Memoir – English 101 – 1 – Growning Up: Tolerance
Just thought I’d post this. See? I’ve been doing writing!!
Title: Growning up – Tolerance
I just stared at her in horror, my own confused feelings whirling around in a clash, wanting to believe my mother, and yet standing slack jawed at her childish display of anger. My skin was crawling with revulsion at her words, the venom of her tone stinging me and making my eyesight waver. Gone was the beautiful and placid lady with the skunk-striped hair. She had been replaced by an ugly, fire-breathing vulture. Her green-yellow eyes were simmering pools of hate, shining inside with a holy rage. Her sun-tanned cheeks were ruddy with the color of bigotry, and her nostrils kept flaring as if she were a bull that had escaped a matador.
“Mom, what’s so wrong with Jen being gay?” I asked, trembling.
“I’ll tell you what, Catharine! She’s an abomination!” Her breath smelt like an old cigarette tray doused with Pepsi as she breathed into my face. “She’s an abomination in the eyes of God!”
I looked at her through the mist of tears, my view looking very much like those privacy blocks put in public restrooms. “How do you know that, Mom?”
“Because it’s in the Bible!” She always makes it sound like it should be capitalized.
“Where, Mother?”
“It’s in there!” She stalked away from me to grab her bible. I found it the most offensive thing in the house. It was a garish pink with glittery gold letters on it, and her case was pink with little sideways Greek lambdas. Not only this, it was the NIV version. The NIV version made my stomach turn sour and try to crawl away. The New International Version. I rather thought it stood for Noxious Insipid Variation.
She slammed it down on the table and ripped the carrying case off, and her finger slammed down on the cover, her green-yellow eyes turning to pin me.
“It’s right in here! Point and fact that homosexuals are a disease in His eyes, and that they’re ripping away at the social fabric of our nation!” Spittle flew in every direction from her mouth, making her look as deranged as I felt she was.
“That isn’t a good translation, Mother.” I saw her eyes narrow, I knew that I was in trouble.
“Pagan bitch! Aren’t you a Christian?! Don’t you believe in the Bible? Believe in Jesus the Christ and that he died for our sins?!”
“I never said I wasn’t Christian, Mother,” I stated with resignation. Better I turn the fight to mistranslation and myself than allow Jen to incur anymore righteous indignation by any so-called Christians. “All I said was that it was a poor translation.”
“All right, know-it-all bitch! Just wait. She’ll lead you astray and when you get broken, you’ll come back to me and I’ll laugh in your face. She’s just falling into the fad. She’s a lying little faggot, and you know it.” With that, she stormed outside, slamming the patio door after to make the whole house vibrate. When the door was slammed, everyone knew my mother was pissed.
I slumped down into the worn couch trying to quell the queasy stomach that tried to digest itself. I couldn’t pull out the hot knife of betrayal that stabbed at my churning insides. Raising my head from my hands, I looked out the back window.
My mother was out there; her head in her hand and tears coursing down her weathered cheeks. I watched as she wiped at her face with unsteady movements as she stared, unseeing, at the field behind us.
I wondered if she and I fought now because I was gaining my own thoughts and becoming my own person with my own sets of codes and morals. Our Ideals didn’t work together, and I think she expected that simply because I was her daughter, I was supposed to agree with every single thing she said, no matter how hurtful or bigoted it was.
Watching her, I felt guilt join the betrayal knife in my belly. The twisting and turning was making me ill. Although the guilt bit at me, I felt as if I were vindicated in the face of her bigotry.
I always felt I could tell my mother anything. I knew that she would be accepting of my views and that anything I did wasn’t wrong, or at least nothing to be ashamed of. She always thought the house was a mess, and she barely tolerated me and my friends in the front yard.
I love my mother with all my heart, but she’s not the most tolerant person in the world. In fact, if anyone in my family was a racist, it would be my mother. Anything against her chosen political party, they were the devil incarnate. Mexicans were a bane on the world and a pestilence that could be solved by shooting and killing them. Immigrants into the
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should be banned and that if anyone wasn’t here before the Revolutionary War, they weren’t to be considered American. Christianity should be and is the correct, and only, religion in the
, and that anything else is the Devil’s works.
Most especially, she detests homosexuals.
