Gifted

It is cold up North. I would need to buy a coat if I moved up there, but I don’t have the money for that. Maybe I could buy good gloves and a hat instead. But what do I do if it snows? I don’t even know what snow feels like, or how to walk on it, or what shoes to buy. What am I thinking?

“Thanks for showing me all this and explaining how to apply, but I have a great part-time job here in Charlotte, so I think I won’t really apply to the Ivey Leagues up North. I don’t want to give up my job, you know….” I answered the school counselor after she spend an hour showing me glossy brochures about different schools she really wanted me to apply to, because they were going to be my path to glory.  I tried to stay calm and give a rational answer. But honestly, I was scared, scared shitless.

I saw the disappointment in her eyes. She felt my resignation. She knew it was not about the part-time job only, but she couldn’t put her fingers on all the other reasons that kept that pipe dream from becoming a potentiality on my radar. I never shared all the burdens of the rest of my life with her. She had only witnessed my ambition, my excellence with standardized tests, my challenging questions to teachers, my endless curiosity, my never satiated hunger for knowledge. She knew – merely based on the dark color of my skin - that I had overcome obstacles, but how would she – with her tender light skin - know what they were? I never bothered to begin to explain them to her or anyone. It was too complicated and at the time, even I didn’t know how to put them all down in words and sentences. I focused on everything else instead. In her -and the likes of her- presence I had always been my best opportunity-embracing self.

But, at that moment, my stomach felt the same way it did back two years ago when I found out my mother had to pawn off the violin to pay some utility bills. I wasn’t playing it anymore, because my new school didn’t have an orchestra or classical music instruction, but that violin – sitting unused at home - had become my token to a path that would take me to new places, new worlds, away from my small muggy world filled with bumps in the road, and into worlds of passion combined with endless opportunity. Away from a place where TV and occasional fast food indulgence were a solace to some, to a place and time where men with wild hair and even wilder minds had the luxury of filling their lives expressing every little desire or petty distraction with instruments flying, banging and fluttering up and down octaves of scales in harmony with dozens of other string, wind or brass instruments.

That little memory of an escape had to be taken away from me to make it through the monthly budget. Similarly, now, I realized my whole reason for pushing and ploughing to get ahead was facing a major road block. All the little burdens I had been in denial about, showed up unannounced as a cumulative force right then. And for the first time ever, I just didn’t have the strength to step over them all piled up right there in front of me.

A price of a winter coat, my mother’s utility bills, Greyhound tickets back and forth, the education of my 8^th grade sister, the overbearing preaching pastor hovering over the household void of a father, the neighborhood boys preying over my younger siblings.

I had to forego the best education for myself, because I had a conscience and a love like a mother hen over her vulnerable chicks. I couldn’t leave and expose my chicks to the dangers all around. I had to go to college in town. That I would do.