Sand Bees and Rain Fish

5^th January 2012

Dear Cassi,

Another of the many points of youth I can now recall is that school yard my father once called the park and how my thoughts of it changed when I became a student at that school. When I was a student at the elementary level I recall what we called sand bees buzzing along the school yard. This was a time in the nature of youth where the way the world worked was still unknown to us and we saw the sand as the birth place of these bees.

     
Some of the children would wonder how the bees would one day turn yellow and join a hive to make honey. Sand bees were black and green on our playground and we thought that all the bees of the world came from the ground of our school yard.

    
 The world can be so large and so small at the same time when you are young. All the world can fit in a thimble when you are a child and still it can be the biggest thing in all understanding.

     
Another of the things born of the sand was fish made of rainwater. It would rain, as many think it does not do in California, and some of the children would toss stone into the puddles to “make the fish jump” out of the pool.

     
There were no fish. It was just droplets of water that looked like fish to young eyes. It would never come to most of those folks that the shape of fish look like drops of water because of hydrodynamics.

     
It comes to me that some of us finally understand why the world is like this and how it came into existence. Then there are those of us who simply fail to see the importance as they grow older.  

Never let the world lose its magic,

Richard Leland Neal

Imagination and Humor - Horace Walpole

I, Cyborg

12^th April 2012

Dear Cassi,

I think you may recall Turtle Nose speaking of a story I worked on back in middle school that stayed with me to mid high school. I have but fragments of its evolution in my mind now and so little was ever written down with all the obstacles in my way. Many were the nights … or days … or evenings maybe, I can no longer give account of such things, that I would sit imprisoned in my mind unable to sleep but too weak to move.

       

My wandering thoughts would spin yarns for me in that hell that gave me what play I could have at eleven. The darkness of my life was lit only by my stories as the spark of light I had to cling to in keeping my sanity. I called my hero Claw as hands had then been useless to me. Those people from where Claw came I called Clordonians. They were a race of Cyborgs things made of machine and flesh.

       

So, from where did the Clordonians come? The face I took from the Terminator and the body was that of a toy soldier that lost a hand. The ship I saw them fight across space with was a toy gun that came with the soldier.

       

In my head and with bits a bobbles I constructed a thing I would dream to become because of my depression. The Clordonian was a being that had suffered terrible wounds and could still live. Wounds like those on my heart from my mother’s death. The beings arms could move by servos and by flesh and so it could feel no pain or fatigue.

       

These things of my imagination were the engineers of a world where my pain would end. They were the saviors from my privet hell, the guardian angels I wished I had. They were the grim smile that kept me alive in this world.

Find your smile, little sister; it only needs to shine for you,

Richard Leland Neal

Within Their Means - Oscar Wilde