Why I don't have dreams

I lived in a two-story duplex, complete with an unfinished basement. It was a brick house with a concrete porch and a good sized front yard. The backyard, however, was about an acre. The back part was an overgrown blackberry patch. That is where the fort was, right in the middle of the dense entangled blackberries.

I am a four year old. Mommy lets me go to school now. I wanted to last year when we lived in Michigan, but they said I was too young. What do people from Michigan know, anyway, especially Mr. Dill, the principal. Most kids just called him Mr. Pickle, or just plain sour-head.

I like to go to school, but I don't like the teacher. She should be a teacher anyway. If you talk in class she puts tape over your mouth and makes you sit next to her desk. If you lick the tape, though, it won't stick and just falls off. Mrs. marble makes you sit on your hands then with another piece of tape over your mouth. I think she thinks I pull it off when she isn't looking, but, of course, I don't. It is just that it doesn't stick when you lick it.

She yells at me a lot, too. All I did was tell her that the tape fell off, and she yelled at me. Then, she made me go to the office.

I don't like going to the office. "Hurricane Face" is there. The Principal's name is Mrs. weathers, but everybody has their own name for her; mine's "Hurricane Face." She made me go and get her some coffee once. I found some Exlax and put them in with the sugar. She liked the flavor. She said the cafeteria likes mocha, whatever that is.

I like school. I've got lots of friends there. Most of them are black. Most of the neighborhood is black. Most of them don't like my brother, though. I really can't blame them. He is really mean to people. I don't think he likes black people He's always getting into fights with them. One time he pointed his finger at my friend J.J. His name is John John, really, but we call him J.J. for short. Well, Willie stuck out his finger, you know, the middle one, at J.J. and called him a "Niger". J.J. just grabbed his finger, twisted, and broke it. That happened a couple times that year. You'd think he'd learn not to call J.J. that, and not to point his finger at him.

My favorite time at school is recess. Most of the time we would go outside and play kickball. I'm good at kickball. We play that a lot at home, so I'm pretty good at it. I'm not very fast, though. I can kick the ball all the way down the hill, so I have more time to run, which helps. Sometimes, I don't get a very good kick on the ball, and I get thrown out, sometimes.

Sometimes during recess I don't play kickball. I sit by the tree and talk to my friend. His name is Tim. He's really in Second grade, but he comes out when we do. We talk about all kind of things. We talk about climbing the wall and getting on top of the building. We also talk about how come Willie has a broken finger. Sometimes, we just sit under the tree and watch the girls jump rope.

"See, see my playmate, why don't you come out and play with me?"

Pretty stupid song, but they sing it every day anyway.

At the back of the playground there is a sink-hole. It's fenced in so nobody goes down there, except my brother. He goes lots of places he's not supposed to. At the bottom there's a car. I guess nobody wanted it anymore, so they drove it into the hole and left it. Willie says there's other things in there too, but I'm not gonna' find out what.

After school I walk home with one of my friends. Mom's never there when we get home, just the babysitter. Mom's at work, but she comes home at night. Most of the time I do my homework before she gets home. It's not hard, so I get bored and I don't do it. Then the teacher makes me sit next to her desk because I didn't do my homework. If she would give us something fun, I might do it.

Next I would change clothes and go outside and play. I run to the back yard. I would crawl through the blackberry bushes until I came to The Fort. The Fort consisted of a bare patch of dirt covered by a piece of plywood. The bushes were so think that they supported the wood really well.

The Fort was where I really enjoyed to be. There, I had no brother sticking his fingers at my friends and calling them names, or a teacher telling me to sit on my hands. There I could be whatever I wanted; a cowboy, an indian, the captain of a spaceship to mars, or even Mohammad Ali.

One time, when I was going back to The Fort so that I could go to Mars. I found a really big spider. It had built a web across the path I had to travel. It was a large black spider about the size of a pop can. It had yellow spots on it, and it sat in the middle of its web. I was unsure what to do with this intruder on MY spaceship. Finally, I backed out of the path the way I had come in. I looked around and found a big stick, three or four feet long, I'd guess. I slowly crawled back through the blackberries where I had been a minute before. I took the stick and started to make a circle through the web. The spider didn't move. When I got about half of the circle "cut out" of the web, the spider jumped, no flew toward the blackberries. It ran away so fast I couldn't even catch it.

The only problem with the whole incident was that it scared me. I had nightmares for weeks about giant spiders coming to get me. One time I had a nightmare about a spider that had jumped on top of me and was squishing me to death. In a sudden panic I opened my eyes, lifted my head and screamed. I never told my mom the real reason why I screamed, because my brother's bunk-bed had fallen on me and was squishing me to death. I was so glad that it was only a bed on top of me instead of that giant black and yellow spider. I don't think I can remember more than a dozen or so dreams since that time. I wonder if there is any connection.