Postcard Memoirs

Goldie Goldbloom

How to walk across the top of slippery waterfalls without falling in. How to get leeches off your legs. How to make bird sounds. Ways of pretending you have brushed your teeth when you  haven’t for  three weeks. Moment when you discover that teeth brushing is incredibly vital. How to practice kissing. How to bribe your brother not to tell that he saw you practicing kissing. Lemonade stand management. How not to set the field at the end of the road ablaze. What to do if it accidentally happens. Barbecued-everything. The fine art of tie ironing. Best manly scents for when your dad offers to buy your first bottle of “perfume.” Snappy comebacks to classic bullying gambits, nerdiness including nerdy glasses 101, uses for the funky junk you find in the dump/thrift shop/rubbish bins behind the grocery/alley. Coolest ways to whistle. Fence sitting/riding. Tire swings, rope ladders, compasses and rafts. Boulder-rolling, rolling downhill inside a tire, seeing who can go longest inside your Mum’s dryer before punching out the door and falling out in a woozy heap. How to hang spoons on your nose at a diner and make the waiter laugh. Murder in the Dark without wetting your pants. Scary campfire stories. How to comfort the girls who get spooked by scary campfire stories. Secret signal methodology. Time-telling from the height of the sun. Homemade medicine, especially anti frog-wart medicine made from stinging nettles, and cures when you are on the run (a pebble in the mouth when you are thirsty but don’t have any water). How to avoid being head-butted by goats. How to avoid being head-butted by your Mum when you come home after dark, covered in stinging nettles, leeches, barbecue sauce and ash, saying that you’re still learning how to tell time by the sun, but in the meantime, your brand new girly-watch went over the waterfall when you almost fell in, but didn’t.

Goldie’s novel “Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders” won the 2008 AWP Award. Her collection of short fiction is forthcoming in 2011. Her work has appeared in many countries and languages. She writes stultifying thirty page letters to her friends who plan on selling them on ebay *if she becomes famous.  [*Editor’s note: “When” she becomes famous..]