Grandmama smoked cigarettes, the smoke swirling as the red-wing black birds she watched fluttered like ruby UFOs in the big yard of summer green, the glass orb on its pedestal surrounded by flowers and a garden of carrots and cabbage and long green beans … the rabbit war machines with glossy eyes looking upward at great big orange BOG riding the heat wave on his surfboard from another planet …

“Are there drugs in here?” the mirror asked me as I played Poseidon in the bathroom and my great trident nothing more than a broomstick painted red … red like blood, red like red-winged blackbirds, red like the lips on the gal at the corner grocery smacking pink gum like a sorceress from some pillow castle. I saw her there when the old woman needed more cigarettes and Sanka. She smiled at me. I stared back, dumbfounded. She laughed and then turned away. She sort of smelled like a pine tree.

And that’s where they found me … on the floor in the bathroom at Grandmama’s house, a red broom on the floor beside me, red eyes and red blood coming out of my mouth. They wanted to know if I tried to kill myself. They didn’t understand I just had a seizure and bit my tongue. Did they want me to kill myself? Would that have made them happy?

They wanted me to leave, but I wanted to stay. I yelled something like: “Just leave me the hell alone!” My mother was shocked. My father was disappointed. And then I ran out the back door and into the splash of heat and sun and moist air and I darted across the lawn and a voice called out from the house behind me … “Where are you going?”

I didn’t know. I never knew. I was aimless. Still aimless. And aimlessly I wandered along the babbling brook down in the forest behind Grandmama’s house. It was quiet, peaceful. I was doing nothing wrong yet I got scolded for running away like I did. Punished for just wanting to be free … free, free, free. Life is chains they put on you. Life is a cage they lock you in. Life is always having to do something you really don’t want to do. Life is always being somewhere you don’t want to be. We are dragged relentlessly from our peaceful places, our peaceful thoughts, our peaceful hearts and thrust into a world that knows nothing of peace.

I just wanted to sit on a rock and listen to the water and feel the sun but I was dragged out of there by my Grandmama and she scolded me for behaving so poorly. That’s what she said: “So poorly.”

I was made to sit in a chair in the corner of the kitchen. I wasn’t allowed to speak. I wasn’t spoken to. All I heard was my Grandmama’s slippers shuffling along the linoleum floor as she boiled water, dragged down a cup and jar of Sanka. I could hear the spoon being tapped on the lip of her cup as she put in the coffee. I could hear the water being poured in and then the spoon again as she stirred it, the scraping of the metal against the ceramic. I could hear her breath as she blew at the hot coffee. I could hear it go down her throat as she swallowed. I could hear the tobacco burn as she took another drag off her cigarette. She eyed me suspiciously, but said nothing. I could hear her cigarette being tapped against the green glass ashtray as she knocked off the precarious ash. I could hear her cough.

The next morning, I went outside and rode my bike up and down the street in search of the lady from the grocery store. I rang the bell on my bike in hopes it would grab her attention. I rode and rode and rode, like a mad child, ringing that damn bell in search for love and grace. The houses remained still. Not a single door or window opened. I was left alone on earth, brokenhearted, a boy who acts poorly, punished, exiled, made scandalous. I finally gave up at high noon and just went to sit in the grass on the side of the road somewhere. A car came barreling down the street and when it got near to me the driver leaned on the horn and yelled out the window: “Get out of the street!” But I wasn’t really in the street. My feet were sort of in the street. Why was everyone on my ass for merely existing?

And here I am – 40 plus years later and wondering the very same thing. By now the madness has become exponential. The killing, the hurting, the shooting, the ugliness of spirit. The rudeness, the criticism, the lack of empathy. The hatred, the bigotry, the heartless and gutless approach to debate. The death of human decency.

But no more.

I’m at the launchpad. I’m wearing my spacesuit. I made the cut and now I am going away, with others, to another planet. Goodbye earthlings. Don’t call. Don’t write. Don’t try to follow us into space. We’re tired of this. We’re done. You’ll never learn how to simply be kind to one another.