I woke up early when the big hand was on the 11 and the little hand was on the six. I heard a party in the kitchen, lots of yelling and Aunt Le Le was still there! She spent the night! I loved Aunt Le Le almost as much as Mommy!
I put on my clothes and started to run down the stairs, but waited to hear what the yelling was about. There was a dance at the Produce place yesterday, and we missed it! Mommy was saying that a black monkey came down from the rafters and started to jump on people's backs. First, I thought it was funny, but Mommy said that the monkey was taking pieces of the people and people were hurt and bleeding! Aunt Le Le said that the horrible thing was that people were laughing at first, thinking that the monkey was playing...
Mommy said that the monkey didn't look right to some people, but it moved so fast that no one could tell what the thing was. They said that it made a strange sound...like a horn...not like a monkey.
Mommy has radar and knew that I was on the stairs, so she yelled at me to come down. Just then, the big town horn sounded and I was supposed to "stop, drop and cover"! I didn't know what to do. Get ready for the bomb? Go to Mommy?
Mommy came and got me and carried me up the stairs. She grabbed my big suitcase, the one with the ballet girls on it, and started to throw clothes into it, and my toothbrush and tooth powder....I was scared!
Mommy said "We're going on a trip, punkin'!" We're going to San Francisco to stay with Aunt Le Le for a few days. You'd like that, wouldn't you?
"Are Pooky and Franklin and Daddy coming, Mommy?"
"Of course!" The whole town is going on vacation!
The next thing I know, we were in Aunt Le Le's big station wagon, except Daddy. Daddy stayed to help find the Baker Brothers and we didn't see him again until we came home from San Francisco.
I can't last very long in a car. At first, I love to watch the houses and the trees roll by, but I fell asleep after eating a pancake rolled up around a sausage and drinking some milk from a little carton.
Before I fell asleep, I heard some things that everyone was saying.
I always knew that I was "'dopted", but didn't have much to say about it. Mommy was Mommy. Daddy was Daddy. Aunt Le Le and Pooky and Franklin were my family. Pooky and Franklin would beat up anyone who was mean because I was 'dopted.
Daddy and some men looked around more of the quarry and found a cave that never had an opening before. Something tore a hole in the quarry wall and came out from the inside of the cave. The men went but found that the cave only went for about a couple of hundred feet until they met a solid wall of big rocks.
There, they found the Baker Boys, asleep with an empty whiskey bottle at their side. The Baker Boys remembered very little of their adventures and swore up and down that they didn't know where that whiskey came from.
Joey Baker was raising a lamb for the County Fair. I loved that lamb and called it "sugar". Joey's lamb went missing last night. The searchers found some of it in the Quarry. Someone else saw a pony running off across the Watson's big alfalfa fields. The pony was running faster than a pony should be able to run. Silly pony!
After I fell asleep, I dreamed about a light going around a racetrack. It was a car so fast that I could only see it's front lights. Then, the car crashed and blew up into a beautiful light that only lasted a little time.
I woke up, and we were at the yellow mountains. The yellow mountains meant that we would smell the onions pretty soon. I did miss the cow and the moon. I fell back to sleep.
Then I had a dream about an elephant with twenty legs and a big dinosaur that was as tall as Daddy's office building....
But that was then...enough of the past!
This is now...2009. Where did the years go?
I stopped reading. What a hoot to read my simple six year old's understanding of events from so long ago. We forget our younger selves and how sweet and simple the world is made for us, even when the world is falling apart.
I am reading transcripts of my statements to the investigators from the "government agency" that responded to the disaster that befell our little town in California. No one had heard of this agency before, but back then, in the '60's, we didn't question authority.
Amazingly, it wasn't very long before questioning authority became the focus of every college student's life. In my young adult years, I did just that, and scoured through every last detail of the incident, which had been classified and buried so deep that the average citizen had not the faintest clue that a major event which threatened all life on Earth had occurred.
It turns out that the "new people" weren't a family at all, in the conventional sense that we have of families. The Dad wasn't an agricotoro inspector. The Dad was a Wrangler. So was the Mom. Eventually the kids became Wranglers, too.
Here's what happened. The Hadrian supercollider wasn't anywhere near the first mechanical entity to create an opening into another, populated dimension. The Zeuss Minotaur in California and the Tunguska Cheko in Russia were the first supercolliders. These rudimentary supercolliders opened tiny rents in the fabric of time and space that attracted the attention of a civilization that looked for tiny rents in the fabric of time and space.
This "tiny" rent was actually a huge hole that remained open for two years. During that time, a large "migration" of life forms occurred. After much discussion, the monitoring civilization decided to establish a program for protecting life on Earth as well as the life forms that were about to kill and eat all life on Earth.
Let's just say that over two hundred thousand of the "creatures" were rounded up before the gateway was completely sealed. The "creatures", however, carried their own parasites and microscopic living luggage, so it was a mess that would never be completely undone.
As a result, a corps of willing volunteers (who found Earth to be a quite lovely place) was established to work and live as citizens of Earth. Underground cave structures were identified and found to be quite suitable for corralling and managing the "livestock". Homes were built over the massive underground compounds, and lives went on.
The "Spooky House", along with about 20 other locations, became home to two generations of Wranglers, until a handful of creatures found a way to escape into the environment via the underground caverns around my hometown.
The "New People" were simply the highest form of creatures that came through a much more advanced "gate". They are now regular travellers through the gate, where they come for vacations, to serve as animal wranglers, veteranarians, and to insure that not even the Hadrian Supercollider is allowed to create another uncontrolled tear in the fabric of time and space. "Black holes" indeed! Not on our watch! Find out about the big bang some other way, silly humans!
That's right, I said OUR watch. My adopted family returned to a safe, cleaned up town. I grew up, went on to get my PhD in basic Earth astrophysics, and to marry the youngest of the "New People". Don't worry, I was in love with him as soon as he showed up at my school.
After two hectic and lovely weddings and two honeymoons, my husband and I set up housekeeping in the "Spooky House", had three children, made millions predicting little lotteries here and there, and kept the livestock from stampeding for over 51 years.
My in-laws were lovely people, except for that sister, who never adapted to here and went "home" in a huff, never to be seen again. We heard that she married a vulcanologist and died on a planet where even the Hubble won't go.
Occasionally, one of our colleagues will arrive, needing a place to hole up after sabatouging another supercollider or nuclear weapon facility (humans don't know that we trashed all of those decades ago), but those visits are great fun, as our guests truly enjoy the underground "zoo" and a bit of home cooked Zargunthorct stew.
You never heard of this? You never heard of us? Of course not! We're very evolved, very devious, and very well established on this Earth of ours, and very...well..it's complicated, but we're a lot like you physically.
Silly Humans!
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