The BelieversA Story by Keith P. FarrellTwo boys discover they can achieve anything in a true story set in 1992, CT which also reveals a snapshot of the social, cultural and political landscapes in the early 90's as viewed by a 9 year oldThe
Believers By Keith Farrell The summer of 1992 I
was nine years old. My mother and I were
living in a duplex on a dead end street, in one of the quitter neighborhoods of
Torrington, Connecticut. My favorite
sports team, the Washington Redskins, had just won the Super Bowl that previous
winter, which was all that occupied my mind.
The country was fresh
out of the Persian Gulf War, which enforced everyone’s view the America was
without doubt the greatest nation. The
concept of war was a foreign idea to me at that age, and the Gulf War, being
over nearly as soon as it started, did not stir any fears or anxiety in my
young mind. There had been something
afoul in places I never knew existed and the United States had gone and
rectified it. This was not anything like
the conflicts I had seen on television.
Those types of violent conflicts were a thing of the past, I was
assured. Wars like World War I and II
and Vietnam, which my best friend Cody studied to an almost unhealthy point,
were of a much larger scale and now extinct in this new era of peace and
prosperity. In all the country was on a
tremendous high, we were the victors and once again our nation had played the
part of the hero. Our economy was
surging, with no end in sight, and the job market was strong. Not that I had the slightest understanding of
what this meant, to me it was clear by the attitudes of the adults around me
that America was the best, our people virtuous and our role in the world one of
the unrelenting hero. I was told by
uncles and elders alike how lucky I was to be an American; how lucky I was to
be free. Cody had his own
family, home and toys, though you would never know it by the time he spent at
my house. We had met each other when I
was only three years old, when my mother and I had moved in downstairs from him
and his mother at our previous apartment.
My mother and I moved around quite a bit over the years, but we always
stayed in Torrington and Cody always found his way there. On that particular day,
Cody had slept over the night before and as usual we had stayed up later
playing video games on my Nintendo Entertainment System. We played Contra, Wolfenstein and other war
games (mostly Cody’s choices). The summer often found Cody and I full of angst
and boredom, with endless days with nothing to do but occupy ourselves as we
saw fit. The Nintendo was a treasured
past time, but we were no couch potatoes.
We were usually running around outside pretending to be cops, army men,
or the Hardy Boys, always at the center of some elaborate plot we constructed
in our heads as we went. We rode the
swings on the swing set sideways; our imaginary motorcycles, with our imaginary
girlfriends on the back. Like most boys
we loved to play in rock piles, thick woods, construction sites or anywhere
else we could get hurt. That morning we woke up
early and helped ourselves to cereal from the cupboard before continuing to
play Nintendo. We soon bored of sitting
in front of the TV and turned to mischief.
Cody often sneaked nudie magazines he’d stolen from his parents over,
and for awhile we gazed upon the wonders of the female body like it was some
far off, mystical place which we would never be fortunate enough to travel
to. Then we played with my G.I. Joe
action figures and waited for my mother to wake up. My mother worked late
usually, so her schedule was offset from ours.
She would normally rouse herself from bed around noon, several hours
after Cody and I began to stir. Our days
in the summer usually revolved around us asking her to take us somewhere; the
town pool, the local video store for a movie and perhaps a new game, or if we
were unlucky she would have us accompany her on errands. Regardless, the most exciting part of the day
usually centered on my mother, and thus, until she woke up we often spent our
time dreaming up places we could ask her to take us. “Maybe your mom can
take us to R and B’s Sports World,” Cody suggested with eagerness. “That could be cool,” I
agreed. R @ B’s offered go-carts,
batting cages, mini golf and an arcade.
“Or at least the pool,” I offered an alternative, knowing my mother
might shy away from R @ B’s because of the cost. “Yeah, that’d be fun
too,” Cody conceded. Though we were far from
poor, my mother did a great job hiding our economic realities from me. Despite the fact that she was a single mother
who refused welfare or state aid, I had all I needed, adequate clothing, plenty
of toys and food in the cupboards. I,
unlike any of my other friends, was fortunate to have both a bedroom and a play
room. I had my own television in that
play room and drawers of toys and games.
