THE RAVEN
by
Anthonystjoseph
I was doing well for a child who was
basically raising himself. I still remember
the kitchen in Los Angeles when I was three years old and my mother lying in
bed due to a late shift at work and the usual extreme indulgence in her
favorite evening friend, ‘Jack Daniels’. My mother’s idea of child development was day
care and the television which she would just sit me in front of. I woke up hungry and knew that the only way
to eat was the way I had occasionally watched others do it; cook
breakfast. So one morning my three year
old, high IQ self, pushed a chair up to the stove and proceeded to cook some
eggs and bacon. I will never forget the
vivid image of that kitchen and cooking that breakfast for myself. It is one of my strongest childhood memories. I still don’t remember any memories of my
mother cooking for me until high school and at that point it was decided that
she was a bad cook so those meals were avoided or slowly digested due to
necessity. I have often thought for a
large part of my life that my Aunt Jeannie was the first person to ever cook a
real dinner for me that I sat at a dining room table to eat until I realized
that the blocked out meals cooked by Mamie Sue were served at a dining room
table. I guess the torture sessions of
Mamie Sue overshadowed the cooked meals in my memory.
So, my mother and I had been in Minnesota
for a few years now and I was totally over the land of ‘ten thousand
lakes’. These people had started to take
the attack on yours truly to a whole new level.
My actual ability to see, my vision, my sight, had been threatened on
two separate occasions. My infamous Aunt
Connie had a twin brother separated by birth and two years of age. Although they weren’t twins, they were
spiritual twins. They both could be
classified as criminals if you used the law as your measuring stick. Crime was their youth and their trade. One day, Connie’s twin brother decides to
tell my mom, his other sister, that he’s taking me fishing. He announces this to my mom while smiling
like a chest ire cat at me, and then he winked at me. RUT ROW!
I get up early that morning and load myself into the car as the Sun is
barely making its presence known to the world.
I sit in the back seat as my uncle and his friend sit up front. The friend of my uncle also has a son that is
around a year younger than I who is sitting next to me in the backseat. My uncle turns to me and says something about
fishing and then gives me that same maniacal grin that he used at the house and
then again there is the ‘wink’. BLAMM! It happened again. I was getting use to these BLAMMS! Everything went black, I forgot who I was, I
forgot what my name was, and my world had gone silent except for a ringing
noise. It took a good minute to shake my head and rewind the tape and figure
out what had happened.
I shook my head and my world came back
into focus and I turned to the boy sitting next to me. He was sitting there smiling with my uncle’s
grin on his face and I was sure he winked.
I then saw the wrench in his hand.
This boy with my uncle’s grin had just for no reason at all taken a
wrench and cold cocked me with all his might in the left eye. I rubbed my eye and don’t remember much after
that. I think I started singing to
myself pretending I wasn’t there. The
next attempt on my sight was in my Catholic school classroom downtown which had
the biggest cathedral in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. You could see the blue dome of my Catholic
School’s church from any location in St. Paul.
Now days you have to be close to it to see it with all the new tall
buildings and growth. It really did use
to be a small world. I was wrestling
during class with some boy at school. I
hit my eye on his knee during one of the tossing sessions and had to be rushed
by ambulance from the school straight to the emergency room where they
transferred me directly to surgery where a plate was put under my eye ball to
hold it in place. Oh yeah! You got to love St. Paul, Minnesota. They got real jokes there. Trying to steal your vision kind of jokes.
So eventually one day at home, my mother, ‘all of a sudden’, announces that we are
moving to Phoenix, Arizona. At this
point I was starting to get a little sick of her ‘all-of-a-suddens’. She could really learn something from the art
of the ‘buildup’. I remember one morning,
as a child, she shook me like there was an earthquake and said in hushed tones,
“Wake up! Wake up! We got to move!” What? Huh? Yeah...
So, ‘all of a sudden’, I was
released from the demons grasp in Minnesota and heading to the desert just like
Jesus. The bible in hindsight is full of
so many clues. I guess that’s why so
many people like the stories in the bible.
So I was heading to another land where I was an unknown. I was faced and blessed with another chance
to become someone new. Another rebirth
was at hand, and Lord knows I needed a rebirth.
