Fading
Someone I care about is dying.
Slowly.
Painfully.
And I simply don’t want to imagine a world without him.
In life, we sometimes gain extra ‘family’ members along the way. Bob was this kind of a man to me. He was a spiritual and intellectual ‘father’ who helped me navigate my way to completion of my degree. He is compassionate, highly ethical, funny, gregarious, wise, challenging, and joyful. Really one of those rare gems who make the world a more wonderful place simply by existing.
The Greatest Love of All
The year was 1985. The album? Whitney Houston – Whitney Houston.
I was pretty young in 1985, only about 7 years old. I was precocious and wildly unpopular. I remember public school as an exercise in frustration and anger management. I would speak out in class, so they would place me at the Spanish-speaking table. Thus, I learned to swear in Spanish. Well, I must admit that the swearing wasn’t my intent, but I really liked to chat, and I really believed that I was learning normal conversation.
I read a great deal at that point in my life, mainly because I needed to escape. I was living through the heart of my parents’ divorce, and something inside me truly believed that it was my fault. I acted out, and had a really nasty habit of kicking people in the shins. When it came to school, I was a conundrum, because they would send me to 6th grade reading and social studies classes, but I was in remedial math and failing my handwriting course. I was normally alone during recess and lunch, even though there were certain ‘friends’ from my street. They mostly made a spectacle of me, and I had horrible self-esteem. I was in gymnastics, which offered some comfort, but I always felt that I was following my brother’s greatness. He did everything better than I did.
But there is one story that sparks things off, that really meant something to me. There was a bully in the school. A bigger boy, probably in the 5th or 6th grade. I can’t remember if I had been asked to leave the class because I was too chatty or if I was heading to the portable classrooms of my upper-level classes, but I was out on the asphalt of the playground. It was quiet. And I had to walk past this great, big bully. And I can remember shaking in my tiny trainers. I was a demon on the handball court, with loads of untapped anger and velocity behind my swings, but this was different. Here he was, here I was, and when I looked closer,
This work is protected…
The Whispered Life by Katherine Sturm is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.