transform: afterword

The Dream Keeper.   

Bring me all of your dreams, 

You dreamer, 

Bring me all your 

Heart Melodies

That I may wrap them

In a blue cloud-cloth

Away from the too-rough fingers

Of the world.

-Langston Hughes

I'm sorry.  There appeared to be some questions left that I did not address.  But all of them can be answered with one simple response.  No one alters.  No one becomes someone different.  They remain the same person.  But new things are saddled to them.  And the older they get the more they reflect these bizarre additions on the look on their faces, the stranger their gait becomes, until, finally they topple over, and cannot get up again.

And so, within a week of the events I described,  Ralph became narrow and his prejudices returned, though now he had nowhere to fasten them.  He took me out that week and demanded that I spread the sand throughout the hill and work it into the soil.  I tried my best in my eight year old way.  I couldn't get the shovel, which was taller than I, to go into that hard pack he called soil.  

The glass jar and the candy disappeared. We went to a bingo game which I, unbelievably, won.  I looked at all the stuff of which I could take any piece I wanted, and Ralph walked by and said, find something for your mom.  I tried, I felt sure there would be something, but he and my grandma were walking out the door,  I felt afraid, I ran to catch them, and he said let's go.

I fell into my usual self-destructive behavior, knocking down a hornet's nest, walking into a quick sand pit, and throwing a king snake at a rattlesnake to see what might happen.  And Ralph kept thinking, the glabella vanished.  The end.  I was left with a cognitive depression, a feeling of being caught between sleep and waking.  I was no longer allowed to watch Gorgeous George.  I moped and sulked.  And then I got sent home.  That's all.