I could get rid of my present cloak of shame that Leon had forced me to
wear around town. I was free. Little did I know that I was rapidly
approaching level three in training and it was only going to get better and
worse. ‘It was the best of times and it was the worst of times.’
The skies had parted and another miracle
descended upon my happy ass and blessed me with another job transfer for my
mother. I left the cloud of shame that I
had created in Minnesota and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. I would rise out of the ashes and flames that
had become my life and fly high like the true bird and butterfly like creature
that I was always destined to be. I was
now twelve years old and basically hid in the shadows in the various schools
that I had gone too since for some reason or another I had gone to a different
one every year. I’m not sure if my
mother recognized signs of trauma and said to herself that she had to move this
kid around so no one would catch on or what.
I would generally know my departure dates ahead of time so a few times I
took advantage of leaving and got to literally kick a bully on the way out.
We were moving away from Minnesota, I happened
to know it was my last day at my school in Roseville, Minnesota. There was this one overgrown corn fed kid who
always use to bully and tease me so I decided to get him back. I couldn’t let him get close like Leon did in
the fourth grade so I had to be quick witted as to how to get my revenge. I really didn’t put that much planning into
my attack but when I saw my moment I took it!
It was my last day at school and my last bus ride home. For some reason my angels had me sitting in
the back of the bus with the bully sitting in the front. When the bus came to my stop, I saw my
opportunity and I seized it. I lagged as
the other two kids from my stop walked and ran to get off ahead of me and then
when they were off the bus and out of the way not blocking the aisle, I did
it! I ran from the middle of the bus and
with all the might I could gather, I kicked him right in the leg; the bony part. He bent over in pain and let out a yelp which
I clearly heard in the distance because I was going about forty miles per hour
so the bus driver couldn’t decide to become a hero and grab me. I didn’t stop until I was halfway up the hill
and turned and laughed my head off in an over exaggerated manner so he could
see me as the bus and his bullying self was driven off into the distance and my
past.
When we got to Phoenix, I went through as
many incarnations as my mother went through home addresses. As a young boy in Phoenix, I hoped and dreamed
that my mother would someday give me that BB gun that I had always wanted. Even though as a young boy I didn’t identify
with most of the testosterone related pitfalls that are set for us men, I
happened to have been born one so I had succumbed to a few of the traps. One day a friend of my mothers went to his
closet and pulled out a BB gun while my mother and I were visiting. I think I started salivating like a male dog
in heat who has just been shown a horny female poodle that only came up to his
knees. I was speechless and drooling as
I stared at the power of the Gun while my mother’s friend explained that it was
no ordinary BB gun. Although I could
barely hear what he was saying while staring at the rifle’s clear beauty and
power, he didn’t have to tell me that it was no Daisy BB Gun by any means. This gun happened to be a Benjamin Franklin
22-caliber pump action pellet gun with what seemed like hand crafted Mahogany Wood. He slowly handed it to me and I slowly took
it as the room started spinning. I was
holding all that power in my hand and rubbing the real wood and simply lost in
the significant and heavy weight of the seemingly real rifle masquerading as a
BB gun. The man then said that if it was
okay with my mother that he had no more use for the gun and if she said okay,
“I could have it.” I think I experienced
my first erection. Well, it was either
the attraction that my mother had for this gentleman or the steel, soul
threatening bullets my eyes were throwing if she said no that convinced her to
say yes. I was happier than a pig that
lives in the back of an all you can eat buffet restaurant that gets all the
leftovers from uneaten portions where they watch you too close to sneak out
what you don’t eat. It was heaven.
Since my new Benjamin Franklin 22-caliber
pellet gun was pump action, you know I had to spend all night and every night in
my pajamas pumping it, the rifle, to
its maximum power for that first shot in the morning and I knew exactly what I
was going to shoot; BIRDS! I learned with my first shot what the United
States Army would learn later. I was an
expert shot with a rifle. The first bird
I saw was a sparrow and let me tell you that two minutes after I saw him, he
saw God! I went on for weeks killing
every bird I could catch standing still for a few seconds and some that were
even in flight. I remember to this day
the hummingbird I shot in flight and
how small he was when I walked up on him.
All I thought of was how good a shot I was for shooting something so small
that was MOVING! WHO’S BAD? I WAS!
That was all soon to change.