Cody riffled through
one of the drawers with my toys and pulled out my set of Operation Desert Storm Persian Gulf War trading cards. The set
nearly matched Cody’s camouflaged Apache Helicopter t-shirt. “Hey, I think with my
set and yours we have the whole set,” Cody said as he skimmed through the
cards. “I have a lot of
doubles,” I said. “I think there are,
like, four President Bush’s in there.” “Do you have the one
where he’s riding through Kuwait in the tank?” “Yeah, it’s in there
somewhere,” I said, joining him on the search till we had located the card we
were searching for. “These Robocop cards are mixed in.” We began to separate and organize the
cards. Around this time we
heard the first sounding of my mother’s alarm clock. It would usually go off for about ten to
twenty minutes, blaring loudly through the house, before she would hit
snooze. The second time it went off she
usually got up. “How does she sleep
through that?” Cody asked. One of us
always asked this. Sometimes, when the
alarm failed to seize and my mother continued to sleep, oblivious to the
unnerving wailing emanating from her nightstand, we would actually go into my
mother’s room and shut it off ourselves rather than listen to it incessantly
sound. On this day the alarm
was quieted sooner than normal and we heard my mother’s disgruntled noises as
she made her way to the bathroom. There
was never any point in asking my mother anything, let alone even talking to
her, till she had drank her first cup of coffee. We rejoiced, the
process had begun, but we knew it would still be a couple of hours before she
would consider taking us anywhere. With
this in mind, we ran outside to play for awhile. At some point we began playing with my Ghostbusters toys. Ghostbusters
was at the height of its popularity.
Originally a movie, it had spawned a sequel and a cartoon television
show with a vast array of toys and trinkets for children to beg their parents
to purchase for them. I had all the
action figures, the clubhouse, and jump suit, equipped with proton pack (a
ghost-busting back pack powered gun) and ghost trap (for sucking menacing
entities up for disposal, of course). After we had bored of
that, we took to catching bugs. At some
point a net that was intended to catch butterflies was used for unintended
purposes and caused us to ponder its effectiveness. “Do you think it’s
possible to catch a butterfly in this thing?” Cody asked skeptically. “I don’t know, I guess
so,” I replied. I examined the net and
the length of the handle. “I suppose if
you got lucky.” “But what are the
chances of that?” he asked, still convinced that this so-called butterfly net
was a sham. “I guess, not that
good,” I admitted. “It is for catching
butterflies, though,” I argued. Why
would they have made the net if you truly could not catch butterflies with
it? “Well, Keith, you have
had this for what, four years?” He said with a laugh. Cody always had a great sense of humor. “And how many butterflies have you caught?” “Right?” I said with a
laugh, now also convinced the net was a sham. “You would probably hurt a
butterfly if you tried to catch it with that,” I added my own skepticism. “That’s true,” he
agreed. “Butterflies are very
delicate, you can’t just snatch them up,” I said with the utmost certainty. “Right,” he concurred. Cody and I weren’t just adventurers; after
all, we were scholars. We had spent many
hours copying verbatim from my children’s encyclopedias and fancied ourselves
experts in such fields as science and dinosaurs. “I bet we could come up
with a better way to catch a butterfly,” I said with excitement. “Of course, we could,”
he answered immediately. After all, why
not? “It could be a big step
for science,” I said, modestly. “So how do we do
it?” That question stumped
us for a matter of minutes. Then my Ghostbusters trap, which was still
sitting on the porch from before, came to mind.
“We’ll trap it,” I
proclaimed. “Right, but how do we
do that?” “We can use the ghost
trap,” I suggested. “Yes, but there is a
problem,” Cody assessed. “There is no
way to keep it open.” “What do you mean?” “We can set the trap,
but the footswitch opens it only for a minute before it shuts. It would be better if the footswitch closed the trap.” He was right, the trap would be hard to keep
open and if we could find a way to keep it open we had no way of closing it on
demand. Cody played with the
trap for a few minutes and devised a solution.
