Every Act of Creation - Part I

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it." - Abraham Lincoln

There were on the outside walls of the school where I attended the beginning of seventh grade two marble slabs, one on the east side, one on the west. They stood well above the ground, permanently stained by the rain that rolled regularly off of the red brick walls of the school.

On each of the slabs, chiseled deeply into the marble, was a quotation. The one on the east by the Father of our Country, the other by the Great Emancipator.

No one ever really too time out of their day to read them, and on this day they were about the furthest thing from my mind. Little did I know that they would both soon probe to have a great impact on my life.

I was in seventh period on Friday afternoon. The last few minutes before the weekend officially started. I thought those last few minutes were the longest of the whole week.

Bob, Chris, Rick, Wooly and I had Mr. Katkavitch's English class during seventh period. He was a huge man of about 35 with enormous hands and a voice that sounded like it was coming straight from heaven. He prided himself on the fact that his brother Paul played for the New York Giants football team. We always wondered why Mr. K never played, too, for to us, his intimidating gaze was like a she-bear out for the kill. We thought he could scare the pants off of any pro football player.

When the bell finally sounded on this particular Friday afternoon, we went for the door so quickly we almost left skid marks.

"Wait a minute!" exclaimed Mr. K. "Just hold on!"

Snapping out of our weekend dreams and turning around, we looked despondently at Mr. K with a collective groan.

"For Monday..."

We groaned even louder.

"...for Monday," he said even more loudly, shaking his head and raising his finger, "you will read pages 277 through 282 and have a two page report to hand in."

"What?" questioned Wooly.

The middle-aged English teacher looked at him coldly. "What didn't you understand, Mr. Woolwine?"

We all looked at each other, inquisitively and with scrunched up eyes like we'd just heard Wooly's last name for the first time. And even though his real name was Mark, nobody ever called him anything but Wooly...ever. The sound of his real name almost sent shivers up our spines.

"Nothing, sir," he said.

"Ok, then," said Mr. K. "You can go."

"Can you believe that guy?" said Rick as we walked down the street toward home. "Homework on the weekend! Doggone it! There go two whole hours of doing nothing but studying, which is actually nothing because I won't learn anything anyway!"

"Six crummy pages!" exclaimed Chris. He was always the most vocal of our merry little band. "And for what? Absolutely nothing!"

"Did you hear what he called me?" grumbled Wooly. "I can't believe he did that!"

"I didn't know your name was Woolwine, Wooly," said Bob, grinning widely, a wink in his eye.

"Me neither," said Chris, with a giggle. "I thought we called you Wooly because of your curly hair." We all burst out in uproarious laughter.

"Very funny, very funny," Wooly said as the snickers started to take control of him. "You guys are a bunch of real comedians, you are. You know that?" We all pushed and poked the chuckling Wooly all the way down Hillside Avenue.

That night, after we had all exhausted ourselves playing football and freeze tag, I opened my English book to page 277. My eyes widened slightly as I read the title, "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. I'd heard of this Poe fellow, but I had never read anything he'd written.

I'd never read anything by any author except the guys at Street and Smiths Baseball Yearbook and Sports Illustrated. The were like icons to me. I read every single word they wrote, and sometimes twice.

And that's pretty much the way I liked it. So, I sat the book down, figuring I had plenty of time to read. I could explore an entire edition of SI in about ten minutes. I could certainly read these six pages with relative rapidity.

The next day, Saturday, started very early, as they usually did. We liked to get out of bed before the sun did so we could make the most of our parole time. Bob started throwing pebbles at my bedroom window at six-thirty. I didn't hear him until my brother reached down from atop the bunkbed at ten to seven and slapped me on the cheek.

"Hey! Wake up! Bob's outside!"

"What? Oh, ok," I said drowsily.

I reluctantly pulled myself out of my nice toasty bed and walked to the window across the room. Pulling back the curtains and looking out I saw Bob standing on the lawn wearing jeans and his favorite jacket. It was an old blue and gold letterman's jacket he'd bought at someone's yard sale for three bucks. It was all beat up and letter was gone, but that's the way he liked it. That way he could get it all dirty and grungy and nobody would ever notice.

I pushed the window up and looked at Bob with extreme agitation. "Hey, Bob," I said, with a small sprinkling of rancor. "What time is it?"

Bob took a deep breath. "It's almost seven o'clock. Why are you still in bed?"

I could see my breath in the chill air as I sighed deeply. "I stayed up late to watch that werewolf movie on 'Creature Features.' It was good."

"Well, can I come in and warm up a little while you get ready?"

"What'cha got going today?" I asked. Bob had been elected by the guys to be the Activity Chairman for the month. Despite his impassioned protests about the job, he was always coming up with cool stuff to do.

"I'll tell you inside, all right? It's cold out here."

Nodding, I closed the window and ripped open the bag that contained three pairs of new underwear. Pulled them on, I reached for my jeans. I loved the feel of new underwear under freshly laundered jeans.

Downstairs Bob was waiting at the kitchen door. The screen door slammed behind him as he entered the room.

"Quiet, will ya?" I said sharply. "Mom's still asleep!"

"Just your mom?" Bob asked. "Where's your dad?"

"Out playing ball. He goes over to the school and plays hoops with the guys from church every Saturday morning." I put a piece of bread in the toaster. "So, what have you got for us today?"

Bob looked longingly at the toaster until I put a piece of bread in for him, too. "Well," he began, "I figured we could get the other guys and go back to the lot and play around awhile. On my way over here I saw that the workers left a lot of junk lying around, like nails, hammers and stuff like that."

The lot was an old vacant lot behind my house. About two weeks before construction guys had come along and started to build a house on it. Mom had made it clear that it was taboo to even think about going over there. "If you go back there, you will be grounded for so long that your children will wonder why you can't go out of the house," she would say. Of course, she was worried about us hurting ourselves, but we didn't understand that. We only understood that we now HAD to go back there.

"Ok," I said, buttering my toast.

Coming soon - Part II