Writing Reality

The Basketball Team Some people that know me. May have known that it took me four tryouts to make a basketball team as a child. Yep, it was seventh grade rec. I didn’t make it. I tried out for the eighth grade middle school team, didn’t make it. And it was quite a small town that I was residing in then.   My class in eighth grade was about sixty-two students in all. I gave it rest. Then I tried out again as a junior in high school. I didn’t make it. Finally, in my senior year of high school, in a class of two hundred and sixty-two.   It was a regional high school. I made the varsity basketball team. Barely. Before I did, I can say this. I liked the kids who were on the team before I’d even made a team. I wasn’t friends with anybody on any of the teams I’d tried out for. I was the kid who kept to themselves, for the most part. All the teams, the ones I didn’t make and the one I did make, I respected the results. I respected the individuals that made up all the teams. Three of

Where’s the Brass Ring?      When you are used to touching death, you need to touch life. If you had asked me when I was eighteen would I have become a person that works with people in pain, some dying.    I would have said emphatically,  ‘No Way! ’ Not because I didn’t want to help people. Oh. I did. It was that my thought process of thinking of a way to helping people was saving them from abuse.    Saving them from war.    Saving them from crime.    Or fixing them after crime or war.    Basically, being there for them. Not in any medical format.    Yet, with a fist, a technique, a bayonet or a format of a firing arm or perhaps even a shovel.         Every night as a young child I went to bed and played a type of movie film in my head. I’d see the  bad guys . They would try to wreck me; I’d fight back.    They were always bigger, stronger and had the capacity to kill me.    Yet, I’d envisioned I would fight to my last drop of blood, my last breath.    I’d somehow survive w