Festive

When I was about, oh, four years old, I accompanied my family to a family reunion. I don't know who's, but it was a heck of a shin dig. There were 'bout two dozen kids and they pumped us full of food and sugar and sat back, partied, and watched us bounce around the area. I remember sitting on a staircase with eight other little kids, big hunks of chocolate cake studiously disappearing; when a naked lady walked out of the upstairs bathroom, got a towel, and turned and saw 16 solemn little eyes looking at her. She screamed, quite educational.

We had a big old picnic and I got in trouble for telling a lady I didn't want any of her macaroni salad cause it tasted like shit. I had an aversion to macaroni salad for twenty years after that whuppin'.

Or maybe it was linked to the memory of leaving. We were getting in the car, a '56 Cadillac, when a kid I had been playing with, earlier, suddenly took off running with an older person after him. Oh boy, one last game, I was off like a rocket joining in the race, my Dad tried to stop me and I was like a broken field runner.

I caught them on the other side of the house and the older person was viciously beating the shit out of my friend. He had a belt in his hand, but that was just collateral damage, he was beating a little five year old boy like a punching bag. I had a flower pot in my hands and had gone about three steps while thinking furiously. Why was no one stopping this? Click. People had tried to stop me, including my father. What would they do after I invalidated this big older person? I wasn't going to get away with stopping this, and none of those balless pukes had followed me. No posse was coming. I surrendered the battle field and retreated. I walked around the house, still holding a flower pot, to complete silence. I glared fury at every man there, and nobody would meet my gaze. I looked at my father and he dropped his head. I put down the flower pot and climbed in the car. I was emotionally distraught that this could and would be allowed to happen. We rode home in silence, the festival atmosphere destroyed.

I was probably a difficult child. A gimp leg, which modern medicine corrected with casts in my first year. I remember riding home from the Doctor's office after yet another cast change, and my Mother explaining to me why she was crying -- seeing the other children there that were so much worse than me. I finally understood quiet crying, that's what i did as I came around that house and got in the car.

I also liked to sit in the corner of my toy box and make 'my sound' for hours on end, I tell you the spirits liked it. My OCD was actually encouraged, to keep me in a routine and connected. That was no more, I had been face planted in reality, and I quit going out that bridge.

I probably didn't say a dozen words between the reunion and Christmas. I was furious at reality and other beings that would allow such brutalization. I ended up 'tongue-tied' and had trouble with annunciation and elocution up 'til 'bout the fourth grade.

From that day forward I was watched. If I saw any act of bullying or dominance, I would mess somebody up, preferring death from above. I wasn't allowed to play football. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got a gimp leg, right. I shoulda found rugby, but i didn't.

To this day, I still deal with repressed anger and can flair into a rage due to injustices that I perceive. It scares me how enjoyable a rumble is once it's started. If someone gets my dander up, they're foolish if they think I'm abackin'.

But don't worry, I take my meds, and sometimes I rock and hum my sound. I am more complacent and reasonable. It's like killing flies, they'll always be there and sooner or later you get tired of it.

We never went back to see those people, again.