My mother and I lived in some condos on
Thunderbird Trail right on the golf course near Phoenix’s Southern Mountains. The golf course provided little
Anthonystjoseph with plenty of hunting grounds.
Later that summer I had gotten up early and it was the first shot of the
day and I had even forgone any type of breakfast, desperate to get my first
kill. I was walking on the golf course
with my rifle slung over my shoulder like the true Kentucky backwoods hunter
that I had descended from. I had only
got about fifty yards from my home when I spotted him. There he was just as pretty as can be and
waiting just for little ol’ Anthonystjoseph.
I could tell he wanted to provide me with a new merit badge for my
crimson soaked collar; what a wonderful bird.
It was a new merit badge of bragging because this was a RAVEN!
I had never killed one of those before.
I had taken out silly sparrows, passive doves, nasty pigeons, cranky
crows, the hummingbird the size of a
thimble at thirty feet, and even some tired quail, but never a RAVEN!
I stopped in my tracks and slowed my
movements like a cat in the jungle who doesn’t blink. I watched the majestic raven with his regal
posture stand proud atop the telephone pole while he observed the land and
smelled the wind. I silently took my
rifle off of my shoulder around a hundred feet from the very tall telephone
pole that he was perched on. The
telephone poles on the golf course were a lot taller than normal telephone
poles in order to keep the telephone wires from interfering with the golfers
shots. I aimed my Benjamin Franklin
Rifle right at the raven and let all the power of the first shot of the
morning, with all the pumps through the night, loose. I exhaled after the shot with a smile on my
face and looked at the raven and nothing happened. I was a little shocked. I rarely missed. I never missed. I looked at my rifle wondering if it was
working and it seemed to be fine and then I looked back at the raven as he
continued to stand atop the pole majestically and then it happened.
All of a sudden, he just leaned over and
fell the huge distance from the extremely tall ‘golf course’ telephone pole and
hit the ground. I swear to this day that
there was a loud dull thump when he hit the ground, and my soul even remembers
the ground move were I was standing. I
looked around to see if anyone saw because something about this act of murder
seemed different. Although all life is
precious this was no silly sparrow. I
slowly walked up to the raven like a child with no feline characteristics
leftover whatsoever; and when I got up to it, I experienced some of the deepest
sense of regret and fear that I had ever felt up to that point in my life. I looked down on a bird that was bigger than
a small poodle. I again looked around
because I knew I was going to jail because this bird was so big that it clearly
had a birth certificate, a driver’s license, and was probably an organ donor. I was so scared that I turned and ran all the
way home and never in my life wanted to shoot another bird. I even avoided stepping on ants after
that. Now don’t get me wrong; If I find
a bug up in my house and they aren’t on the mortgage, they got to go, and by go,
I mean Raid Bug Spray. Don’t make me
break out Luke 10:19, ‘…behold, I give
unto you the power to trample on serpents and scorpions…’ to me that means
spiders and snakes! I do not like them.
Seriously speaking, I could feel and tell
that the raven I had shot was a creature that was intelligent and that clearly
I had no right on God’s earth killing.
It didn’t take the later knowledge in life that ravens were monogamous
and kept the same mate for their entire life to make me regret my actions. Nor did it take the actions of the ravens
that later in life followed me for four blocks to protect me from imminent danger
to make me feel sadness over my actions.
It also didn’t take the ravens that seemed to watch over me on my
journey from San Diego to Denver when I found out my grandmother passed during
the trip. It simply took the true
emotions of a considerate and compassionate human being to walk up on that
large creature and realize that I was in the wrong. I had taken a creature’s life that when I was
up close to it was one of the most hauntingly beautiful animals that I had ever
seen. I wrote a piece titled ‘Stoned’ which was an homage to one of the birds I shot during my youth that
is also on my album ‘Passion Flowers’ and it goes like this ~
‘He said to me again
and again
Just don’t you worry
You’ve been chosen to
win
For all the cries of
‘you’re crazy I see’
You are more and more
with We
For you have been
chosen to help spread the word
As one would if a
hummingbird
For when you were young
and the one that you shot
With him and with you
there was a lot
He is still with thee
as he will always be
But for him and you to
do there is a lot.’
~Anthonystjoseph
By
Anthonystjoseph
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