Little Altars Everywhere Read Free

you know a thing about cooking or it’ll be used against you in later life.
    Now at our meetings, instead of working on our Hospitality, Music, and Sewing badges, they have us work on dramatic readings. They make us memorizeJames Whitcomb Riley and Carl Sandburg poems and then Mama coaches us on how to recite them. She calls out, Enunciate, dahling! Feel it! Feel it! Love those words out into the air!
    All my popular girlfriends look at me like: Oh, we never knew you came from a nuthouse. I just lie and tell them Mama used to be a Broadway actress, when all she ever really did in New York was model hats for a year until she got lonely enough to come home and marry Daddy.
     
    Our annual Scout camp-out always comes up just after Easter. I just dread it. I’m in the middle of reading a truly inspiring book called Judy’s Journey. It’s all about this girl who’s exactly my age, and she and her whole family are migrant workers. They have to travel from place to place, living hand-to-mouth. Judy works in the fields and never complains, and she is brave, and a hard worker, and very popular with all the other migrant kids. Her father plays the harmonica, and her mother is so kind and quiet. I fantasize around fifty times a day about being her instead of me. I would just kill to stay in my room and finish that book instead of going on a stupid camp-out, but you’ve got to do these things whether you want to or not. Otherwise any chance you have at popularity can go straight down the drain and you will never get it back.
    You have to start early if you plan to be popular. Mama was extremely popular when she was growingup. She was elected Most Well-Liked, she was head cheerleader, captain of the girls’ tennis team, and assistant editor of the yearbook. Everyone at Thornton High knew who she was. Even though it sometimes wore her out, she said Hi! to every single soul she passed in the hall. It was a lot of work, but that is how her reputation was built. Mama understands the gospel of popularity and she is passing it on to me so I won’t be left out on the fringes.
     
    We head out to Camp Mary Alice real early on a Saturday morning. It is twenty or so miles from Thornton, in the deep piney woods. They named the camp for this very famous Louisiana Girl Scout who gave up her entire life for scouting. There is a main lodge built of logs with a huge fireplace at one end, long tables set up in the middle, and a big kitchen at the other end. Not far away, at the edge of the woods, there is a screened-in cabin filled with bunk beds where you sleep.
    Right off the bat, Necie backs her Country Squire station wagon into the flagpole and bends it in half. I’m inside the cabin unfurling my bedroll when I hear this big uproar. I bolt out the door and—wouldn’t you know it—there is the Girl Scout flag flapping in the breeze a couple of inches above the ground! The Louisiana state flag with the mama pelican feeding her babies is right next to it, and the American flag is right next to that.
    Mama is laying on the ground kicking her feet upand down, just howling with laughter. Tooty, she yells, quit it! I’m tee-teeing all over myself!
    “Tooty” is Necie’s Ya-Ya nickname, and all the Scouts flutter around me squealing, Sidda, why is your mother calling Mrs. Ogden “Tooty”? Why is your mother wetting her pants?
    Well, I could have predicted that something like this was going to happen. You can’t go anywhere with Mama without things getting nuts. If it’s going along too smooth she will invent something just to stir things up. Sometimes we’ll be downtown shopping and everything’s going normal, and Mama will put her fingers in her mouth and let out the loudest, most piercing whistle you ever heard in your life. Then everyone gets startled and drops what they’re doing and looks around to see where the noise came from. And Mama, she’ll just bend over and pretend to be looking at a pair of shoes. Then she’ll lift her