I had a lucky childhood mostly, which I could not take for granted after the incident when I was in my mother's belly on a two lane highway, an oncoming schoolbus swerved over the line and almost collided with us. I think I remember. I got the best of education and parents and a brother who looked after me with great care. I had my own room at an early age, though I wished I could share a room with my older brother still, in a sprawling Queen Anne Victorian on a hill. We had a dog, a cookie jar, steam radiators, and a piano. My mother issued spankings by the mouth of its winding staircase. My father came home from work and the family gathered round the kitchen table nights, and we picked a prayer from a deck of cards inside a plastic loaf of bread, to read with our heads bowed and fingers clasped before our meal.
I had lots of chores to do and lots of books to explore. I loved the Chronicles of Narnia most. I cherished those books. I had one foot in the church and one foot out, in perfect reflection of my mother's Christianity and my father's atheism. I certainly enjoyed exploring the great cathedrals of New York City and participating in charitable events. And listening to music all the time. Years later I became agnostic and a social worker. Television became a terrible faith. Mindlessness and magical thinking and unreality. I was much better off reading and using my own imagination, playing outdoors with the neighborhood kids in any weather. Skating, running, listening to music, fighting, writing.
Thinking back on my life... there is no wonder i am changed and yet remain quite the same at the core, rock steady somehow, trying to be an innovator, trying to express myself in meaningful waves, and hopefully many more years even twice as many years in store, which i could not even say three years ago today, when was my time of dying. Some like myself cannot stand (for our health) lashing out upon the world when we feel we have been forsaken. Instead we go inward and hurt ourselves, which is no less terrible perhaps - but I would rather swallow the poison than poison you, if between the two was my only choice. That's just me.
