A Fool's Journey Book II

a fool’s journey

Mosanami Etal

Book Two

SmashWords Edition

a fool’s journey - book two - Copyright 2013 by Mosanami Etal

SmashWords Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author and publisher of this book.

Formatting by RikHall.com

Book Series Dedication

To the living memory of my mother.

BOOK TWO is the second of an ongoing book series where the Author takes pause to reflect upon his life as a jigsaw puzzle. A mystery where he begins to fit the pieces of the puzzle together in the hope of achieving greater understanding of why he is here.

I share with Roland Barthes the opinion that the text is formed by the reader rather than by the author. — Rain-walker

Author's Introduction

In the story of Tarot, the Fool represents each of us as we begin our life journey. At birth, we willingly play the role of fool because only the purest of Spirit brings forth the innocence and blind faith to trust.

The Fool is ready to embrace whatever comes down his or her path to learn the lessons of the world, and is oblivious to the hardships and vicissitudes of life. Newly born, bright, and open to spontaneously venture to adventure; from comfort and joy—to pain and suffering.

It is in this context that I share with you the stories of my life: a fool’s journey. So please, if you will…

"Sit by my side, come as close as the air,

Share in a memory of gray;

Wander in my words, dream about the pictures

That I play of changes."

-- Changes by Phil Ochs

Elements of Change

Somehow, I advanced past the second grade and managed to float while keeping my head above water. But floating wasn’t good enough, as far as my mother was concerned. She wanted me to swim the fastest, so she enrolled me in summer school.

As she dropped me off on that first day, she parted with her signature remark to the homeroom teacher. And please, don’t spare the rod! Immediately afterward, a broad smile crossed her face followed by, That’s right! My mom loved saying that to all my teachers. She loved giving them permission to beat me into submission, as if that were the secret to get me to learn faster. It was probably some back-in-the-day, backwoods, down-south country thing. The whole way of living gave me the creeps. I’d seen it on the news.

What my mom refused to understand was that summer school was for the slowest of the slow, not the slowest of the fastest. But I didn’t mind, because the school day was shorter, and they gave you all of your assignments in the beginning of each class for the next day. So by the time the class was over, my homework was done.

On my second day of school, the teacher asked me to stay behind, along with two other boys. One of these boys I recognized from when I was in the slower class. I remembered that I liked him, and though we never spoke, we smiled and nodded to each other every day in class. He had a really nice face. The other boy seemed out of place, like he didn’t belong here.

She asked me if I would stay after school each day for one hour to tutor these boys in English, Math, and History. My first thought was, And what, cut into my playtime? Not a chance! But then I thought of how much Marianne had helped me with Geometry. I really didn’t believe that I would have passed second grade without her help. Maybe, I thought, I can actually help these kids.

Okay! I’ll do it!

Little did I know, neither of these boys spoke English very well. The familiar boy, Johnny Rivera, was from Puerto Rico and had only been in America for one year. The other boy, Augustino, seemed like he had just gotten off the boat yesterday from Sicily. He told me to call him Auggie, so I called him Auggie Augustino.

Auggie was going to begin his first year at Our Lady of Knock, where there were tales of nuns who ripped the ears off of kids who didn’t know how to listen. If you don’t know how to use them, then you don’t need them, they’d say. That’s where most of the Italian and Irish kids went to school, there or St. A’s, where the nuns sang the same tune. The catholic kids in my building all attended St. Joe’s, where the nuns were angelic.

Johnny was from across Fourteenth Street, in the part of Chelsea that no child dared go without an adult. It was a rough-and-tumble neighborhood, and for the most part, the Rivera family ran the streets. And there were a lot of them too—hundreds of blood cousins. Each cousin was bigger, stronger, faster, and meaner than the last. The teenage girls were even meaner than the boys, and they roamed the streets in packs, like hungry wolves.

Auggie lived on The Block in Westside Little Italy, below Houston Street, another place that was too dangerous to be visited without an adult chaperone. It was only four city blocks from my building. If you were a kid growing up in the Village during this time, you best know where you could and could not go, and what time of day it was safe to go there. And you did not learn this from adults; you learned this valuable information from the horror stories other kids told you. Even though Auggie was small and fresh off the boat, he gave me the feeling that he lived on that block for a long time. He was a big small.

The teacher left us in the classroom alone. I had no idea how to go about tutoring these kids. They were waiting for me to begin. I asked them to give me a minute, because I didn’t know how I was going to do what I needed to do just yet. They both smiled and nodded. Okay, I thought, they can understand me—that’s a good start.

I thought for a moment, and realized that although we were from different blocks in different neighborhoods, we had something very important in common. All three of us were kids! We were in the same boat! It was us kids against them—the adults. I felt relieved.

At this point, I began to understand how to approach the tutoring. Basically, the adults spoke a different language than we did, so not only was it essential that Auggie and Johnny comprehend English, but they had to learn the adult language, too. Once you understand both languages, everything else will come much easier, I promised. They both laughed so loud that another teacher peered through the door window to see what the ruckus was all about.

Okay, for Math I’m gonna use pizza sketches, because all kids love pizza. I will use slices and whole pies for addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and even geometry, I thought. But I doubted that we would get to geometry in six weeks. English and History would be straight translation; this is what it says, but this is what it means.

And I’ll give a lot of attention to helping them to understand the trick questions that adults always throw at you to help make you feel more stupid than you truly are. If I can help them understand the questions, they will be able to figure out the answers easier, I thought again. So what I am going to do is act everything out, like in the Drama program. This way, they can see what it looks like off the page. And as there is no Drama program this summer, this will be good practice for me. Good to Go!

My goal was to have them finish all their homework in the hour we had, without me doing it for them. They loved that! Because really now, think about it—what kid wants to take schoolwork home with them? Especially in the summer! It turned out that the two of them were very fast learners, and after three weeks I no longer needed to tutor them—they were doing well on their own. The truth is that they were both smart. I figured they could be in that IGC class in another year.

That summer, I only spent two weeks with Mr. and Mrs. Miller in Amagansett. It rained a lot while I was there, so we were indoors most of the time. The professor introduced me to his record collection—mostly rock and jazz. He exposed me to excellent music that I had never heard before. It was the kind of music that wasn’t played on the radio. I could feel I was beginning to develop a sense of why I enjoyed the different kinds of music that I did.

He taught me how to play backgammon, a board game I grew to love. I also tasted lobster for the very first time! For some reason, it tasted like fresh popcorn with gobs and gobs of butter! Lobster was really good! It wasn’t as good as John’s Bleecker Street Pizza, or even the Eighth Street Pizza Place, but it was yummy delicious. I made certain to thank the professor for the lobster, the music, and the introduction to Professor Dodge.

The remaining two weeks of summer vacation I spent at Auntie’s. Auntie was an older woman who cared for kids like me, who had a single mom who needed a break for some peace of mind. So Auntie wasn’t really an aunt, and the