A short story of a memory.
I guess I should begin by telling you what a Homecoming Mum is. It seems to be exclusively a Texas thing and is a big fake chrysanthemum flower, usually in the wearer’s school colors, surrounded by and trailing ribbons, bells, braided ribbon, curled ribbon and every plastic dangly item that can be bought at a local Hobby Lobby and may best describe the wearer. For example, cheerleader megaphone, teddy bear, princess crown...you get the idea. These mums are worn on homecoming day and gifted to the wearer by a boyfriend, a grandparent, a parent, auntie, uncle, a secret admirer etc. The boys also wear something similar in terms of ribbons and dangles, but it is attached to a garter on their arm and out of necessity, much smaller. That elastic band can only hold so much weight. Mums, however, have no limit as to how big and elaborate and weighty they can be.
In the 90’s, things had gotten only a bit out of hand and while the mums were large, they were still mostly wearable. They could not be pinned to the shirt because it would rip a hole in the fabric. Often they were pinned (if the mum was smaller) to a bra strap for support. Or to the heavy wool fabric of the letter jacket the wearer was sporting and if it was your sweethearts jacket, all the better. It was all about structure and support. An interesting fact was that these mums were often a measure of popularity. To be seen on Homecoming day, with a LL Bean backpack and Dooney & Bourke purse, struggling down the hallways, clothes obscured by the mass of jingling and fluttering doodads was the height, THE LIMIT, of cool. The coolest girls got a mum not only from their parents and/or grandparents, but from their boyfriend and bffs.
In 1994, I was a senior. And let me be clear, I was, how can I put it best...queen of the nerds. Well. Not that nerds had queens then. That would imply that I had some sort of notoriety as a nerd, but really I was just a plain old nerd and I had a small group of nerd friends, but I was not the queen of them. Chubby, glasses, nose in a book, in the most uncool extra curricular activities. Academic Decathlon, for example. We studied and took tests. For fun. For FUN! What? In addition to that coolest of the cool activity, I was also on the swim team and sang in the choir. These may be pretty cool in some places but in the 90s, these were the backwater of sports and activities compared to the behemoth that is football (and its cute perky girlfriend, cheerleading) in Texas.
I could feel the longing to belong, to have a mum, to be popular, but I didn’t have those skills, or that kind of money. My large family had enough for necessary and sometimes a bit for what was fun, but shelling out 50 bucks for something I would wear for one day was out of the question. I had reconciled myself to that fact in my Freshman year when I realized what a big deal this Homecoming thing was. And now my budding rebellious mind had done a 180 and if I could have uttered these words whithout dying of religious guilt and perhaps being struck down in blasphemy at the time, I would have said “F that”. I knew, even in my longing, that it was a ridiculous, extravagant thing and not necessary for the wellbeing of my soul. At least that is what I told my 17 year old self.
Instead, I decided to go classy. I was, due to perhaps a glut of reading all things L.M. Montgomery at the time, a bit of a romantic. Not in the relationship sense, but in the Anne of Green Gables putting herself in a leaky old boat to float out into the water, a pale “dead” maiden while her friend read “The Lady of Shalott” upon the shore and shedding a tear because she looked so dead in that boat, kind of way. She nearly sank by the way. That’s what being “romantical” got you, even in Anne’s day. This is the kind of gal I was. I was very Anne. So I bought a real chrysanthemum and with my best craft store supplies and questionable hot glue gun skills, I made my own corsage. That was, in fact, where the tradition had come from. You got your gal a corsage for Homecoming. It was just a testament to how all things are bigger in Texas that it had gone from that, to the shirt ripping monstrosity it had become. I pinned it to my own letter jacket (because I had no boyfriend’s jacket to wear) and off I went to school.
My nerd friends tentatively admired it. They knew what it was to buck the system and to be seen as enjoying a departure from the status quo, so they kept their praise on the down low. A chrysanthemum is a sturdy flower and needs a lot of water to not go wilty, so I had to keep refilling that green tube of water with a rubber top in which my flower was stuck. It involved a lot of unpinning and getting my jacket wet to maintain this flower, but I did it. For a full school day.
