Anybody who grew up in a small town knows the people in that town who are considered "a bit off." You know who is harmless and who to avoid. I lived just across from an elementary school playground when I was a kid. It was where everyone met to play. One learns much abut human interactions and human nature playing with others as kids. You learn about cooperation, competition, aggression, shared happiness, dominance, trust, and how to survive in a group of peers. You also learn about how people are different.
There were two kids in our neighborhood who were "different." Each was a kid in a man's body. Each was probably in his mid-to-late twenties when I and my friends were between eight to twelve years old. It didn't happen every day, but occasionally, when were playing games in the school playground, one or the other of this kids would show up. I can remember "Cookie" as a slim and soft-looking kid with sandy hair and ivory skin. I have an image in my mind of him often showing up with a fringed cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a cap gun strapped to his side. He liked being picked to be on a side for games, but wasn't able to tolerate much frustration and would often walk home crying and saying he would "tell my mom on you." I think it was for that reason that we never seemed to make much of a connection with him. "Waldo" was thick and muscular. He was shy and slow-thinking. He was strong as an ox from our perspective. He could hit and throw a softball farther than any of us and we liked having him on our teams for that reason. He had trouble understanding the games, though, and was easily distracted. We thought of him as a good kid who tried as hard as he could. We all knew these guys were different from the rest of us. We knew that something was keeping them kids when they should have been adults, but we didn't understand what or why. I think that we kids knew they needed special consideration and I never saw anybody say or do anything unkind to either of them. Also, we were not afraid of them just because they were different. They never did anything to make us afraid. Kids seem naturally tolerant of differences. Knowing that always gives me hope for the future of humanity.
When I can finally master the ins-and-outs of this blog space, I plan to include a group of haiku that I wrote while dealing with losing my wife to cancer. Although I had no plan in mind when writing the poems, I later decided that they seemed to fall fairly naturally into four groupings. One group of poems is about my relationship with my wife. Although very personal tome, I think they also have a kind of universal meaning. A second group is poems about what I observed and learned from my clients while working as a psychotherapist for forty-five years. A third groups is about the innocence and importance of children and nature. The final group is about my attempts to establish new intimate relationships after being out of practice for so many years and finding that I had a myriad of unexamined issues that I was unaware of having. I think this blog is a part of the journey that I began as a kid. Everything then was new and un-nuanced. What I have discovered so far is that it was easier as a kid. We were more tolerant and more interested in gobbling up any new experiences. I think that it is important for all of us to embrace that child-like part of ourselves that still exists within us somewhere.