Is This Worth Reading

When I was a child, I looked up to see all that was, now its just reversed and I look down to see what I missed.

At times it's like the two meet in between and the past comes up to meet me as I fall directly into its path:

Okay, here’s my take. I read it. I think it’s overwritten. But.... it’s beautiful writing. I do not quite know what you’re talking about. A little boy and his dog, a rich kid who, what? Buried something in a field that the poor boy played in? The poor boy hurt himself? Did the dog get hurt? And at the end, the poor boy knows that there will be time for revenge?

You’re making the reader work too hard to figure out what you’re saying. The sentences are sometimes way too long. An example:

“Fido, being dutifully impressed, wagged his shaggy tail — all except that last bit of the tip that got left in the fence that night the rabbit suckered him into following him through at full throttle when he was caught napping the winter before; with rapt attention Fido’s droopy ear served as a placemaker as before his very eyes there appeared a half-gallon milk carton and more.”

This sentence is a paragraph!

I’d cut it down to:

“Fido, being dutifully impressed, wagged his shaggy tail as before his very eyes there appeared a half-gallon milk carton and more.”

The other stuff about the dog is interesting, and maybe can be used elsewhere.

The whole thing needs cutting. It’s beautiful writing and it might be painful, but why don’t you go through it with a hatchet.

And keep writing, you’ve got talent.

You’re right of course, about all you’ve said and I put it back in the hopper to pop some more while I’ve gone about the ‘teedi’ and the ‘um’ that make up the day’s hummed drum.

Meanwhile my mind strolled up and down the street outside while the marquee tempted me back inside with each tempting waft of the hot, fresh oiled corn as another thought opened wide and the door glided back to turn it aside.

Fresh ticket in hand I’ve reentered the fray; with luck this time I’ll get past the matinee.

[Summer came late that year, slowly uncurling and with seemingly great effort, she rose from the frost-covered grass, wiped her eyes clear with the last bit of passing fog and looked down upon the small boy and his cock-eared dog scurrying about on the remains of what appeared to be a homemade battlefield of sorts.

There, on the ground ,were bits and pieces of white plastic, tattered paper shards, a few greyish-white, silver dollar sized discs of single-ply cardboard and literally dozens of displaced tiny craters of splotchy dirt.

The dog, nose to the ground, was sniffing determinedly about while the boy was curiously retrieving a piece or two, here and there and holding them against the welcoming and suddenly warming skies as though he were fitting together a giant puzzle.

The boy ran to the dog and grabbed the one good ear and tugged him to the edge of the chopped-off hill that divided his side from the enemy who lived below on the other slope, the big kid with the big house and the rich parents and all night every night to lay such a devious trap for a younger kid fresh from the country and about to enter middle school that fall.

The boy bade the dog lie still and then, one by one he laid before the dog, Fido, for that was his name, the pieces that he had spent the last few hours collecting and reassembling all that he had found.

As each piece found its rightful place another memory returned from the autumn before when the boy and his family had moved back close to town. The house wasn’t much as houses go but it had running water.

All through the weeks that followed, the boy and his dad with a lot of help from some of the local ‘slow boys’ — men in their 30’s who suffered life’s sting — made friends.

The septic field with its leach pipes, the tank new and strong, laid waste to the outhouse followed by a bathroom upstairs. The ‘boys’ worked hard, laughed loudly and helped the boy convince his dad and his patient mother that the only thing missing was a dog.

On days when the dad was at work and the boy discovered the neighborhood he found both friends and a playground nobody else claimed. One day it was a ballfield where bats would swing wide, another a racetrack where all would match stride. The dog romped as well, chasing moles, bugs and rabbits, cabbages, leaves and little boy’s sleeves.

One late, last gleaming speck of light leaped smack out of the night that the dog ran yelping to catch the fast doppling fence-clearing baffled bunny going out of sight.

Poor dog, held suspended from his tail where it had caught the chain link and rabbit long gone. Somehow the dog looked more balanced, his flopped ear on one end, the other his lopped tail (some say it was the other way around — the story keeps changing).

The leaves soon covered the ballfield, the air had grown cold, the clouds kissed the hilltop and only weekends saw the children where laughter and sun once beckoned them daily before the schoolbells had rung and there he stood.

A new kid, bigger and surer, walking so proud; he carried a tape measure in one hand and a hammer in the other and, from his pockets he would pull a stake and tap it firmly in place.

Down one side and up, back and forth caddy-corner all around he made his rounds and then announced to one and all that from this day forward this was to be a battlefield where but one side would win; and we knew with a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be us.

The snow hit that year, three feet of glorious, beautiful chaotic flakes of one of Nature’s most miserable, enervating blessings.

Patient, sun-drenched Fido, being dutifully impressed, wagged his shaggy tail — all except that last bit of the tip that got left in the fence that night the rabbit suckered him — as I put the last piece of the then revolutionary marvel of packaging that now is remembered more as a place to put pictures of lost little boys and girls who never got old enough to have memories of dumb dogs and mean boys.

With rapt attention Fido’s bad ear perked up as before his very eyes there appeared a half-gallon, wax-paper milk carton which had just drenched my pantleg as I ran.

Fido began to lick thirstily but soon disappointedly as the milk had all been greedily drunk months before as the rich kid who lived in the big house and now claimed the ‘battlefield’ had collected the materials to plant the landmines now all over what was once no-man’s land.

The now abandoned all-purpose field became just another small rise that might as well have been the 38th parallel that followed that fateful year.

The field, once an old man’s garden, rich with flowers, fruit, lush green leafy plants and stalwart stalks of corn had passed into disuse along with the old man who tended it for the years when the sap ran high and then coursed back much slower but surely still.

It was a place to gather when young spirits ran high and races were to be won, and hard white balls were meant to fly and then a battlefield where treasured memories die.

But that big kid who lived in the big house on the other side had plotted and planned all that winter and spring and even right up to the discovery one dawn when the boy and his earlopped dog stumbled out to meet a lazy summer’s morn; they romped, they ran, they cried with joy and wept with glee and in their freedom they both came afoul.

For where ever they strayed from the bases and lines old summers worn, they came a cropper — their shins bruised and torn — that nasty brat, the little rich kid with nothing but time and a devil’s mind had spent the whole winter digging and hiding juice bottles, milk cartons and even balloons filled with dank water and girl’s perfume all over the field where the boy had run wild the late autumn before in his mad dash to make friends before the iron grip of January’s cold forced him inside.

Wet to his knees, shamed to his core, the boy swore one day he’d get even and just now remembered it once more as summer would be soon leaving and he knows that the rich kid’s always just on the other side of the hill and just outside the door.]

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