Mineral Point (Part 1)

On the way to my father's farm for the weekend, as my brother and I would always do on the weekends of the school year prior to high school, sometimes with my sister, sometimes not, an hour from Madison to Mineral Point on Friday after school, an hour from Mineral Point to Madison on Sunday afternoon, we'd usually stop in Dodgeville, eat out, and go by the Farm & Fleet or later when it was built, the Walmart. Farm & Fleet was and still is a wonder of a store. One part farm implementations such as feed and ropes and tractor tires and tools, one part general store with household products from sporting goods to candy to sponges, and one part clothing store selling jeans, boots, gloves, and flannel shirts. To this day when I am back in Wisconsin I try and make a pilgrimage for the jeans (nothing fancy but a lot of sizes that are a bit bigger, to comfortably fit my hockey player thighs and butt) and sometimes a flannel shirt, plain styles in durable if not particularly soft fabrics. My father took frequent trips to Farm and Fleet as he was always working on something out on the farm, sometimes the buildings, sometimes the tractor, sometimes out in the fields. Sometimes he'd just go to find something to buy, like one goes to the mall. The farm was not a horse farm (though in the early days Susan kept a few horses there) or a farm to grow food, but the farm was originally a one-hundred fifty acre plus expanse of rolling hills that we planted Christmas trees on, first in the Spring of 1985. I was seven years old. 

My brother and I were standing at the cash register with my father at Farm and Fleet. The registers in those days had a coin machine that would distributed the coin change. So as, one gives the the clerk cash (though my father would usually write checks) and then to the right of the customer was a coin machine synched to the register that would release the appropriate amount of change once the clerk opened the register cash tray. I remember the machine as a slim beige rectangle whose front was partially opaque deep brown such that you could see the coins stacked up inside it. On the right of the machine was a kind of slide that curved around to the front of the machine into a little cup such that when the change was released the coins would roll down the slide and land in the cup. Because my father always paid in checks, and later, used credit cards, I didn't often see this machine close-up and in action. Also attached to the machine was a little metal lever at the top of the right side. One day, standing to the right of my father with my brother, waiting for my father to finish the transaction or finish talking to the clerk or finish whatever it was that was taking him so long, I reached out and switched the little lever on the side of the coin machine. Suddenly a set of alarms went off. Red lights on the walls above the exist and entry doors started flashing and spinning and a loud alarm, not a ringing bell but a siren, blaring. I don't know how long this moment lasted, perhaps not more than a second or two as I quickly switched the switch back down, and the noise and lights stopped.

What happened after this moment is what I always return to. What happened after was nothing at all. Nobody said anything. Not the clerk and not my dad. Not my brother, to my memory. I've always wondered if anyone saw me switch the alarm on or if they saw me switch it off, and if they did, why didn't anyone say anything? Underneath this memory of what happened and this question of why, if my flipping that switch caused the alarm to go off, is an uncertainty that this actually happened. There was no confirmation, either though some kind of admonishment or joke or observation. No eye contact or smile or frown. Part of me wonders if my switching this switch caused the alarms to go off or if that was just a random event that my action happened to co-occur with, or if it happened at all. This doubt then is kind of a reoccurring theme, a question as to if what I remember and what I felt is real, that if the way I experience an event shares any resemblance to how anyone else experiences the same event; a question of if my experience is entirely singular. This lack of confirmation then is a constant, one that underlies much of this kind of writing, these attempts to reiterate an experience a confirmation of my own existence. As an adult I've since asked my brother if he remembered that day and he did, yet I still wonder. Endless wonder.