random musings

It’s always been hard for me to trust people. When I was young, we moved around a lot. From West Virginia to South Carolina, from the Carolinas to Ohio, from Ohio to Virginia, all up and down the east coast. And it always seemed like there were people in our new community that looked exactly like people I knew before we had moved. An old lady from a church in South Carolina, I saw in the grocery store in Ohio. A kid from my second grade class was the same guy who took my lunch money and sat on my head on a school bus seat at my new school.

Though I was only six, I was pretty smart; I realized there was a conspiracy here. We hadn’t really moved from West Virginia, or Ohio, or for that matter, the Carolinas. There were actually no such places. There was only the area we lived in. Dad packed up the car, drove in circles on a highway for twelve hours, then, figuring he had disillusioned us enough, got off the highway and settled in to our new house, not four miles from our former dwelling. Every adult knew the truth, but tried to hide it from us kids. It was a law, really. Don’t tell your kids the world is not round. It’s flat and it’s the size of Hoboken, New Jersey. Then when a boy turns into a young man, say, at age eighteen, the night before he leaves for college, the dad sits him down, hands him the car keys, has the birds and bees talk, and then says, You’re a man now, and it’s time you learned the truth: the world is no bigger than what you’ve seen. I may not trust people, but at least I’m bright.