I look at the clock again, 2:50 am; I better get some
shut eye. My mind is still racing and I can’t get comfortable. I lay still
thinking about Amari and how we met. Part of me feels like it was a lifetime
ago while part of me feels like it was just yesterday. My thoughts take me to
my past as I drift to sleep:
I’ve been
told all my life to follow my passion. To tap in to what makes me tick, what
makes me wake up in the morning and excites me to the core. When I think back,
there have always been two things that made me move forward, things that made
me dream, and things I yearned for, but never fully attained. They were
teaching and writing.
I remember
one year I got a chalk board for Christmas. It was kept in my Grand-Mother’s
basement because that was the only place there was room for it. As a child it was
bigger than life. Each day I made my lesson plan, and tutored the imaginary
students that sat before me. That black board, its’ chalk and eraser gave me
the thirst for knowledge, I couldn’t let my students down, they depended on me,
they had the same thirst I had, knowing.
And then
there was writing. When I found my old
diary I was amazed that my first entry was made in 1965 documenting my
confessions to my Parish’s priest and my impure thoughts about a boy in my
class that I no longer have a recollection of. It continued with how many Hail
Mary’s and the Lord’s Prayers that I needed to complete to cleanse my soul of
the feelings I felt for the boy who sat next to me when I was six years old.
Then there are no entries until April 4, 1968, when I was 8 years old. Martin
Luther King had been assassinated and I wrote of my city, the District of
Columbia, and how it was in turmoil through the eyes of a child. I remember the
nuns from my elementary school ushering us to the outlining boundaries and
praying for our safe journey home.
When my
Grand-Mother passed away the family gathered there to divide the treasures that
lay within that small brick, semi-attached row house, the same house that
housed my chalk board, and my imaginary students. Damn where the
hell did I put that diary.
To Be
Continued…..
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