That night was the “big game” and I put this in quotes because while I understand football and grew up near football, I literally could not care less about it. Scandalous. I know. I’m sure I’ll hear about this later. Especially from my Grandpa who insisted we spend Thanksgiving with the TV blaring the Dallas Cowboys game while my Grandma marshaled the troops and cooked for an army of adult kids and grandkids. She’s not here to tell me if she would mind my indifference to football but I remember her crinkled bead brown eyes peeking around the corner of the kitchen door for the score every so often. I stood in the stands, with my back to the game, plastic Longview Lobo cup in hand, drinking my soda and talking and laughing, proud of the corsage on my lapel. When the band would play or the crowd would roar, or people around me would lean forward, sucking in their breath, eyes popping as some play was made for the endzone, I would turn around and watch and collectively chear or “awwwww man!!” with the best of them. A nerd in a Texas Football world has to learn to assimilate, right?
Now the worst thing a nerd could do in public at the time, was appear to not care what other people thought about him or her. One had to be properly aware of how uncool one was and pay proper deference to the hierarchy. To fail to do so was to risk wrath. I should have learned that lesson at the Sadie Hawkins dance when I was laughing at a joke with my date, a boy called Russell Hurst who was sweet and very very pale, when a football jock recoiled at the audacity of my happiness and reached over a burned my leg with his cigarette. But I was hard headed and more than a little ADHD and so I had forgotten to be properly cowed in the presence of cool. I was having a good time and was proud as punch of my little corsage.
A few of the cool boys noticed my forgetfulness and began a plan to put me back in my place. The uncool are never deserving of happiness, after all. Whenever I turned my head to look at the game or to look at a friend, this group of boys began plucking out flower petals of my corsage. Like a snake strike. Just go for one petal. Quick as a flash. I would cover my corsage and shout at them to stop. Then after a few minutes, I would forget to be on guard (ADHD, remember?) and they would do it again.
Now in my head, the adult me replays this sequence of events and imagines I give those boys a massive shove backward off the bleachers where they would lie bleeding and contrite that they had been such jerks. I would flip my hair and coolly sip my coke (which was a Dr. Pepper but in Texas a coke is what we called every soda). Then I would flay them with my eloquent words as I dressed them down for all to hear and my friends and fellow nerds would cheer and say “Serves you right, assholes!” That is not what happened. I was not self aware enough to move to a different spot. I did not have enough self respect to not be a tiny bit pleased with this attention, awful as it was. To be seen and paid attention to, even negative attention, felt better than being invisible to my warped high school mind. So it went on, for the better part of the game until my flower was just a stem and I was mad and close to tears.
The game ended and we did not win. The 1994 season had not been a good one for the Longview Lobos. The crush of bodies pressed out of the fences and I wandered to find my grandpa, who had season passes and therefore sat in the “good seats” on the other side of the stadium and didn’t have to endure the rabble of the bleachers. I threw away the sad remains of my corsage in the barrel full of discarded Lobo cups and we walked together down the long row of cars parked along the street to his old Ford pickup truck. We didn’t talk much and that was normal. Grandpa was my ride to the game, but not really my companion, nor had he ever been back then. That had been my grandma’s job. Both of us were still reeling from the sudden loss of her earlier that year in April and it was all too fresh. Too real. Too lonely. Being with the person who reminded me most of her and yet was the opposite in terms of comfort and understanding was like holding a coal to remember the warmth of the fire. The pleather bench seat of the truck was cold underneath me and neither of us spoke as he drove. I figured he was mad we had lost the game, and he was a man of few words anyway back then. My chrysanthemum and dignity were a mess and I didn’t have much to say either.
I looked out the window as that old truck lurched and squeaked and jostled down the road. It was dark as only rural roads can be dark. The light of the crescent moon was faint and thin and cold.
