If I could Only Turn Back Time

I sit he by my lap top wondering about my life. I am sixty-four years old and wondering where my life went. I look back at it and wonder maybe I should have done this differently. Or I should have done that differently. Could have should have but didn't. I grew up in a small town in the sixties and seventies. And I couldn't wait to get out of there. I hated every minute of it. I didn't have a lot of friends because my family was one of the poorest in our Neiber hood. Our house was so old we had a hand pump in the yard for water and still had a outhouse. Most of the time I wore hand me down clothes that were given to me or mom bought at a yard sale.

We had a small farm just on the edge of down that my father ran during the day. And he worked as a janitor at night in a local factory.

Mom tried to keep the house going along with my older sister.

I was very rebellious growing up. My father was the only one that could control me. He knocked me on my ass more than once until I got to big for that. He tried to slap me one day and I caught his arm and I said at with a very hard voice NO MORE. You will never hit me again. And that was the end to that.

I think that day I earned his respect because we seemed to get along better. I was fifteen then. I was almost six feet tall and one hundred and fifty pounds.

School was another story in itself. I got involved with the wrong crowd. Some people thought it was. In our school was the jocks and the heads. The jocks were the sports nuts, and the heads were the partiers. That was where I fit in. Boy did I do a lot of partying.

There was a church right across the street from the school where we used to sit on the steps. We would get off the bus and head right there. We would get high before school so we could deal with what was going on.

I got to know quite a few people when I was a head. I found out have the teachers got high. Which was cool at the time. I would give them a nickel bag a week and they would give me a passing grade and I didn't even have to show up for class. Then one day the shit hit the fan some two- faced s o b turned me in for dealing. I got kicked out of school and arrested the same day. My father had to pick me up at the police station he wasn't very happy about that. To be blunt he was down- right pissed off. A week later we went to court. I had a judge that was a prick at least I thought so at the time. He gave me two options two years in the country jail or four years in the military of my choose. Since I was only seventeen, he had to give his consent. I didn't know this until I arrived too boot camp, he signed me up for a twenty-year hitch. Since I can't control you, the Army might. I carried a resentment for years because.

A week later I had to go to boot-camp. My father even gave me a ride to the bus station. That was the last time I seen him alive. I was three weeks into basic and I was told by my co he had died. He was working in the field and dropped dead of a stroke. The Army wouldn't let me go to the funeral because they didn't think I would come back. That was another resentment I carried around. I became a man with a lot of anger. In a way it was to my advantage. It made me push myself harder. I turned out to be a pretty good soldier. At least the Army thought so. I was in such shape was advanced to Ranger Training twelve weeks of hell. I was a quick learner when it came to learning combat and survival skills.

The past is the past our instructor said more than. You will learn to move forward and never look back. You can't change the past no matter how hard you try. You will always face forward and stay focused on your mission. That little talked worked as long as you were in the Army. When you get out it is a whole nether story. Along with a different way of life.

That was forty years ago a lot has happened since then. I have been married twice. I have for children Five grandchildren. And my second wife I love with all my heart. Yes, there are somethings I would have changed in my past. But if I did, what kind of life would I be living now? Staying focused in the now. Now is I being a sixty-four-year-old blind author trying to follow a childhood dream. In a world that doesn't exist except in my past. My stories to tell are many some are fiction some are not. But I am real in the hearts of my family and friends. I have some days that I don't know what I would do without them. There is one thing I know for sure I am not going to die a lonely old man rotten away in a nursing home. I have been to a few of those places, and they are not for me. I told my wife when I die send my body to the taxidermist and bring me home and put me in my favorite chair. Where I will always be home with my wife. Ha- Ha

Thank you to all my readers. Because of you my writings with on.

C.E. Metcalf