I walked out into the back
yard. Standing there was a
grasshopper. My mother, from her window,
told me to be careful for my skin. I
vocally agreed and walked to the side of the house, out of her vision. I kept watch on that grasshopper. When he looked at me, I held out my hand,
opened with fingers out and those two outside fingers, the small one and the
thumb, touching each other on the same hands, I held my hands out, palms facing
the sun. I was acting like some open
flowers, and that grasshopper viewed me not moving other than bending in the
wind. He hopped over and landed in my right
palm.
My parents tried to act like
parents to me. They tried to act
caring. They did nothing to
intentionally hurt or ignore me, but I could not feel they were close to me. My brother did not even try to act like he
cared about me. He played God’s Priest
using a chess board. I asked him a
couple of times if he wanted me to be his alter boy in his game. He’d get mad,
throw pieces of the rug he had ripped out at me, and after about five times he
would just ignore me.
A lot of kids in our neighborhood did not pay much attention
to me. They would play softball. They would play football. They would play hockey, using roller skates,
in the streets. My feet were too big for
getting roller skates, so I could not play.
I did not like pushing into other people like some do in football in
order to stop the ball runner or to be a ball runner. So, I did not play. I could not catch or throw or swing the bat
very well so I did not play softball.
Since I was so bad at playing, a lot of the kids in the neighborhood
would either ignore me or laugh at me. I
started walking through the woods to look at animals, instead of being bored and saddened in my neighborhood.
My brother was not liked by other
kids at the start, because of what he said about them, but he played baseball
and used a hockey stick a lot, so that he was good at it. He played with them. Once, he began fighting with two neighbor
kids on the walkway home from school.
Two of them against him. I saw
that and ran into the mess in order to help my brother. My brother got backed into our house and
closed the back door as one kid tried to get him. I grabbed the other kid as I was walking up
the stairs to our front door. He looked
at my face and smiled. He said, “Hit
Me! Hit Me!” I said “I don’t want to hurt anybody.” I let go of his arms and he laughed as he
walked away.
I did have some friends. They were some of the few that the other kids
disliked and laughed at and made fun of.
A bunch of the neighbor kids would go to the unused land a couple blocks
from our house. They would play baseball
or football in the grassy area. I went
towards and slightly into that green grounded open skied area too. Me and one or two other laughed at ones would
go to a small hill behind a food store being built, that was in the unused yard
for quite a while. A while enough for weeds and tall plants to grow, and amongst
what grew we made our way through pathing a long not quite ridged top. We made our way through so many times that
our path became a permanent tunnel through which the green weeds and growing
branch limbs gave us a secured feeling.
Many days I had also walked in the woods
carrying garbage bags so I could clean up treeless circles in the wooded areas
garbaged and ashed up by high school kids who made fun of school and made fun
of me. In cleaning up the woods I got
snakes encircling my arms and legs and they did not hurt me. They rubbed their
noses across my skin. On logs in the creek,
I would see turtles sunning themselves.
After a couple times, they turned their heads and watched me. In watching me stand by the side of the water
they crawled off of their logs and came up to me so I could pet their
shells. As I became more used to the
woods and the nice growingness of thoughts and actions of various forms of
life, I found that the woods pathway led to the local Zoo. In some mornings, after I would enter the
Zoo, I saw Zoo paid people walking their elephants across the whole Zoo walks
in order to give them daily exercises.
The elephants would stop and stare and pointed their noses towards me. After a couple weeks they started pulling
their care takers towards me so those elephants could snuggle their eyes
against me. Their ear flaps were big and
near by but they seemed to know that they liked me and they themselves held
their ears back so I would not get hit by them.
In school I had to sit in the back
of the rows in the classrooms so that the aisles of students in back of me
would not be laughing as much out loud or crunching up papers from their
notebooks and throwing them at me. The
teachers had grown into ignoring me, maybe they did not want to call me to the
front of the classroom to spell a word or work math on the chalkboard and be
laughed at and heckled by the whole room.
The classroom windows were open a lot and various moths would push in
through the screens and fly up to me and perch themselves happily on my neck
and head.
At home my brother would complain
about eating breakfast and supper with me.
He said that I stunk too much and had too many fleas surrounding our
food. My Dad made me eat in our bedroom
so my “religious” brother could have a soul lifting meal with them. Within a couple years my parents moved me to
another bedroom in the house, it used to be a closet, so my God stating brother
could have a more enjoyable night’s rest.
During my trails through the woods,
skunks would drop me off carrots and mice would pull barbequed slices of beef
and pork. Bees flew carrying over waxed
made up containers holding honey for my use as one of their growing
clouds. Racoons knew and understood that
it would not be nice to my parents if they thought I left the house, so they
climbed in through our bathroom window and scrunched on the floor various
versions of my foot prints and shoe prints going up and down the hall and
making my bedroom look occupied.
I got holes dug for me in the
woods. Birds patted their used feathers
and dried leaf veins covering the inside, ground touching areas of my new
outside living quarters so that I could live and sleep dry and warm. As time and living grew on, over my ankles,
arms, legs, chest, and replacing my used, bolted, and busted shirts and pants
are now various tendrils, twining stems Epiphytes (Air Plants), orchids, and
several bromeliads. Possums would eat my
delivered lunches from my closet room at home.
Birds would flock to my several desk chairs at school. My brother was so self involved that he never
noticed me missing either at home or at school.
Living happily with true friends;
life, nature, taught me to start noticing that various exposures of the real
Earth had different temperatures, warm and cold, not related to pipes and sun,
and lava pushes, and flowing of soaking water.
Those mounds and grounds and rocks and ridges had happy and sad and
greeting feelings too. Life of earth had
gotten more encouraging.
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