He laid out the trap and extended the cord that led to the footswitch as
far out as it would go. He stepped on it
a couple times to test its responsiveness and then fetched a cooler off of my
front porch. He placed the cooler on the
trap and sat atop the cooler. The weight
on the mechanism kept the trap open. He
then stood up and moved the cooler and the trap shut. “Well that works,” I
said with surprise. “Only thing is, the
trap closes kind of slow.” “I know, that could be
a problem.” We agreed that though
flawed, the design was over all good and better than the net by far. We picked some dandelions and other flowers
from around the yard (mostly just weeds) and placed them in the trap. “What if we
accidentally catch a bee?” “What do you mean?” he
asked. “Bees like flowers
too. What if we accidentally catch a bee
and it gets pissed? What do we do?” “Alright…” Cody
pondered for a moment than answered confidentially that we would simply take
the trap upstairs to my bathroom and submerge it in water, drowning the
bee. My concerns alleviated
we set forth on our task of catching a butterfly. Never for a moment did we consider that we
had never seen any butterflies in my yard or nearby, nor did we consider that
butterflies aren’t particularly attracted to weeds. We never thought about the odds; the chance
that a butterfly would be nearby and actually decide to feast on some
dandelions that were situated in a peculiar and most certainly unnatural blue,
plastic device. We did not know that
butterflies were not even in season, knowing very little about butterflies at
all. Despite all the reasons
to believe the contrary, we never gave our failure a second’s
consideration. We absolutely knew it would work. To this day it is utterly amazing for me to
recall that within a few short minutes a beautiful butterfly, with vividly
yellow and black colored wings, not only appeared but flew right into our
trap. We released the footswitch from
under the cooler and the door to the trap closed, successfully trapping our
prey. “Yes!” we both
yelled. We had done it, just as we had
envisioned. “Wow- we caught a
butterfly!” I exclaimed. What a
triumph! What an accomplishment. We raced to the trap and held it in our
hands. We could not see the creature
inside, but we knew it was in there. We
had seen it, clear as day, fly in and the trap shut over its head. I remember feeling
disappointed that we could not examine our catch, knowing that any attempt to
actually open the trap and hold the creature would result in its immediate
escape. For this reason alone, I
thought, the net had one up on our trap.
Though the net was a more violent, forceful method of trapping, the
victors could examine their accomplishment.
Ours was one we could not physically hold or even see. I grabbed the trap,
keeping both hand firmly over the top, for fear that the little insect would
power his way through the trap doors to freedom. We ran inside to the bathroom, where my
mother was putting on her make-up. “Mom! Mom!” I yelled
with glee. I raced through the story of
our triumph so quickly I nearly lost my breath.
I held up the trap with delight for her to share in our glory. “Very nice, dear,” she
said with a smile. Her forced excitement
was all too recognizable to Cody and I.
Did she not hear me? Did she not
think it remarkable? We had achieved a
great thing- it was in my hand, before her eyes. Did she even believe us? After all, we were but children and our
imaginations so very active. I couldn’t
blame her; for her it was a matter of faith.
She, like us, could not see the butterfly inside the trap. We, however, knew it; we had witnessed it
before our own eyes. We had set out to
achieve that very end and done so with remarkable accuracy. We were not as surprised as we were
vindicated. We had envisioned those very
events unfolding and never once considered the unlikelihood of it actually
occurring. We willed that butterfly into
that trap, the inconceivable made reality by the limitless reaches of our imaginations. In our young, naïve minds there was no reason
to doubt our actions would succeed. We
had considered the plan, weighed the risks (the bee) and calculated our moves
in accordance. We had set forth to do
something most would have thought impractical or impossible and achieved it
with ease. Neither of us expected any
less, we knew it would happened, we believed it would as certain as we believed
in anything. We released the
butterfly almost immediately. We did not
want it to suffocate inside the trap and even more, we wanted to see it once
again. We could have kept it till it
died and preserved it, thus preserving our victory, but we had other plans. We
wanted to behold our accomplishment once more in its natural beauty, flying
freely into the air as it had so gently glided into our trap. We opened the trap and the butterfly gracefully
flew out of the trap. It seemed to float
for just a moment before leaving us on a wind I can still almost feel on my
face. To this day I am certain that we
succeeded because we believed we would, as if life was confirming our just
pursuits of our wildest dreams. As if
faith had seen it fit to show us that we could accomplish anything together, if
we only believe. © 2010 Keith P. Farrell |
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1 Review Added on June 12, 2010 Last Updated on October 10, 2010 Tags: children, kids, 1990's, politics, Gulf War, family, butterflies, peace, single mothers, short stories AuthorKeith P. FarrellTorrington, CTAboutKeith Farrell, an American Studies major at the University of Connecticut, is a high school teacher's aid and is studying to teach on the college level. He has his associates degree in liberal arts wi.. more..Writing
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