Taylor Was A Bust

Going back to Taylor on leave was like walking into a house with one very irate alligator, my mother. I don't know why it surprised me, I have known how she was all my life. Why did I go back to Taylor? I'm not sure, but it probably had something to do with garnering some respect. Right. Lotsa luck. And why in the hell would I even care about gaining this respect from her and the rest of Taylor? I'm not sure, maybe because for eighteen years of constant harassment by mother and inattentive reaction by my father, that, plus the fact that I had shoved my insecurities and had actually replaced them with positive thoughts and pride of something accomplished, i.e., the communications/teletype school. But since the teletype had a keyboard on it, mother only said, "Oh, you're a secretary."

The conquering hero was a dud back in his hometown, much like he was before he left. There are just places certain people are not meant to live . . . Taylor, Arkansas is that place for me. Conquering hero. Big joke. I had no illusions in that directions, of course, but I did have disillusions that the school I had gone through, passed with flying colors, kept my nose-to-the-grindstone more or less, which had filled me with pride, would somehow correlate into more acceptance. It didn't. It was never brought up after the first initial conversation. I have to admit, even now, that I loved the school. I was learning something no one in Taylor knew and I was damn good at it, but I found out, to Taylor, it meant less than nothing. That would be all right. El Paso was calling. What I would learn there isn't taught in any kind of school, except maybe you could say it was a primer for the underside of society, which is an offshoot of the School of Hard Knocks, something I would embrace wholeheartedly, realizing as I did, that the good folks in Taylor would be shaking their heads and tsk, tsking, saying things like, "We knew he was like that, we've known it all along."

Maybe they had. Whether they had known it all along or not, I would be back in Taylor in a few years to give them reason to nod and cluck some more . . . I would bring it home to them. But in the meantime, I was headed for Biggs AFB with an even a bigger chip on my shoulder and a willing nature to taste the forbidden . . . Tomorrow . . .

My Novels:

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