From Jamaica With Love. Part 3
Despite my speaking issues, within the first couple of months of starting first grade, things were going well, and I was promoted to second grade, and was taking reading classes with the eight-graders. The school was not challenging to me and it became obviously clear that I couldn’t stay. The principal talked to my parents about busing me out to another school, and of course they jumped at the chance. I took the entrance exam, was accepted, and was promptly placed back in first grade. This was the second major decision made in my life, once again without my input. The neighborhood that we lived in was made up of working class while the new school was an hour away on the northern boundary of Chicago, I would be in the minority based on color as well as economics. But it was an incredible opportunity that would help me in the long term. Top high schools avidly recruited from there, it would definitely put me on a college track.
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The kids there might have had way more money than the ones at my last school, but they weren’t any more accepting initially. Although things got better as the years passed, but those early years had a definite lasting effect on me. My voice was like a huge ever-present kick me sign. I was tormented to the point where I just found life easier if I kept my mouth shut. My brother ended up becoming great friends with the very same guys that chased us home that first day, but I was a neighborhood outsider. To be called a brain as an adult would be very flattering, but I assure you it is nothing that a child wants to be referred to as, by the kids in his neighborhood.
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Unless it was playing with my brother, I pretty much kept to my self. I spent most of my time reading fantasy novels, the kinds with magic and dragons. I read to the point that my parents would have to make me go outside and play. I had a very vivid imagination as a child and would often picture myself as the protagonist in one of those fantasy novels. I always liked the ones where there was a group of friends who were on some mission to find the long last ‘fill in the blank’. I even had delusions of writing one of those books, until I came to the sad observation that my imagination was light years ahead of my paltry writing abilities. I have always been good at science and reading, but I am math dyslexic and horrible at writing.
That’s pretty much the way that elementary school went for me, trying to blend into walls and keeping my mouth closed. I tried as hard as I could to lose my accent and was more or less successful. But the damage had been done. I would never again truly be comfortable speaking in front of people that I didn’t know well. It’s strange that it affects me to this day; I larger groups I avoid situations that would force me to talk. Around close friends though I talk incessantly and won’t shut up, its really odd. I'm quite jealous of people that automatically smoothly interact with others, my initial interactions fall much more into the awkward.
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