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| I Talk Slower Than I Think: An Antidote to Helicopter Parenting
| | C.D. Bonner
| I Talk Slower Than I Think - An Antidote to Helicopter Parenting
Author: C. D. Bonner. Cover Illustration by Patricia Garrigus.
In 52 Creative Nonfiction stories, author C. D. Bonner reminds grown-ups of simpler, more satisfying times and gives adolescents a chance to discover the fun of exploring the wonders just outside their door.
Most of the stories will make funnybones ache, but a few will make heartstrings feel like fresh sutures. A child tries to eat a biscuit that is so hard firemen must remove it; Sammy the Basset steals a baloney his own approximate size and shape; there is no reset button when a neighbor knifes the ice cream man over a thin dime; and, "A Fine Bordelleaux" moves into the house nestled between a child's school playground and his church.
I Talk Slower Than I Think chronicles the misadventures of a Georgia family growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. Although fans of Southern humor will enjoy the flavor, growing up transcends time and place.
The book gives parents permission to park the helicopter, grab Granny's best tea strainer, and go outside to catch tadpoles with the kids. The length of these stories makes this book a perfect bathroom reader.
an excerpt from the short story, Sole Survivors:
Each summer we would get a new pair of Keds High-Tops that were expected to last through the year. You could get a pair for a dollar if you shopped around. I had been wearing a pair of Buster Brown leather shoes for a year and a half, and they had split open at the back like sun-ripened possums to accommodate my growing feet. They were even beyond the ability of Brother James, a devout shoemaker in College Park. He preached on Sundays but the rest of the week he fixed shoes. He gave it his awl and he saved a lot of soles. My shoes let water in, and I had to shuffle slowly to keep my feet from slipping out.
It had been a tough year for my parents the year I started first grade. The truck line had been on strike for a year, and my father had to make do with odd jobs. He said that union rules inhibited him from taking a competing driving job during the strike. We had to move from the apartment to a tarpaper shack with an outhouse and a well way out in the yard. He borrowed an old dump truck from his cousin and made survival wages cleaning out old houses as hippies vacated them. He took on an armed security officer's job, and we greeted him with cheery anticipation each evening, "Did you shoot anyone today?" We subsisted on nothing but biscuits and gravy for months. I still can't stand gravy.
I was determined to take great care of my new Keds. They would have to last me a yea--maybe more--and my father had said that if I didn't take care of them, I wouldn't get another pair. I lined them up carefully under my bed. Not good enough. I tried putting them into the dresser drawer that my mother had used as my bed when I was a baby, but the bottom was coming loose--still no good. I didn't want to just leave them out in the open. We had rats that probably had a taste for new shoes.
I fretted over the shoes long after everyone else went to bed. I finally hit upon the perfect place, a bastion no rat could enter. A place surrounded by cast iron, the safest place in the house.
The wood stove had a side door just big enough for a small biscuit pan, and I would be up before Mother awoke. I could show her my clever hiding place first thing. I brushed out the oven compartment and lined up the two shoes neatly inside. I went to bed, my mind finally at rest.
I awoke to a loud, metallic clank-clank and the smell of burning kindling. I flew from the bed, yelling at my mother, "My shoes are in the stove!" She just stared back, since the statement didn't really make sense to anyone else, nor should it. By the time I explained it two more times, thick black smoke was rolling across the ceiling.
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