I guess I’m getting older. Sometimes, I’ll think of a time when kids were just too damn cruel to each other. Looking at some of us now, we’re fairly well-adjusted, no harm done. I have two instances I wish I could have fixed when I was younger.
One instance is when, in eighth grade, we had this kid who occasionally attended our church. He was poor. Dirt poor. Unfortunately, he caught absolute hell because his family couldn’t afford to go to K-Mart and buy him some cheap-ass K-Mart clothes like everyone else. He walked around in 70′s butterfly collars and assorted clothes that must have been hand-me-downs – I say this, because Goodwill has fairly modern clothes that I’ve wore proudly through the years.
He was a fairly handsome kid, had flowing sandy blond hair and blue eyes. But I only remember the last time I saw him before he stopped going to our school. The week before, his dad shaved his head. Just being an asshole, I guess. And that, coupled with his clothes, just socially crippled the kid. He left our school bus, jumped into a puddle in front of his shack of a house and that was the last we saw of him.
I guess I wish I was a better kid. I got the hell picked outta me, but I was a good kid. I had poor friends, people who lived in shacks, etc and never treated them differently….I didn’t know they were different. Partially, I believe, this was because I was raised by my Grandparents and their depression-era upbringing.
I guess I wish I invited him over to ride bikes. Something to at least atone for treating him like he wasn’t human.
Why do I think of this, some 20+ years later? Who knows.
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