Sunday, March 10, 2013

A Birthday To Remember

A Birthday To Remember

I will never forget my 10th birthday for several reasons, and some of those reasons don?t include the nice parts, like when I got to have a big cake and nice presents. It was the ?not-at-all-nice? parts that most helped make this a birthday to remember ? or maybe, better yet, a birthday to forget.

My name is Max and since my 10th birthday is on Sunday this year, that means I must spend the whole day at church ? first, Sunday school, then morning service, then afternoon service, then bible training, and then evening service. I won?t be able to play with my best friend, this birthday.

I was all dressed for church but mom was running late. She played the piano for the choir and today the choir was having an event. I saw mother rushing down the hall toward the bathroom to finish dressing, and not a second later, she let out an ear-splitting scream ? I can still feel the goose-bumps on my arms.

A very large and very ugly rat had been crawling along the rim of the toilet and had slipped into the water. It couldn?t get out because of the slick surface. Mother screamed and screamed and came running to me insisting that I get the rat out the toilet ? I was the only one home, other than my mom.

That was the first surprise of my 10th birthday. Some surprise ? a big, nasty, wet rat with dangerous looking teeth. I won?t go into the scary things I had to do to get the rat out. But, I did get it out and mother and I made it to church in time for her to rehearse the choir.

My mother said two amazing things to me on that day ? she said I was her hero! The other thing she said was so out of character I wasn?t sure she was OK after the rat incident. She said that after Sunday school I could go home and spend the rest of the day playing with my friends. Amazing!

So, off I went, later that morning, to play with my best friend Walter. The tenement he lives in is attached to the tenement I live in and we both live on the top floor, five stories up. So, we can stick our heads out the window and talk to each other. We bang on the wall real hard if we want the other to come to the window.

We both liked living on the top floor because you could see all over the rooftops. Sometimes we go up on the roof to play since it is closer than going down to the street. I was so happy this Sunday I ran all the way home and up the 5 flights of Walter?s building.

I was to be disappointed, though, because Walter had been grounded for the rest of his life. His mom caught him with a deck of naughty, X-rated playing cards spread out on the floor. Walter said he found them by the trash when he took the garbage down but that didn?t stop his mom from grounding him.

I sure wasn?t going back down all his stairs just to go up all my stairs to get home, so I went over the roof. When I opened the roof door of my building to go down the steps to my apartment, I got the next big shock of my birthday ? there was a man and a woman lying across the steps, blocking my way.

The woman looked very sleepy and had a hypodermic needle hanging out of her exposed breast. One of her hands was limp on the step while the other hand kept scratching real hard at her right leg. The needle just hung there with the tip in her skin. I wondered why the air smelled like baby powder.

I thought the man was out cold until one blood-shot eye half opened and looked up ? but it only lasted a second, he nodded right back off banging his head against the wall. I decided they were too out of it to do anything to me so I carefully hopped over the woman and quickly squeezed by the man, then high-tailed it like a bat out of hell to my apartment just below.

It was no big deal, really. It wasn?t the first time I had seen heroin addicts and I knew the signs .. lots of track-marks on their puffed up arms and legs. I knew a lot about junkies but that encounter was way too close for comfort! Later that evening I peeked up to see if they were still there but they had gone away.

The way my 10th birthday ended made up for all the other stuff. I got a brand new camera, some games, and money! My father said I was old enough to own and take care of a camera now, and that made me feel really grown up.

Source: http://www.streetarticles.com/relationships/a-birthday-to-remember

the weather channel national grid LIPA Cnn Live Garcinia Cambogia Little Things One Direction Bob Ross

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.