He was two years old when his mother gave him away. He has one faint memory of her. In the memory, she is sitting in the backseat, holding him. He remembers radio music. Sunlight. That’s all.
It’s a short recollection, but it’s all he has.
His addict mother underhanded him to his aunt like he was an unwanted Labrador. His aunt had worse addiction problems than his mother, the situation didn’t work out. He was five when his aunt gave him to the foster system.
Group homes are not places you want to find yourself as a kid. Three squares and a bed. It’s no day at the Best Western. In orphanages love is hard to come by. Hope can seem like a myth.
When he was thirteen he came down with pneumonia. It landed him in the hospital for a week. He didn’t care if he survived.
At night, he’d often stare out his hospital window and wonder if anyone even cared whether he lived.
“I was alone, man,” he told me. “I was a kid
who was totally alone. Lotta people don’t know how that feels. I hope they never do.”
One night a woman with gray hair and kind eyes visited the boy’s room. She was a night-shift nurse. She saw him looking at the Milky Way through the window.
“Whatcha staring at?” she asked.
“I dunno. Stars, I guess.”
Their relationship was as easy as throwing a rock. She talked. He listened. She told stories that left him engrossed. A good story can do a lot for a lonely kid.
The woman told a particularly moving story the kid would never forget. It was a tale about her grandmother, who had been raised in orphanages during the Great Depression. This story hit the boy where he lived. His ears grew ten sizes while she talked.
She told him how her granny wore ratty clothes and ate…