Okie-Dokie!

Do you have fond memories of any stores you regularly visited when you were a kid? I was just reminded of a store I used to LOVE going to when I was a kid, b/c I replied to someone's email Okie Dokie!

Yes, the store I adored was named Okie-Dokie! And those stores were the best! (Or maybe it was Oky Doky, but, whatever, you get the idea) What the Okie Dokie actually was, was a convenience store and gas station. And as a child, as you can imagine, the convenience store part was the draw for me!

I loved going to the Okie Dokie, especially the one right next to my Aunt and Uncle's house. And when I say right next door to, I mean, right next door, literally. It was so close it was like walking to the mailbox! Maybe this is not that hard to believe for some of you, but from the perspective of a little girl who lived on a farm and my nearest neighbor was 2 miles away, this was like unbelievable! And my lucky, I was so jealous, cousins got to live a stone's throw from the Okie Dokie! Not Fair, totally not fair! Where they could run next door and ogle candy and sodas and peruse magazines after school, I was getting off the 45 minute bus ride, to walk down a 3/4 of a mile long lane and hopefully, please God, not encounter any stray cows hanging out on the gravel road.

Cows are completely frightening when you are little, okay?!?! Well, or maybe just completely frightening to me, being the wussy child I was. But, when it's just you and the gravel, and this 800 lb stinky, road blocker, lots of crazy ideas start running through your head. Like, oh, I don't know the vision of your mom driving down the road and finding the pancaked remains of her precious daughter under the cud-chewing heifer camped out in the middle of the lane! Yeah, that one went through my mind a lot. Thus, my serious fear of the cows!

But, my city dwelling cousins, now they never had to face such fears on a daily. No, they could hang at the Okie Dokie whenever they wanted, and to get home, just walk the 30 paces to their front door! Oh how I envied them!

When I was staying over at my Aunt and Uncle's with my cousins, I'd make sure to bring like 2 or 3 dollars from my piggy bank just so I'd have plenty of money to load-up on penny and nickle candy with. Yeah, candy was that cheap! And good candy, too! Hard to believe, eh?! Especially in today's economy!

Well, this Okie Dokie was a child's dream! Row upon row of brightly packaged, neatly stacked candy containers with every flavor and every possibility you could imagine.
My cousins and I would come out of there looking like Candy Junkies. It was sick! I mean there were probably years where I got less loot trick-or-treating than on my visits to the Okie Dokie!

But, too, that was how my times were just being at my cousin's house anyway! My Aunt and Uncle always had a freezer full of every child's favorites, pizza rolls, push-ups, individually frozen pizzas (the kind you didn't have to share with your pig-crossed-with-man brothers.) Basically, anything I had seen advertised on TV, and then incessantly begged my mom for while we were at the grocery store, they had in their fridge or freezer. Believe me, I would have been Jaba-the-Hut had my parents kept as many kid-convenience foods in our house.
Well, but then, maybe not, because, as I previously stated, I had brothers who were genetically crossed with pigs and would immediately eat every appetising morsel brought through the threshold of our house. I can't even count the number of times I uttered, "Are all the xyz's gone???? You pigs! I didn't even get one!" Oh to be the youngest and a girl! There was absolutely no possibility of me ever filling up on snacks in our house, not as long as I lived there with them!

But, the Okie Dokie, it was mine all mine. When I went to visit my cousins, who were all girls by the way, my brothers were usually not along, and so, it was just me and my dollars, and a whole world of junk-food options. Life was good!
Then, one night, my love of the Okie Dokie changed. On this night, I would see violence in it's most primal form, for the first time.

It was my brother Craig, myself, and my Mom and Step-dad, and we were gassing up so that we could get on the road back to nowhere's-ville, when this car pulled up to the pump on the other side of us. The guys in this car started yelling, cussing and threatening the guys in another car that was gassing up on the other side of them. Then, all of a sudden, one of the guys from the car that just pulled up, jumps out of the car and starts getting in the other driver's face. It was like watching in slow-motion. Your mind was going so fast, but there was no time to react.

Right after the guy got out of his car and started yelling at the driver, a guy from the passenger side of this car got out with a baseball bat and started coming after the yelling guy. When that guy saw him, he bowed-up like "that bat can't hurt me" then the other guy cracked him with it. And, I mean, hit him. It was the most horrible thing I had ever seen. Not because there was blood everywhere or anything like that. But, because this guy, knew in holding this bat, that he could do serious damage to this other guy and yet, he still hit him, and hard, too. With hate-filled eyes and rage pulsing through his veins, he hit him!
The guy who got hit kind of stumbled back, and tried to like come at the other guy, but then realized he'd be fighting a battle he would not win; so he retreated back to his car. The other guy hit the driver's side of his vehicle with the bat several times before the guy could drive off. But, once he did, it was over. Over in seconds this vicious attack with both parties fleeing as fast as they could so not to be there by the time the cops showed up.

It was scary I tell you! I was completely freaking out! Completely! Didn't they know this was the Okie Dokie where kids come to live out their candy-filled dreams? This is a sacred place. Take your violence somewhere else. Would you act this way if this were a church? Well, it was. It was my temple. I worshipped this Okie Dokie, and you just brought your hatred and rage into my sacred place! I was not only scared, but mad! Now I have something else to fear, great! Don't you know I'm already afraid of cows?!?!? In fact, my whole world is filled with fears! Now I can't even go to the one completely magical place on earth without fearing something bad could happen. Thanks a lot you dirty bastards!

So, as you can imagine, from this point on I walked tentatively to the Okie Dokie. Not with the joyful bounds that used to carry me there. No, now we would drive up to my Aunt and Uncle's house and I would make sure that neither of the cars I had seen there that night were, for some reason, back, just waiting to act out the violence again.

The memory of the Okie Dokie reminds me of something we all know. Kids are like sponges. Everything sticks with them. Everything.

Griffin wanted to roast marshmallows the other night. And so, I asked him, "Do you remember the first time you ever roasted marshmallows?" He said, "Yes. I was at my Grandma and Poppa's house and I held the stick like this and turned it and turned it and then blew on it to eat it."

It just amazed me that he remembered because that was over 2 years ago, and he remembers it like it was yesterday! And Grant, his memory is pretty spongy, too. Like how every morning he gets up and whines at the pantry door and points for you to open it, and then says "googie". And cries and cries if you start saying, "You want Goldfish?" Waaaaahhhh, "You want cereal?" Waaaaahhhh "Oh, you want a cookie?"
"Ha Ha, Googie, Googie!!!" And then runs off to sit at the table because he knows that's where he needs to be in order to get a cookie. And yes, I allow him to eat cookies in the morning, sometimes. Call DHS if you want. But, really, is it any worse than a bowl of Fruity Pebbles? Or any worse than a donut? Or should I say a frosted cake that, since it has a hole in it, we call breakfast!

You see, here's the thing, kids have these memories we older folks do crossword puzzles and play mind games to try and re-gain. So, let this be a lesson to us all. Everything you do your kids will remember. From the very best things you do for them to the very worst. They'll remember it. That's why we're all emotionally scarred adults. It's impossible NOT to be. Things happen. Life happens and some things you cannot control. But, what you can control is how you love your kids. Love them with all that you have because when scary cows and drunk, white trash try to disrupt your child's life, at least she will know that nothing can ever penetrate the Love Armor my Mom and Dad surround me with every day of my life.