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It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in November,
with nothing I want to watch on TV.
All of my friends are away.
My sister is at Green Acres Shopping Center.
I walk through the house.
My father is stretched out on the Lazy
Boy recliner in the den, watching football. I sit down on the
couch. A commercial comes on. A cute guy is in a sports car, driving
a beautiful woman through a snowstorm in the mountains. When they
arrive at their destination, a Victorian inn, every window is
illuminated with a candelabrum.
I walk to my parents' bedroom. The door
is closed. I peer in. My mother is asleep.
I wander into the kitchen. Nothing interesting
in the fridge. There are Saltines, cans of tuna fish, spaghetti.
I look in the breadbox and find a loaf of white bread.
I roll the white bread into little balls
of dough between my palms.
I eat ten little balls.
It's 5:00 and getting dark.
I go into my room and look at the poster
on the bulletin board: A tanned guy with blonde slicked back hair
emerges from the waves, a surfboard balanced on his head.
I turn on the radio. No songs I like. Static.
I go back to my father in the den. He is
snoring.
I go back to my room.
I take out a book, Gone
With the Wind. I've read it before.
I don't want to read it again.
It is 1968. The Vietnam War is escalating.
Martin Luther King has been shot. Bobby Kennedy has been shot.
There's a civil rights march on Washington.
I know little of those events.
I am 13 years old, in 8th grade.
In every fiber of my being,
I am waiting not to be bored.
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