Ben was too young to remember our time in the Ghetto Jungle. He couldn't run anyway because he was strapped to a board and had Forest Gump shackles on his legs. All I did was run. Run away from the broom, run from my Uncles who tortured me daily, run to the candy lady, run to my mother begging not to leave me with her broom wielding mother. So one day, I ran all the way to the beach. To get to the beach though, you had to run through the rice patties.
There I was, five years old standing in a labyrinth of rice patty squares that led to a beach. Only problem was the Water Buffalo were always in my way. They would just stand there dropping their swirls and twirls shit on the pathways that led me to the beach. If I wasn't hopping buffalo shit, I was crawling under the buffalo itself. How I wasn't kicked in the head, knocked into a patty to drown, or impaled by a horn is beyond me.
My mother would tell me stories of her childhood and how she had to collect the hardened buffalo chips for the family. She told me how sometimes it didn't always look hard and she would wind up with buffalo shit all over her because it was soft and would fall apart after picking it up. My poor mother. When my uncles found out I was running through the rice patties, they would tell me another story. How my dinner every night was going to be cooked on a buffalo dung oven. OMFG! This is why my mother collected dung?! I chose to starve to death from this point on.
Being five, full of imagination & a will to survive in this god forsaken land, I decided that if there was no dung to be found, there would be NO OVEN MADE OF SHIT. So I ran barefoot to the rice patties as often as I could sneaking buffalo dung back into the rice pools. I was NOT eating off a shit oven! I'd rather die, but I bet they had really good crops of rice that year...
See you tomorrow on "Inside the FLIP Side" ;) <----------- not a winky face, that's half a chinky face!