The Ballad of the Bouncing Baby Boy

A dozen and some small change.

When I awoke the morning of the incident, none of my senses appeared heightened in the least.

I was a child, full of innocence and relatively unaware of my own mortality. Although memory is most often an erratic and unreliable scene setting, I confidently recollect that the mortality of others, like my own, had never even once crossed my conscious mind. Luke Skywalker’s mortality was of great concern to me, but none of the living or even the reality in which they lived, ever really occupied the paradigm of my insomniatic adolescence. I did not know too many unrelated people and shallow was my depth. Again, I was only a dozen and some small change.

HE was just a baby. A beautiful baby boy.

Dancing around the truth, if you have been paying attention, is a familiar pattern of mine that deliberately detracts from the celebration of self-awareness through self-disclosure.

The truth is out there! 
I will get us there, I assure you.

Meanwhile, the eight-track tape — as the magnetic sound-recording technology extraordinaire of its time, was nearing the end of its popularity. This now obsolete technology was alive and well circa the moment in question. It was 1979. Barney was not yet a purple dinosaur. Superfluously detailed to overly contextualize the character of the protagonist, this diminutive discourse demonstrably derails the focal context of the story at hand. 

Ponder this.  The sentence for involuntary manslaughter was likely longer than the melting of the snow beneath the rubber boots that I wore during my lonely walk to Longfellow Junior High. The walk itself was perhaps my single greatest challenge on blizzardy mornings — uphill for more than a mile — in the snow, both ways.

As the oldest male child I was the hand-me-down production artist, never the victim. Entitled was my middle name. Poverty was not my style but it was well known by the poor people that I lived with.

Bourguoise muah!

Proletariat deux.

Death knocks for all.

Death. Thank God you were not the final outcome of what I refer to as Exhibit A.

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Exhibit A: The shit I have been painstakingly talking about.

Exhibit A: The alleged accident.

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Cognizance of the time of day, the day of the week or even the day of the month, let alone the month itself is something that I cannot summon unto my memory, even with my heightened ninja-like ability to print a calendar and draw tiny circles around numbers and follow-up with arrows pointing to specific dates.  Yellowed paper makes this exercise seem all that much more authentic.

______________________________________

The sentence for involuntary manslaughter 
would not become known to me then 
— now — 
or at any other time in my living history.

______________________________________

My baby brother. I loved him dearly.

My baby brother. I likely changed his diaper(s) more than any other sibling ever did. Probably more than even his mom or dad even did.

My baby brother. Lovingly held in my arms as I brought him from his crib, down the stairs, to the breakfast table, like so many other times before.

Why did someone put a blanket on the stairs?

Why did my left foot buckle as I lost my balance?

Why did my superhuman brotherly love strength fail me on the final step?

Why did everyone have to watch as I tumbled stair by stair, head over heal, in slow motion?

He lived.

I lived.

Live and let live.

Will he ever forgive me? Will his service as my eternal muse ever pay dividends that he will treasure as much as I treasure him?

                                                ______________________________________

Retrospectively speaking I understand fully why I was always visibly the least favorite among my stepfather’s many critical responsibilities. 
BURDEN
If you can not do the time  — do not do the crime.