Lesson 6 Part 1

The room was scary –

I stepped into the room and my body crawled with goose bumps.  Uncle Ted’s trophy room was not about sports as I know them.  Instead, ten pairs of eyes stared from animal heads poking out of the walls.  I turned tail and ran before the lion head ate me, or worst – before I became one of the heads.

I’m afraid to fly –

We both had our super-hero capes on as we each shimmied up the rope to the garage roof.  Peter was Superman and flexed his pretend muscles.  I was a bony Batman wearing one of mom’s new blue towels safety-pinned around my neck.  We both stretched our arms forward in preparation to make us air-borne to save the day.  Peter said on the count of three we must fly off the roof.  1-2-3 he yelled taking his flying leap of faith, but I sat back on my bum and sighed – maybe next time.

He was ugly –

Many of the strolling women quickly looked away in disgust as the hunched man shuffled on the street with down-cast slit eyes that took one too many punches.  The purple-red bulbous nose looked like a huge rotten strawberry.  His cheeks were scribbles of lines and his lips, cracked and blistered, never knew a woman’s kiss.

My father was quiet –

While my mother was always yackety yack, my dad was without hype or gimmicks.  He spent long hours doing home repair projects in the basement or fixing our broken bikes without ever raising his voice to yell at us for being careless.  He was the kind of dad you could sit next to all day fishing and know what he was thinking without ever saying a word.


Grandma was a thief –

Grandma collected stuff.  Every day she went out and came back with some little useless treasure she could not resist.  Today it was my remote control that she slipped into her handbag when she thought I wasn’t looking.

I’m a mess –

I had ten minutes and two blocks to go to get to my job interview, when a micro burst of rain shattered my hopes for making a good impression.  My reflection in the window of the high-rise building I should be entering reflects a mass of wet hair that looks like tossed spaghetti, my best dress clings to me like a wet suit, and my new shoes squish with every step I take.