When You Don’t Know What To Do

ask your inner child or Bruce Lee

When I was a kid, around 6 years old, my grandma gifted me a microscope and a science book illustrated by Charles M. Schultz. She had also gifted me two encyclopedia sets. One set was very used, an old 1950s, traditional blue hard cover, Encyclopedia Britannica from her home. The other set was a brand new, fake leather bound, Time Warner edition specifically about cowboys and outlaws of the wild west. I was stimulated and entertained reading through them. The gifts were greatly appreciated as I was having a rough go-of-it socially, being the new kid on the block.

Disappearing into the worlds my grandma provided were calming and engaging. Learning about cowboys, Indians, bank robbers, and gold miners felt like time traveling. Her gifts also turned my own backyard into a world filled with microscopic beings waiting to be discovered. An old boring yard was made new again by looking up the plants and small animals that occupied it, then finding surprising details.

I preferred this calm and engaged state of mind to the anxiousness I felt daily after attempts by the other kids on the block to bully me. We were all pressured by our parents to play together because all of us lived on the same dirt road and there weren’t other kids for miles around. There were about nine of us total from 5 different families. The oldest was about 11 and the youngest was probably 4. The main instigator was a little boy that was a year older than me. He seemed to get too hyper and then get mean, or he’d get too bored and then get mean. I was usually able to ignore most bullying attempts by walking away or pretending to be bored. And when the attempts started to escalate, I’d ditch those kids while riding bikes, in favor of spending time with pond scum and my new favorite toy, my microscope (which I had to sneak out of the house because my step mom said it was expensive, and not allowed to be played with unsupervised).

But then school started and there were a whole new band of bullies added to the mix, and a whole new territory to carve out beyond the dirt road… the playground. It would be a year or two before I would have read Lord of the Flies, but when I read that book, I instantly recalled many incidents from that dirt road (where I learned how to ride my blue Shwinn with whitewall tires) and the playground I had my first fight.

I was “big” for my age (tall and a wee chubby) and my mom had cut my hair short. I liked to wear…