Big Eye Over A Small Table

Jerry Vilhotti
 

© Copyright 2006 by Jerry Vilhotti

 

What the two suns would do in Johnny's ethereal dream, while on the small operating table, was to first twang into a frown and then twang back through circles into a smile. Johnny was eight years old and inside the dream adjacent to the two suns was the woods where fifteen year old Grady, with the mind of a seven year old boy, had walked and Johnny along with several other young boys had stumbled in trying to get away from the helpless looking boy the older boys, who in a couple of years would be fighting in a war to preserve the "American Way of Life", were using to scare the younger ones by having Grady flashlight his pockmarked face to dangle bright in midair inside the darkness of a summer night. These same woods where Johnny had to prove he was a "tough kid" from The Bronx, soon after moving into the Little Dublin neighborhood of Burywater, by having to fight the toughest kid who just happened to be two years older than he. Johnny used two punches to beat the bully, a wearer of a frightening face, with a right-left combination to his head that had the boy collapsing into a heap screaming to know if he were going to die. Watching him, as the bigger guys did their awkward nervous Burywater laugh. A laugh he would hear for another nine years and then marry the pretty girl he would meet at the senior history class picnic six months later Linda Ann and the song "Moonglow" would forever remind him of the great event and both would go off to the Big Apple where she would help him get through Harlem College by working in offices in mid-Manhattan in the same building where the British Embassy would be housed being constantly protested against for its misguided policies and Johnny would feel the presence of people who had gone to that school too: Jonas Salk whose polio vaccine would help many of the suffer the little children in the world, a Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter who did not believe a Supreme Courts should appoint a president, a Bertrand Russell who would be told by a New York supreme court he could not teach there due to his views on religion and morality suffocating free speech which would foreshadow events in the future and a Secretary of State who would forget his roots and tell the United Nations he knew the nation they were about to invade had weapons of mass destruction. He asked to be trusted since he had done his ROTC at the college near the great Hudson River - not very far from The South Bronx slum he escaped ....

"Tomorrow this time the operation will be over and my leg will no more have water inside it." Over and over Johnny repeated this until sleep overtook him and then he was in the dream of the two suns.

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