A Story that I wrote in 1993, from Provo, Utah

    I was 22 years old when I wrote this. It was my first year living in Utah, my first year of studies at Brigham Young University. I always wanted to write, but it could be hard to get things organized.

I will call it "Hector", some 30 plus years later. It had no title nor date affixed to it in my notebook.

    Hector

    When Hector was young he flew the kites in the spring with his schoolmates, and a few boys who didn't attend school. They ran and shouted as the classes ended, running towards their homes, where their fathers had helped them construct the kites, and where their mothers awaited with homemade bread, and their sisters would sing and clap, while even the street dogs frolicked in the wind, exasperated at the thought of so many boys running to and fro.

    The dusty streets became well-trodden with the commotion of spring, and the wind lifted the kites into the smiling sky, smiling for the time of year, blowing past the rainy months of winter, and gently arriving in the national holidays of September. Hector's heart soared beyond the clouds, into the rays of heaven, made blue like the western mountains, only endless and infinite and sculpted by dozens of earthbound pilots. Sailors of the fathomless sunny sea all edging their way through eternity.

    But that was long ago, and Hector had since grown out of childish exploits and adventure, and since then had sunken old in a wheelchair. No one was left of the family, a neighbor brought by bread freshly baked, but it wasn't the same as his mother's. His father had died quite young, his sister had married and was across the mountains. His mother was just recently buried in the town's high cemetery. It was impossible to go there in a wheelchair. 

    Hector sat alone and thought. Stared out the window at the dead-end street of soot and half buried stones. He saw the neighborhood children run with their kites in the spring, forgetting about the school notebooks on their dead-end streets.

    He was skinny and frail, with deep sunken eyes. His legs didn't move. His hands were shaky, feeble and withered. The radio was his string to the eternities, yet he couldn't quite see his kite his father and he had made. He had a hard time smelling the warm sopaipilla that were brought to him by the neighborhood children. Its taste was bland like some neutral colorless clay. It warmed his mouth, but his unfeeling stomach just let it die there. His bowels just let it return to the earth by cold running water from the streams of the far-off mountain.

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The notebook was found by my daughter a couple days ago; she is close in age to what I was then.

She read other random comments and words in it and said," That is where I get it from!".

It was nice to review some of these old words and thoughts.