A Day That Changed My Life
June 10th, 2008When I was about twelve, my Mother had a boyfriend. He was a skinny little guy with the worst luck with animals. He had been attacked by Pit Bulls and Dobermans, and German Shepards (please note all the plurals, they are not exaggerated.) He had two metal ribs because a horse he was feeding a carrot decided instead to bite two of his God given ribs right out of his chest through his flannel shirt. He had been in several motorcycle accidents, and was once pinned under a truck, bent in half such that he was looking up from between his boots as a priest gave him last rites. The man had bad luck. He was also an amateur taxidermist, and I once watched him preserve a lobster. He managed to inject his own left little finger with the solution which was supposed to turn the lobster’s tail muscles solid. He smiled through everything in life with a hearty, “Oh well.” And, on the occasion of the accidental attempt at preserving his own hand for posterity, his reaction was just to chuckle, flex his hand, and say, “Well, it will either circulate itself out, or I’ll loose the finger, and maybe the next one. Hmm.”
It was this boyfriend, who opened my eyes to basically the whole world.
You see, I was a terribly shy boy. I spent my days in near complete mental isolation. I knew there were other people in the world, and I knew that they had some sort of interactions with each other, and I vaguely knew it was something that I wanted. All of that occurred outside of the world of my experience. One day, Roger (that was his name) was sitting at the table with me while Mom made dinner. He said, “Travis, I notice that whenever you walk, you always look down at the ground. Maybe you should try looking up sometime, see what’s there.”
It was my habit, at the time, to walk myself the eight blocks to school everyday. The morning after Roger made his suggestion I walked the same exact walk to school, but this time I looked up. My God! The world! It was so fucking huge! The vastness of it, the beauty, the sky that would not stop. I was a twelve year old boy seeing the world for the first time. I was born again into a universe so much larger than the one I had known. It was joyous.
Then I got to school, with all those mysterious others, and I looked back down. I sat with my head down through homeroom, and half way through the first period of school. We were working on some arithmetic, which I have always had a talent for. Because of that talent I was nearly done with the assigned problems about a third of the way through the period. I was looking straight down at a blank spot between two problems when it hit me. “What if I looked up?” I did. The room exploded in all directions. I thought, “There are so many kids here!” I smiled and looked around the room at the other children diligently working at their papers. My eyes drifted slowly, nonchalantly, And then, I saw her. I don’t know her name. I never will. But, she looked up at me, saw me smiling and smiled back one of the most lovely smiles I have ever seen. My head snapped back down to my paper work so fast that my neck hurt for the whole next week.
The next day at school another girl I knew by mumble, Shereif, walked up at me smiling and said, “Travis, what happened? You never smile, and you never look up.” I turned bright red and shrugged. She said, “Well, whatever, I like it.”
That experience gave birth to my life long love of exploring possibilities of perspective, of viewing the world in other ways. It also sparked in me a love affair with relating to people, the whys and wherefores of it all, the forms it takes.
I am eternally grateful to Roger, for that. He didn’t last long as my Mom’s boyfriend, and I never did see him after that. I am sure he was killed by a circus elephant, or something. Wherever he is, I hope he has some idea of what a difference he made in a small boys life. I still wistfully look down sometimes as I walk, especially when a girl smiles at me, but now it’s with a twinkle in my eye.
