this time no longer so new. And the pool tables allure had resurfaced. The boys, Michael, Josh, Bryan, and Ricky, out numbered the girls, Lauren and I. So, much as usual they were attempting to exclude us from the game. We weren't very good, and only wanted to play because we didn't want to be excluded. The parents, from the other side of the room, ordering them to let us play, always settled the argument. A few spots of wear and tear marred the green-blue felt surface of the pool table. The wood was deep brown, and shiny. Some of the ball pockets had holes by that time. The pool balls themselves were dulling, no longer the shinny colors of a new set. But we didn't care. It was the game, the competition, and the time together that secretly mattered to us.

"Once, we saw a black funnel drop out of the low-bulging sky over the football field across the street. It tore the yellow goalpost up and wrenched it like a paperclip. We were forty yards away, watching through the screen. I leaned my head into Mother's denim hipbone and kept my ears stoppered with my fingers. but I could still  hear the concrete posts torn out of the ground like some giant buttons getting popped off. Mother worshipped that kind of wild storm like nothing else." (24)

I love this paragraph. It's full of description, and information about her mother. My favorite line is "I leaned my head into Mother's denim hipbone and kept my ears stoppered with my fingers." It says a lot about mom and daughter. Clearly she loves her mother, and almost seems to want her constant attention through out this part of the book. Her mother seems a bit odd, but it fits with what we already knew. The end of that paragraph seems to hint, to me at least, that her mother  the freedom and wildness of the storm, that she was denied as a child. We already know her mother was raise strict methodist and that strict structure seems to be what her mother is always trying to escape. 

She describes the sound of the goalpost getting ripped up, and the sight of it twice. I think the repetition makes the image that much better. and it was that image, combined with the one of her leaning against her mothers hip that stuck with me.