Dover Street was a turn of the century area in the Eastside of Dayton. It used to be a nicer neighborhood with well cared-for houses and yards, but now it was run down with abandoned houses that served as homes to crack dealers. Several of the houses had been torn down to make the parking lot for the Xenia Avenue Feed company, and latter was gated and locked off because they had moved out of the neighborhood.
The faded blue steps were hollow, one side caving in, and the concrete was gouged and scratched. The front had two doors: one that went into the parlor and the other to the right into the family room. Its painted wood was chipping and shedding, and it creaked and groaned, but it was one of my favorite places to be despite the danger of being outside. Every step you took inside made a noise that echoed back from the basement and it always made me think it was alive. It wasn’t simply a house, it was The Family’s.
“We’re going to the Family’s,” I was always told at holidays.
I always thought that ‘The Family’s’ was its name. Like some of those famous mansions down south, The Hermitage, Rosedown, Greenwood, The Forks of the Cypress. I thought this old white house was just as famous. After all, most of my mother’s family came from the south, so why wouldn’t it be like those? It often reminded me of the old Disney Short about the little house squished between the tall skyscrapers, being neglected and run down and in general, getting shabbier and older.
This was the house where my mother had been born and raised. She had older siblings, and I’d see everyone save my Uncle Don. He had left the Family after turning his back on us.
Then there was the complete opposite: Virgil. My Uncle Virg was a big teddy-bear of a man. He was a round and tall man, his bulk filling the doorways of The Family’s with his girth. He wobbled rather than walked, shuffling across the floor because his knees wouldn’t bend. He was bald, his head shined like a proverbial Mr. Clean, and his eyes were a soft blue that would twinkle kindly. We would sit together for hours outside on the faded blue steps, not talking but watching the world go by in ever increasing speed.
I always felt guilty when he’d shuffle his way outside to painfully sit himself down. I’d watch and hover by his side, offering silent help if he wanted, or needed, to take it which never happened, but it was appreciated none-the-less.
When I was younger, it never dawned on me that there was something wrong with him. I just though that shuffled walk was how he always ambled around.
“A gook bullet tore under my knee cap. It was a good shot, went right between my bones.”
I’d never say my uncle was a racist, but he really didn’t like the Northern Koreans, the ones that followed Communism. He had several Korean friends, and it was always an interesting day to listen to him talk about serving in
. That despite all he had been through, he could put his differences aside and care for his fellow man
The thunk of my boot hitting the step made me jump. I always forgot that the blue steps were hollow and I needed to lighten my tread, like my mother always yelled at me to do. I glowered at the thought. My mother wasn’t one of my favorite people at the moment, but I remember her fondly telling me with a gentle smile that a heard of elephants had roosted in her hallway.
The echo often made me realize that the steps were actually quite flimsy and easily broken, yet they supported the weight of my family treading up and down them constantly. You see, in spots they were dry-rotting, and the once china blue color I remember them being had faded into a somber slate grey.
Turning to face the road, I sat down on the steps to watch the world go by and think. My jeans clung to my legs as I sat on the front porch, the denim wet with perspiration. I pulled up a leg and I grimaced at the blue fuzzy hue that graced my legs. I’d have to take a shower when I got back home.
<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; TEXT-INDENT: 0.5in”>That’d be another thing Mom would get angry at me for.
Dropping the cloth, I turned my gaze out into the little yard, trying to find some serenity of mind and peace in my soul, struggling to come to some sort of understanding.
“Can you move over?”
I jumped and fell off the stairs to look up at the interloper of my quiet-time. So intent in my scrutiny of the yard, I didn’t hear the lumbering steps nor hear them stop. I sat up, rubbing my lower back with a look of distaste.
“I’m not quiet anymore. You should have heard me.”
“I didn’t,” I groused as I stood to help my comrade make his way down the steps so he could sit on his porch. He never took the offered help; he was too proud, I think. He labored his way to his seat, his legs spread out, and heels resting on the last step. His knees didn’t bend, so it was imperative that he not even try to work them. Titanium was a hard metal to bend.
He turned to scrutinize me. He patted the step beside him, his eyes the same color as the steps he sat upon. “Sit back down,” he said with a smile. He had no teeth; his smile wasn’t much more than a simple stretching of lips and gum. His words were slurred, but to me they were clear as a bell.
“Whacha doing out here alone? It’s dangerous anymore.”
“I’m… thinking, Uncle Virg.”
“’bout what?”
“Things,” I replied vaguely, not wanting to bother him with my troubles.