I decided to wear my earphones on my walk this morning. I thought I would just let my mind travel, keep away from politicks, developments on the home front, problems of the world.
I should have turned on my Pod Cast but when I turned on my IPod there was my favorite music. So, I don’t learn anything on this walk, I would try to see if I could walk the distance without getting bored. But then bored is good, it isn’t controversial.
As I sang to myself, and looked for the mango tree to see how it was coming along, life was good. Half way through my walk the words to “You Picked Me” by A Fine Frenzy became clearer. I was admiring the phrase “like an apple in a tree hiding out beneath the leaves, I was difficult to see, but you picked me.”
I just loved how she conveyed that thought so thoroughly. But my mind wouldn’t let it go, long past the finish of the song. “Hidden beneath the leaves” it started to make it’s rounds through my crazy imagination as I started walking slower finding it hard to even lift my head in greetings to others walking by. My mind slid back to my childhood.
I was around 6 years old and my parents were in a quandary. Mom had come back from talking to the neighbor, telling dad that the neighbor had no idea where Gloria could be. In fact the neighbors daughter had run away too! “ I bet Gloria is with those Indians again!
My little mind conjured up my sister up in the hills somewhere with a tribe of wild Indians being held hostage. Where were those Indians? I had never seen her with anyone but her friends and they didn’t seem wild to me.
Gone again, hiding, boy my sister was a handful. I couldn’t imagine in my naive mind why she would not want to stay home. “Oh well” I would say and run out the door to play as my mother and father took off in the car.
I was left alone at night to sleep in the big bed where she and I slumbered in the room that smelled of rotting wood. I missed the security of her being next to me for some reason. I would stare at our little wooden dresser painted with layers of gray paint, the closet that we shared and the empty rocking chair.
My sister would turn up sooner or later, weather she was dragged home by my parents or she came home voluntarily, kicked off the reservation as it were.
It was in the Mission District of San Francisco. High above the dark patch of grass and trees that were so infamous at night, I stared out of a window straining my eyes to see if anyone was being attacked in the park below. I was with my sister and she was visiting the “Indians.” I don’t know why I knew they were whom my mother was referring to, but I did.
As I stood there with the curtains pulled aside looking into the dark, my heart pounded, it felt like I was falling into a dark well and that I would never see home again. For what ever reason I was frightened but I just waited in hopes that my sister would take me home.
The “Indians’ lived in a housing not in a tent. They were nice enough to me but they were not the type of associations that my mother would have approved of. The apartment was small and poorly furnished. Dolores Park spread out below, with the reputation of rapes and attacks. The housing was run down and crowded. This was where my sister hid from my parents this is what she preferred to our home.
Throughout my childhood my sister would always be telling me don’t tell Mom, this or that and I think this is one of the places I was not supposed to tell mom about. I was a brat but somehow these secrets that she entrusted to me, I knew needed to be kept.
There are so many things in my childhood that I can’t remember or for some reason won’t. I wonder how much Gloria protected me? Was I like that apple hidden in the tree? Was it she who kept him from picking me?
No comments:
Post a Comment