Shadows and Shade - Part I

THINKING A LOT ABOUT POTENTIAL LATELY. Energy capable of going kinetic. A kind of hope and belief in the ability to fall or fly. It feels like intuition sometimes, in that you can sense it but is only validated when it yields something else.

I was, like most people growing up, lavished upon with a healthy mix of affirmation and shame. 

It was a pretty clear Yin/Yang in our household. My father struggled to approach the changing world with his 1950s world view, a view that made real men hairy-chested, muscle-bound inseminators who could field strip a Buick blindfolded. My brother was born seven years before I was with a love for sports but a body that would prevent him from living that dream. My mother proceeded to miscarry three times before - in what I have always envisioned to be hail Mary coitus - I shot forth into the world. Finally, a chance for my father's genes to manifest in the way in which his God intended. Progeny waiting to be trained for battle, a clean slate upon which to write the ways of men.

Alas, it was not to be. In me he got the flip side of my brother. Born rosy and plump, I developed near hemophilia only to round back out around puberty. I had a general lumpiness of body that could have been molded into anything: baseball, certainly. Basketball, maybe. Football? Well, that's a stretch. The body was there, but absolutely no interest in sports, hunting, fishing, any of the things my father associated directly with maleness. I didn't have to imagine his frustration. I saw it in glances I will never forget, a chill hard to shake off.

1. The energy possessed by a body by virtue of its position relative to others, stresses within itself, electric charge, and other factors.

Potential energy. Sounds spot on, but it didn't feel like potential to me. To that young, blonde-haired overly sensitive boy it felt like losing the race while your loved ones look on, but in a dream where it happens over and over, skipping like a record just out of reach.

Next: In which there is fire and wheelies and even some Melville...

Happy Piano Day