My Youngest Days

In my youngest days, as an infant and beyond, I must have been pretty agreeable. Mom told me I was always content to play outside in the dirt or the grass, and even in the mud. Sure, I had some toys and games. But no, I didn't need anything really special.

We lived above the Edgefield Tavern. Mom worked, so a Sid, babysitter would watch over me. Sid didn't always pay really close attention. It rained and became wet and muddy outside. In the alley beside the upstairs apartment, a lot of standing water had gathered. I was still young, maybe three or four years old. Sid did not watch me closely. I spent a lot of time playing in the water puddles, becoming wet and muddy. When Mom came home from working, that was the very last time she used Sid as a babysitter.

When we lived on East Street, on the west side of Uhrichsville, I could have fun just riding my small peddle-powered metal car outside by myself. I could peddle on the sidewalk and into the Grandison neighbor's driveway. My father bought that car for me. It is one of the only things I ever received from him. Mom gave me his first two names. He kept his last name. I didn't get it. We never met except when I was very young. I don't remember it.

Uncle Frank had bought a new Thunderbird. When he drove the car to Mom's apartment on East Street, I got really excited and ran out the glass-pane front door to see his bright new car. I somehow forgot to open the door as I ran through it. My white tee-shirt was covered with red blood; my red blood. It got all over his interior when he drove us to the hospital. I received one butterfly self-adhesive stitch near my jugular vein. But I bled very thoroughly.

When I got older and stayed with Mom's parents, on a farm, I loved to play with simple green army men, right out of a bag. Mom got those from Barney Gagner's Western Auto store in downtown Uhrichsville. Building forts and special areas from the rocky dirt and twigs and leaves laying around a Maple tree on their farm was a favorite pastime. It allowed me to figure things out, like solving a puzzle. Those skills would follow me for a long time into the future.

A friend and I would often scamper into the wooded areas to play and to run, to ride a sled in the snow, to explore the brown, leafy autumn hillsides with flowing, bubbling streams. Uncle Jim owned the fifty-two acre farm. He built some ponds with rocky and mossy waterfalls on the property. There were tall, large brown electrical poles with darker oily stains stationed right down the center of a hillside. We rode a sled down the cut-a-way paths between the poles. One time, Alan and I steered the sled smack-dab into a pole. But we were young, Nothing bothered us at that age. I was in third grade and Alan was in fourth.

Everything Happens A Certain Way

Throughout history, everything happens a certain way. Not the same way every time. Not even the expected way. Just a certain way that creates the situation for specific results to occur. Why?

Maybe there is a force, or some overall prevailing condition that allows those events to be as they are. As they may become. To develop into a prescribed set of arbitrary actions.

Frustrations ruminate and try to evolve. The evolution of these newly considered feelings and influences begin their existence as an amorphous living structure, sprouting and growing in a vine-like manner. Pressing against the nearest structured edifice, while staying out of the brilliant sunlight or frigid atmosphere. All-the-while, retaining the acquired form of that initial seed of inspiration. But, the frustrations continue to be. Continual change discovers an infinite array of potential sequels, inviting variation to develop into more highly-diversified results.

The so-called “invisible hand” described by Adam Smith in his book The Wealth of Nations is a non-observable force that controls the law of supply and demand to become a market equilibrium. Yet, in modern times, this equilibrium has been conditionally less than achievable. Instead, all manner of human conditions have saturated and fractured the lifestyles and existence of so many as to become irregular and cancerous to our normal society.

This is just one uniquely pertinent point of view. It is derived from personal conditions and experiences. Absolutely no other person or entity can or may ever have these precise circumstances of that lone context. That reality exists one time only. As it happens; it also dissipates into the ether. It came and it went away.

That is now my dilemma. What was can never be. What was once being developed to create one non-variable line of existence is no more. I am who, and what, is left over.

My deepest thoughts have been clutched and annexed away, deep into some God-forsaken mental underworld of my mind that I did not know even existed. Perhaps those thoughts were disjointed enough to create a symptomatic form of cognitive derision. My recovery from the severe brain trauma may have become a sort of intellectual dissonance, haunting my existence for the rest of my eternity.

I did not recover fully. A large chunk of my existence ceased to exist. That is why I am merely a left over portion of what may have been, what could have been, what can never be again. I am me.

As I struggle and strive to express myself using common language, the words I may have used in my former life elude me. I have tried to replenish my own vocabulary in order to state my personal feelings and thoughts with learned words, using a concise and economical discourse. I unashamedly use literary tools to help create my thoughts on paper, or on my computer screen. Many times I can and I will stray from my preconceived subject. Adam Smith may not be so proud of me and my not so prudent literary discourse.