Seattle, WA
Heather Smith
Storyteller
I really don't consider myself an artist but I do love to write. I'm also Narcoleptic so writing is a way that I channel all of the things that go on inside my head when I'm sleepy and struggling to stay awake. I am also told that I have knack for story telling.
I was made fun of a lot as a child. I've always been a little strange and I was never doing or into what all of the other kids were doing. Other black girls picked on me because they said I had a "white girl’s" name and that I talked "white". Then I met a black girl named Heather at some sort of girl scout function. She talked like me, she looked like me, her name was Heather and best of all she didn't take any crap from anyone and actually rescued me from another group of girls that were starting the usual crap. I never saw her after that but I realized that I should be proud of my name and who I was and that anyone that didn't like it or had a problem with it could kiss off!
I come from a very close knit family. My mother is the second oldest of five children and essentially never left home. She started to take care of both of her ailing parents and when I was about 2 years old made plans to move out but never actually ended up moving out because her father became ill and ended up dying. We lived in a small Iowa town and our front door was always open. My mother was single and I was the first grandchild in the family. I was doted upon by my uncles and went pretty much every place with them. For a number of years my mother’s oldest brother would take me with him when he went to look for work at the unemployment office. By the time I was 4, I looked forward to my weekly trip to the unemployment office with my uncle. One afternoon after ballet class, my mother and I were walking down the street hand in hand when she asked me what I wanted to do for lunch.
“I have a great idea! Let’s go to the unemployment office!”
Puzzled, my mother made sure she’d heard me correctly. “The unemployment office….for lunch?”
“Yep! If we go to the unemployment office, Miss Vicky will give us pizza and Shirley temples and we can sit in the booth and look at the fish!” I started to pull my mother down the street towards the unemployment office. When we got to the front of the plaza downtown, I ran down the steps in front of my mother and pushed open the wooden door to what I knew as the Unemployment Office. As it turns out the Unemployment Office was actually a bar called the Town Clock Inn and I had been a regular since I was about 16 months old.
After pizza and Shirley temples my mother and I headed home. I was settling down in the living room for my nap when my uncle strolled in the front door. “Hello Heather Dear! What did you do today?”
Excited, I sat up on the couch and said, “I took mommy to the unemployment office for lunch!!”
My uncle stopped in his tracks, his eyes were as big as saucers. “You did WHAT?!?!”
It was at precisely that moment when my mom appeared out of no where wielding a frying pan, “You’ve been taking my BABY to a BAR with you?!?!” She chased him around the room and out into the street, I tried to follow to see what was going to happen and was told to get my behind back on the couch.
Fast forward nearly 32 some years later. My mother decides to throw a surprise 60th b-day party for my uncle and when told about the plan my first question was “It’s at the Unemployment Office right??”
The party when off as planned and good times where had by all, but this time there was vodka in my Shirley Temple.
