Lives piece

Back in the good old days; four houses and a good few years ago, I was a strange sort of child. Not like the well-adjusted properly motivated man of eighteen you know today, I was skittish and anti-social. Lacking the finer social graces I would later develop I preferred to shrug back from public places and strangers. Hoping to cure me of my diffidentness my parents would exercise any opportunity to force me out into the world. Pre-school was the most obvious choice and it served well enough; I would go and sit. Sit by myself, sit in the corner, sit in the bushes, I would just sit. Now, it doesn’t take my parents combined thirty-seven years of education to realize that crouching in a shrubbery doesn’t facilitate socialization. So my parents decided a more aggressive tactic was required. My mother set aside whatever it is that mothers do in the afternoon to march me around our wee town.
I would, under duress, accompany her on her daily errands; the grocer and such. Once in public I would be expected to stand tall, walk straight, and greatest of inhumanities, speak. By this point I would prefer the turmoil that was school, there at least silence was acceptable, except during prayer (damn nuns.) But on the unfortunate occasions I was sick, or when it snowed, I would once again return to the care of my mother. And once so supervised we would re-explore the familiar haunts of small-town Vermont. Thanks largely to the mind-freezing cold of New-England winter (that is to say all months except July, which could easily reach a balmy forty-seven degrees) we would stick to the great indoors. Lacking significant structures of a noteworthy nature, our town necessitated that we run the course of the usual small town locals. The grocer, the general-store, the teddy bear factory, the mall (a term laughably applied to the ten store collective in “downtown.”) It was on one such march that I was égorged.
One particularly pleasant day we decided to leave our standard route to stroll along the banks of the mighty Lake Champlain. As it was late summer so we needed only our lightest down as we walked that rocky shore. And it was in the frigid brine I spotted a delightfully unusual bit of flotsam, a pair of glass bottles. The two twin buoys bobbed about in the gentle undulations of the vast lake behind them. I watched the little submersibles twirl and dance about for a brief until my mother was suitably distracted. At which point my reasonable response to such an invitation was hold both bottles aloft and clack them together. It was a most appealing sound. I repeated the motion. This time; both bottles shattered, raining jagged glass down upon me. Little shards of glass ended up lodged in both my right eye and my throat. Bet’cha didn’t see that coming.
Anyways, one hysterical trip to the emergency room and a few stitches later I was good to go and ready to hit the beach again. Unfortunately, in the brief period that had elapsed winter had set in and the whole region was buried under snow drifts. The snow that september was as brutal as it was brumal, we were trapped in our house and forced to eat my little sister Liesel, but that’s a whole different story.