To Touch the heart of God...

I remember the day I started feeling that I was "less than acceptable". I was somewhere between 5 and 7 years old. Flossi (my beautiful dog) was still alive, and Bruno, her husband, lived next door at Mrs. E's house. I spent my days running between Sis. B's house to the right of me, and Mrs. E's behind me. Sis. B would let me do "cool" things like slaughter chickens by chopping their head off really quick, so the head would keep squawking and the body would keep running around for a good 5 to 6 minutes after the fact. She also owned the mother of Flossi, and she told the neatest stories of when she was growing up. She lived there with her husband, and her evil sister-in-law, who in coming months, would perform Obeah in an attempt to get them to move out, and would blame them for a brake in that happened right under her nose while she was sleeping one night. But all of that is for another story and another time.
Mrs. E lived behind me and was an incredible baker. She would make the most beautiful wedding cakes. On top of that she had two beautiful daughters, one was Christine, the other one I cannot remember her name. They were both in college and whenever they were home for the weekend I practically lived there.
There were neighbor's on the left and in the front of me; the Ed's family, a clan of coolies that live in a large yard with 3 houses and several families deep. There was always drama going on there, and they were always coming into our yard, much to the chagrin of my mother and me, since that usually entailed them stealing something from our yard. My mother later lessened that problem somewhat by becoming their Sunday school teacher and their mommy too. In front of us were the Js' and the P's. Both were expatriate Jamaican families that had returned from England. Mrs. J was a pleasant woman, and I would play with her grand children. Mrs. P and her husband lived alone in their 2 storied, 5 room home with the large porch on the roof and a built in aquarium on the front porch that housed about a dozen miniature sharks. They also had ferocious and beautiful black dogs.
If the mentioning of the layout of the house seems a bit grandiose, do not think so. All of our houses with the exception of the Eds' were two story. I lived in a fairly affluent middle class community. We were the only family renting there. Our house was a beautiful 2 story "castle", 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, living room, kitchen with bar, huge dining room, laundry room, enclosed front porch, 2 balconies, and a huge car port. It was sitting on a half acre lot so we had lots of room to play, and grow a garden, and raise a couple goats, 2 rabbits, 3 barbledoves, 2 ballplates, one dog, and for one day a mongoose it took me all morning to trap. I also raised a lot of infant wild birds there as well. My dog Flossie, could climb trees, and would frequently take the babies out of the nest and bring them to me. I would patch them up, raise them, then teach them to fly by throwing them off my parents balcony in the front of the house.
My brother and I spent our days after school hunting lizards, caring for animals, playing with our neighbor's, and little DG who lived about 2 blocks from our house, down the road and around the corner. We had the most awesome tree house that David (my brother) and I built. DG once tried to climb into it, but his mother worried that some harm would befall him, so it didn't happen. Our other favorite past time was raiding the fruit trees in the yard, we had soursop, sweetsop, orange, grapefruit, pomegranate, mango, coconut and one cherry tree that grew against the wall that separated our yard from the Eds'. One day I found a dead humming bird by the tree, one of the Eds' children had shot it down with a sling shot (they were a troublesome lot, all except for K). I found she had a little nest in the cherry tree thorns, and I found 1 baby and 2 eggs. I tried to save them all, but the ants got to the baby before I could do anything about it, and the eggs didn't hatch. I was devastated. The little baby was less than a inch long, and covered in black downy feathers. We had a suitable funeral for her.
When we got hot playing outside (it was always hot in St. Jago De La Vega - Spanish Town, the old Spanish capital of Jamaica) we would go and sit in the little drainage canal my father dug that ran the length of our property. Spanish Town was originally mostly marsh land that the settlers filled in and built on. Our house was built on a marsh with a small spring, and the soil in all of St. Catherine is clay so the water would not drain properly. It was doing a number to the foundation of the house, so my father dug a drainage ditch about 2 feet wide and as long as our property was wide. He stocked it with perch, and little fish to prevent mosquito's from taking hold. We would sit beside it and stick our feet in the cool water and watch and feel the fish come up and nibble on our toes.
It was on a Sunday, (the day "it" happened) so I didn't have school, we had finished our chores for the day ( 5:00 a.m. family worship, going and cutting grass in the cane fields next to our home and bringing it back to feed the goats, feeding the other animals, watering the garden, breakfast, tidying the house) and I was off to Sis. B's to help her. She had just gotten back from church and she was about to catch, slaughter, pluck and dress the chicken for cooking of the Sunday meal. I helped her gather eggs and pluck the chicken and as a reward she gave me a pretty little plastic egg holder. She said it had a special surprise inside if you filled it with water. Being an extremely inquisitive and precocious child I instantly put it under the tap. To my utter amazement and joy a little picture showed up magnified by the water. I do not remember the color of the egg holder ( I think it was pink) but I do vividly remember the picture, which was burned into my mind by the events that followed. It was the picture of a beautiful nude woman being kissed by a man. I immediately ran to my favorite house, