Dreaming Small: An Excerpt from a Work in Progress

A screech owl’s loud and unexpected cry interrupted the stillness of the cold night. It startled me and momentarily interrupted my thoughts as I walked toward home. I laughed to myself as I realized there was nothing to fear. I had been thinking about how much better life would be for me if I could have played sports before I graduated high school and I wasn’t sure I was going to make it that far.

I realized that I was considered a loser and a quitter in the eyes of the coaches and there was no way I could change their perceptions of me. They did not tell me that and they did not have to. I had heard them say that about others who played and quit sports or those who played and did not return for the following season, and I knew that was how they felt about undesirables like me.

The coaches did not like for their athletes to associate with non-athletes who were less than average, and they frowned upon those who did. High school coaches liked for their athletes to be an elite group, a clique, and at Graham they did not like to see athletes associate with students who did not make good grades or whom they considered to be of poor quality or standing. I was an example of what coaches disliked and I knew it. As I walked through the darkness and the four and a half miles to my parents’ house at Mudfork, I played those thoughts over and over. They were my favorite record on the jukebox in my mind, and I had an endless supply of nickels.

I did not like walking that road alone, especially at night, but if I wanted to do anything other than stay at home and be a recluse, it’s what I had to do. I had thumbed a ride to Falls Mills from Bluefield after watching my high school’s football team, the Graham G-Men, win another game. They had an excellent football team and I wished more than anything that I could have been on it. They won the Southwest District Championship as well as the Virginia Group 1A State Championship.

I had quit midget football because I had to walk five and a half miles to get home after thumbing a ride to Falls Mills from practice. I quit junior high and junior varsity football for the same reason. The next year I was asked to go out for the basketball team as a ninth grader and I quit that too and gave up on sports. There was no doubt that I was a quitter; I had proven it. I was a junior in high school and I wanted to play football or basketball more than anything, but once I had betrayed the system in the eyes of the coaches, I became an outcast and that was the way it was, the way they ran the system. I had no one to blame but myself, but walking that damned crooked road alone at night was the biggest reason I quit. Five and a half miles was a long walk in the dark or the daylight. Since my family moved to another house, the walk was only a little over four and a half miles. Lucky me.

I loved sports and I knew my time was running out to play them in high school. If I did not play then, I would never get to play in my lifetime. I knew I was not good enough to play in college but that did not matter. I would never go to college because I was not smart enough to get onto any college campus in America. I was having a tough time just getting through high school. I did believe I could play football or basketball even though I was skinny and not very strong. I could catch a football really well and I could jump pretty well. I was almost six foot two and that was nearly as tall as the guys on the basketball team. I could have tried out for an offensive end position in football and maybe the center position in basketball. Even if I did not make the first team, I still would have been a part of something good while I was in school.

I envied the players who got to travel to the other schools and were considered to be special by other students and the faculty and the coaches. The athletes also had their names and pictures in the paper and most of them were popular and well liked, especially the ones who were good students. I wanted to be just like them and feel that I was a part of something which to me would have been a great way to spend my last year in high school.

I kept thinking about how miserable my life was as I walked through the darkness that was covering me and seemed to be at the same time lighting up my faults and failures. I heard an airplane way off in the distance, and I wondered what it would be like to ride high and fast above the clouds. My grades were not good; I was barely passing. I did not have a girlfriend, I had never had a date, and we were so poor that we sometimes did not have the bare necessities. We didn’t have indoor plumbing from the time I was a first grader until I was a sophomore in high school in 1962. There were eleven children in my family, five older than me and five younger. There were eight girls and three boys. My brother Sam was the oldest and he somehow managed to make it through college to the surprise of no one because he was smart. He got married, had a son and then returned to the area. He had graduated from VPI with a degree in mining engineering and I was struggling to get through high school.

Sam was working for Consolidation Coal Company at Pocahontas, Virginia. His lovely wife, Judy, worked as a nurse, and this had helped his young family financially while he attended college. He was eight years older than I, and when he discovered how bad my situation was as a student and as a brother, he was appalled. We were nothing alike. Sam was smart, assertive, handsome, and the vice president of his senior class. He was the oldest child in my family and the favorite of my parents. He was also the favorite grandson of both sets of grandparents. I was none of those things. Sam never had the difficulties that I had faced with our Dad either. If it weren’t for our names, no one would ever guess that we had the same parents; we looked and acted nothing alike.

My youngest brother, Cline, who was the baby of the family, was stricken with spinal meningitis at the age of three and was helpless—couldn’t walk, had no muscular control, was blind, speechless and totally dependent on others. My Mom, my wonderful sweet Mom, had taken the total responsibility of caring for him. I don’t know how she endured what she went through. My youngest sister Cheryl was diagnosed with polio a week or two after Cline became sick, and when she was at the Medical College of Virginia, we were all scared to death about what was happening to her and what might happen to us. It seemed as if nothing would or could go right for any of us at that time in our lives.

I felt guilty because I was able to walk the roads and do anything physical that I chose to do, but was doing nothing else positive. It was not fair that my baby brother and youngest sister were stricken with these terrible illnesses. It should have been me because I was useless anyway. It hurt to think of what they were going through and I wanted so badly to change my sorry situation for the better. I was glad no one could see the tears as I walked in the darkness.

My Dad was not and had never been the ideal father to any of us since I became aware of my existence. We almost never talked unless he was telling me to do something or had something hateful or demeaning to say to me. He also drank too much when he had money to buy it. It had been a while since he had whipped me with a belt or a switch, but I never knew what to expect from him. Since he lost his job at U.S. Steel at the Gary 14 coal mine, things had not been good for any of us at home, and that had been over ten years ago. He had worked at the saw mill, in timbering and at other mines, but the jobs never seemed to last and we did not ever seem to have enough.

I walked briskly for over an hour and not one car passed me in either direction. I was relieved when I finally saw the light shining from the kitchen in our house. The door was not locked, it never was, and there was no one awake, so I slipped quietly in and went upstairs and fumbled in the dark to find the single hanging light bulb that lit my small room. I pulled the chain and turned the light on and quickly pulled my clothes off and turned the light out and got into bed as fast as I could because there was no heat in my room and it was a cold night.

As I closed my eyes and pulled the covers around me, I wondered why my life was so awful when others had it so much better. I wondered what it would be like to be a starting varsity player on a winning team, what it would be like to be a good student and to have nice clothes, a girlfriend, a car, or at least a driver’s license. I went to sleep and dreamed of being the high scorer in just one basketball game for the G-Men, and I heard the crowd roar and call out my name as I scored those points and we won a big game. I got hugged by the cheerleaders and my teammates slapped me on the back and congratulated me. Roy Orbison appeared in my dream singing the words over and over, “Sweet Dreams Baby, sweet dreams baby, how long must I dream.”