And now, before we move completely away from this area of time I shall relate some events that I can’t quite place in location or time but believe that they exist in this general vicinity…
…There was the time when I and a little friend had wandered off to the end of the street and my friend found a piece of used chewing gum on the sidewalk. He said that he wasn’t allowed to chew gum at home. I said that neither was I. (which wasn’t true) He then suggested that since neither one of us were allowed to chew gum that we could share it right here, right now and that no one would know.
So that’s just what we proceeded to do. My friend first and then me.
I still remember the grit of sand that was mixed in with it.
I didn’t really like the gum or the grittiness of it, but I liked the adventure and camaraderie of the shared experience.
…There was the time when my friends and I had found a place in the road where some fresh roadwork had taken place, and the road crew had filled the hole with fresh blacktop when they were done. It was marvelously wonderful to dig up and play with but very unpleasant was the experience of having my mother wash it off of me using turpentine.
…One day while playing with some friends in a vacant lot we were throwing sand up in the air.
Grabbing handful upon handfuls and throwing them up into the air with the wild abandon of a toddler!
In a moment of sand filled ecstasy I decided to open my eyes to the sky to watch the sand fall back to earth from the furthest reaches of our childish abandon!
I can still see the sand falling back earthward (and eye ward) from the sun.
Oh the pain! The blinding agony of it all! I ran stumbling, screaming, and crying back to my house, eyes filled with sand and tears in search of my mother and the hope of rescue!
…Then there was the time when I was occupying myself with my new found game of attempting to fly by using the railing of our front porch as a launching platform.
A wonderful but short lived adventure which ended by my landing on my mouth, thus gaining for my efforts a mouthful of front yard dirt.
…My first look inside of a book.
Overwhelming is what it was. It was in the entryway of a house in which we lived. I opened it’s cover and looked inside. It was a dictionary. I remember that, and I remember thinking and feeling that I would never be able to translate the meaning of SO MUCH! In that moment the idea of ever being able to read felt more than just a bit of hopeless.
…The same house as the dictionary (before Johns house I remember now) the landlady had a boy who suffered from some form of what they called back then mental retardation.
My mom was concerned about him being around me lest something unpleasant happen, but this one day when I was playing in the backyard he had come out to play and had decided that I needed to get something that he had thrown over the fence. Well I wasn’t allowed to leave the yard so I wasn’t going to get it, but he decided that I was, and so started threatening me with violence. I was scared and was hoping that my mother would notice out the window that I was in trouble but she was no where in sight.
He was telling me that he was going to pick me up and put me over the fence into the next yard so I could get whatever it was that he had thrown there. Over the fence? Into the next world? OMG no! What would I do? How would I ever find my way back? I would be lost! I was very upset about the prospect but he was way bigger than me and way stronger too… That’s all I remember about that scary episode. I don’t recall what happened next. Maybe my mom rescued me. I don’t recall.
…One day while my mom was washing out a glass milk bottle at the sink, it broke somehow and deeply sliced open the inside of her entire forearm from wrist to elbow.
I ended up going to stay with a friend of hers for a while, while she was in the hospital.
Actually it must have been quite a while since when we were reunited I didn’t actually recognize/remember her. I remember her friend, (the woman I had stayed with) had to coax me to go over to this strange woman, saying, “she’s your mother”.
I don’t actually recall much about staying with this woman, except that she had a son, and that he and I fought one day and rolled down a hill tumbling over and each other as we went.
He had said something I didn’t like. I don’t remember what.
Also one day at the barber she had taken me to, the barber accidentally cut one of my ears with his scissors.
Those seem to be the only memories I retain from that adventure. Sure there are others but they are more like phantoms drifting in the fabric of time and memory without any real form or substance, too fleeting to be recalled.
…Back to Johns house. One night my mom had a date. She met this guy somewhere and they dated for a while.
I remember she introduced me to him one night, and then came the inevitable time when I had to go to bed.
But I didn’t want to go to bed. I wanted to stay up and enjoy the company too. I wanted to be a part of it all.
But I had to go to bed. From my bedroom I kept calling my mom. I wanted her to let me stay up. Finally I heard her coming down the hallway. Yay! Maybe I can go back to the living room now!
But it wasn’t her. It was the guy. And as he stood there talking to me he took his belt from his pants and then very matter of factly proceeded to beat me with it.
This had never happened to me before. Sure sometimes my mom would spank me. But here tonight was a stranger beating me with his belt. I remember when he drew it free from his pants that I didn’t even know what that meant. Didn’t understand the danger that was walking towards me. I didn’t realize until the 1st crack of leather upon my body that hell had suddenly found me alone and unprotected in my bedroom.
But I didn’t go willingly. Oh no! I screamed bloody murder for that’s what it felt like. I did not know what would be my fate at the hands of this monster and so let loose my fear and pain in my screams to hasten the ultimate rescue that would come in the form of my mother! And lo! He would regret what he had done this night!
I will not ever forget what happened next… Which was nothing.
Nothing but more beating by this creature and his belt until I cried and whimpered myself into submission… Quiet submission he let me know would be the only way to make him stop. He communicated to me that as long as I reacted to the beating that it would continue.
My mother never came. Just never came.
It became apparent that quiet submission was my only avenue of escape, but not an easy doorway to take since the overwhelming horror of my situation had me in its grasp both physically and emotionally.
My mother never came. Just never came.
How could that be? What did it mean that she never came? How could she let this stranger beat me? I of course tried giving her the benefit of the doubt. But how could she not have heard my screams and the crack of leather?
Maybe there was somehow a valid explanation. Even now I find that I want there to be one. But as you may imagine I asked her about this event several times over the course of our history together, and I must admit that the question was not ever answered satisfactorily since she claimed to not remember the event. Who knows? Maybe she had gone to the store and just wasn’t there at the time. That possibility only just occurred to me.
Either way, I did not understand, and I’m sure that in its way it became an important life lesson for me, and also in its way, whether fair or not, whether born of misunderstanding or not, changed the relationship between my mom and myself forever.
That night I lost a little bit of my trust and my innocence. I now knew beyond any doubt, that the world was not always safe or friendly. And from my viewpoint, the one person that I looked to for protection and guidance had betrayed that trust in such a way as to shake the foundations of my understanding of life and the world.
Little did I realize at the time that the lesson I was learning that night, a lesson that could be entitled, “Look to yourself for protection”, was to be an ongoing and important theme in my experience, and that soon all that I had known as secure in my world was to come crashing down around me…
“I Pleiades” The Story Of A Lifetime. FOLLOW today and watch the story unfold.
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