Violence In The Kitchen

Truer words were never spoken than what is aflame on the left. "You don't have eternity." Until you have something enter your psyche which is so dramatic and, well, important do these words begin to come into play. And when this important and dramatic thing suddenly, after all these years, appears in your life it is a wonderful feeling and you just can't wait to get started doing it. But this important thing you feel you must do, you have to do, brings to mind questions you really have never entertained before. Questions like what if you die before you can finish it? Unthinkable. The mere fact that life as tenuous as it is could cause you to leave the sphere of the living in the blink of an eye, and this important thing you feel is the culmination of your life's work will not be finished. It cannot happen. Ah, but it could, and you know it. Oh, I guessI have brought this same question up a few times before, but usually only in passing, like, "I hope I have time to get this done." That is an anemic way of putting it. I find myself lying awake at night thinking of the possibility that before Misdemeanors & Felonies: A Memoir is finished I could die. Hell, I have enough wrong with me, that any one of a half dozen of things could take me out. Let's see, I have high blood pressure, thyroid problems, kidney dysfunction, emphysema, and diabetics. I am lucky, I suppose, that I live in an age and in a country, where research has made it possible to, if not beat these diseases, at least prolong life much longer than it could in the past. But that doesn't matter, because with all the miracle drugs I am taking, and I am taking a lot, I could go out before I finish this sentence. I'm not getting morbid here, it is just a fact of life, or rather, death.

Chapter 15 took place during the summer vacation between the eleventh and the twelfth grade. A very pivotal time in my history, because of something a little neighborhood boy said to me. What he said drove me into a drunken rage and I demanded some answers from my parents. They did not answer my drunken questions the way I wanted them to, therefore I became violent. Not with them. No, I never struck them, but I did commence to wreck mayhem in the kitchen where our conversation was taking place. That, at least got an answer from my mother, but it wasn't the answer I wanted to hear, because it was a lie. That night served to change the way my parents looked at me. It changed nothing about the way I looked at them, for nothing had changed in my way of thinking. The whispering rumors I had heard all my life had finally been addressed. It scared them and pissed me off, because I was still being lied to like I had always been lied to. It was getting close to the time I would be severing ties with Taylor and all that went with it, but if I thought I had cowed my mother into leaving me alone, within the next year I was to find out how wrong I was.

New chapter tomorrow . . .

NOTES:

Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621

Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842

My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742