The Beginning

The memories of my childhood are vivid, as if it was yesterday. Deep down inside I somehow always knew I was different than the other kids. I grew up in a middle class neighborhood where children rode their bikes in the street, walked their dogs without a leash, and old folks sat on their front porches exchanging the latest neighborhood gossip. Like a small town or village, everyone knew everyone else, who lived where and what they did. Everyone knew my story except me. I was too young to be told the truth. My parents dressed me in old fashioned clothes and shoes, as if they never outgrew the 1800’s so I became the laughing stock, the joke of the “village”. I tried to play with the other kids but they were either too busy laughing at me or bullying me to even give me the time of day. And so I withdrew into my own world. My only companions were our family dogs – Collies.

The Collies were my loyal companions. My mother would scold me when she’d find me speaking to them. She’d say they didn’t understand me, but I knew different. Somehow I just always knew. Was it the way the Collies looked at me? The way they protected me? The way they’d never leave my side? Or was it something else? Whatever it was, our connection was special. I was “special”. And so it came to pass that one full moon night, while my mother visited with a neighbor on our front porch and I sat there listening to them visit, that it happened. The night was clear, the stars were out and the wind whisked by in a gentle breeze. Without warning, I felt the pull, the tug if you will, to look up. The Collies looked up too. And there we were like a pack of wolves staring at the full moon.

My mother and her visitor grew silent as they stared. The silence around us was golden. And then it was gone. My mother touched my shoulder and said it was time to go inside. She broke my connection, as if she knew what was happening. She dismissed herself, said her good nights, and she ushered me inside. “What’s wrong with you?”, she said. “Don’t ever embarrass me like that again”. I asked what was wrong but she said I’d have to wait until I was older for her to explain and for me to understand. “But mother, the moon showed me things. You have to listen to me”. The slap across my face was her answer. “Go to bed”, were her final words. This would be the last time I ever confided in my mother about what I saw, what I felt, what was inside me. There would come a day she would have to listen, she would have to know, but it was not this day.