I owe a great bit of gratitude to the man who found me 3 days after I left the orphanage.  He was kind of like me, just a lot older.  He looked to be in his sixties, but I never asked him so I really don’t know.  He proved to me that no matter what I ran into in life there would always be something or someone there to teach me all I needed to know to survive.  

When he met me I was dirty, unclothed, and hungry.  He was only dressed in a loin cloth, but he looked well fed and pretty clean.  He showed me to a nearby river where I could at least rinse off the dirt that covered me from 3 days of just walking around in the middle of nowhere.

Also in the middle of nowhere were animals.  “Beasts made for our survival” was what he called them.  At the time I didn’t know what a caveman was, but now that is what I would have compared him to.  His weapon was not a bow and arrow, not a gun, but a pointed spear.  He just slammed the point down in the water and found what he called “Manna of the sea.”  It was so amazing the way he had pretty much renamed the animals to suit his appetite.  He showed me how to use a spear like his, just smaller of course.  Before long I knew how to get my own fish and also learned how to hunt larger animals like deer.

He then showed me how to build a fire, which he called “nature’s stove” and cook the meal.  He showed me how to take the deer hide and make a loin cloth out of it, not that I cared because it was so hot at the time.  Once winter came though that knowledge was good to have.  

Unfortunately that man died just a few months after I met him, but I think that was the earth’s way of telling him he had served his purpose and it was finished with him.  As far as I was concerned he definitely had been a useful person.  Without the teachings he gave me I may have never survived.  Wherever that man is right now I hope he knows just how meaningful the few months we knew each other were.

To many that saw me in this time I was regarded as a mistake of society and someone who was not to be hung around, but at least if they weren’t going to understand me they would just leave me alone.  But to this man I was thought to be an equal somewhat.  Isn’t it strange that we only judge those we don’t understand and only care for what we see as an equal.