I remember sitting across a card table from you. It was winter. Your home was warm and cozy. Your wife sat in the living room crocheting and watching television. You had no use for television. You preferred to build things and read. At the time you were teaching me to play dominoes. Double nines, because double sixes were too easy. I remember the long trail of numbers on our scoresheets.
We talked a lot then, about a lot of things. We talked about your garden plans for the spring. You always had a huge garden, almost an acre. I remember the dill plants, and the crunchy dill pickles every year. I remember the watermelon. I remember you talking about organic gardening before I even knew that was a thing. It was the seventies. You were too old to be a hippie, but you were still into all those things. Alternative energy, organic gardening, compost, recycling, energy conservation; you built your own solar shower out in your workshop.
I don't know why I was allowed / encouraged to spend so much time with you, except that my parents just wanted me out of their hair. Even after it all came out what you were doing, they still sent me to you for babysitting. I still can't wrap my head around that. (Weird Freudian slip; I originally typed "warp my head around that".) I know that it was important in my formation. I know it was messed up. I know I adored you. I believed all your tall tales so much that I argued with my teachers if any of their new-fangled "science" contradicted your stories. Yeah, I know, I'm cringing now. Sorry, Mrs. Neese.
I think one of the things that bugs me so much is that it wasn't all bad. That "so much of me is made of what I learned from you. You'll be with me like a handprint on my heart." Pretty sinister for a Broadway show tune, innit? You were a rebel. You weren't content to be trapped inside the conventions that said "you must believe this and not that", and you didn't want me to be either. You believed in me. If I said I was too little or too clumsy to do something, you said I most certainly could learn to do it, if I wanted to. You taught me yoga. You taught me to ride a bike. You taught me to build things, and use power tools. You taught me to climb a rope and to balance on a rolling barrel. I was athletic around you, like I couldn't be anywhere else. When the kids at school made fun of me for being pudgy, you just kept encouraging me, and helping me adapt and learn. And you cheered all my successes. But it was all twisted, wasn't it?
It seeped into everything, you know, like your fingers sliding up my legs and under my shorts at the most unexpected times. Yoga, biking, balancing. There we were, having fun, and then suddenly this unpleasant, unexpected (no matter how many times it happened, I never really managed to see it coming) touching that grossed me out. Sometimes I think "What a fucking idiot!". My therapists, and all the books say that's normal. They say children need love and acceptance and mentoring from adults, and if their caregivers can't or won't give it to them, they'll seek it elsewhere. They say that's what people like you do, that it's how you choose your victims. You look for the lonely ones, the hurting ones. They say that's how you get them to go along. "Grooming" they call it. The presents, the companionship, the time spent, the praise. All of it a means to an end. Or maybe the majority. Maybe part of it. I don't know.
That's hard to sort out too.
Were you just an evil, conniving bastard who manipulated me so you could use me sexually? Were you just a fallible, fucked up human who really cared for me somewhat, but didn't bother to see that your desires were inappropriate and would cause me long term harm? I don't fucking know. How the hell should I know? But it's still with me either way. Like that g-ddamned handprint on my fucking heart.
"It well may be that we will never meet again in this lifetime,
so let me say before we part:
so much of me is made of what I learned from you.
You'll be with me like a handprint on my heart.
And now whatever way our stories end,
I know you have rewritten mine, by being my friend.
Like a ship blown from its mooring by a wind off the sea,
like a seed dropped by a sky bird in a distant wood,
who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But because I knew you, I have been changed for good."
"For Good - Wicked"
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