georgio

Sun 9.5.21

      There are people in your life that make a difference.  You may meet them just once; they may share a lone word, a sentence, or not.  This encounter becomes embedded in the inner mind, the section you might call psychic because the memory has a potent flavor.  It points to a new possibility of how one interprets things, to a new direction.

      I went to boarding school as a child with nuns and 120 girls.  I managed to escape that situation by running away, 14 years old.  The police shortly found me on a deserted road and brought me back to the station.  The nuns said, No, we’re not taking her back.  Dad was furious, What am I going to do now?!

      I was free; out in the world.  Every day was a new experience with new sights and colors.  Nuns didn’t allow TVs, which struck me as a good idea because playing outdoors I would see in my neighborhood, house after house, people sitting watching the box.  It had a mesmerizing effect.  Kids talked about sex, their genitals.  Some kids were already dead, by that I mean here but not here.  They had been so indoctrinated that they weren’t a kid anymore, but a sort of ersatz adult, or what adults thought kids should be like.  I was not molded by the nuns to be part of the era’s zeitgeist.  They formed me according to Catholic precepts of how to be a good girl.  Which of course, I was not.  It’s not that I was bad, I just had a mind that differed from theirs.

      One of the things I was really looking forward to was going to school on a yellow school bus.  And, there were boys.  I seriously checked them out.  Once I even followed one home, three stops beyond my own.  This kid was in my class, tallish, blond hair, good-looking.  He interested me, being in my class, as one of the boys in the back of the class that teacher would hand a pack of cards to with the understanding that they not interrupt teacher’s class.  You can imagine the impact that had on me. 

      On the school bus, was a boy whose father owned several Italian sandwich, pizza shops, named Georgio’s.  Georgio son was being picked on mercilessly by a bully and his cohorts on the bus.  This went on for days.  One Friday, when the bus stopped in front of Jordan Junior High School and the kids tumbled out, I saw Georgio waiting outside the bus.  Then the bully, a big kid, came out and Georgio jumped him, got him pinned on the ground and let him have it, bang, bang, bang.  None of the bully’s cohorts came to his rescue.  He was crying. 

The favorite post this month has been Simulation Theory