World Beginnings

In 2004, Sri Lanka was at the beginning of the end of the long-running civil war between the government and the LTTE, known as the Tamil Tigers. The LTTE has the terrible distinction of creating suicide bombers, often using women as carriers, targeting political figures. Since busses were the primary transportation, they became frequent sites for their destruction,  as well as the crowded bazaars. They once attempted to bomb the government complex, which was very close to my school, and the blast rattled the windows in the staff lounge. But the one of the most brutal of their activities was the capture of children to serve as soldiers. No child was safe outside in the North  and armed soldiers would even break into homes demanding one to conscript. No one argued with the brutality of the guns in their faces. One day at school, word filtered down that the UN had captured dozens of child soldiers from the jungles in the north and that several dozen boys and g...

Life in the dusty Mississippi town was boring for “town kids” because we didn’t have cows to milk or chickens to feed. Soon after moving there, I formed a lifelong bond with another rebel whose parents were just as happy for Simone to get out of their hair as my mother was with me. So little changed in those long days and there was always a ripple of excitement when the dry goods store, Allens, changed the seasonal displays in their tiny plate glass window. We would walk to the little cluster of shops and gaze longingly at what was there and then go in to look at the new shoes, fabric and pattern books. Never mind, neither one of us could sew. But our time in Home Ec is another story. Next door to Allens’ was the movie house, run by the Floyd family and every Saturday night, there would be a still unknown movie for the whopping sum of a nickel. No money? Not a problem for us. We would snitch it from our mother’s purse. Innocently saying, “I have money for the movie, c...

Seattle had proper blocks with unbroken pavement perfect for a game of hopscotch or a starting point for evening hide and seek. At   one end of our block was an overgrown vacant lot with a huge tree that had fallen. Hours were spent down the block on that tree which often became a pirate ship rocking violently as we tried to shake each other off or holding spears made of twigs fighting off the invaders. Seattle is a city of hills and one was at another corner of our block where we would gather the wagons and race down the hill, careening into another vacant lot filled with blackberry bushes where we tunneled for hours eating ripe and unripe berries. When the street lights came on we went home; berry juice staining us from head to toe and knees were scraped raw from tumbling out of the little wagons. We lived without hand sanitizer or cute bandaids . We looked   and smelled much like the wild Indians on the western shows on the tiny TV’s. Then we ...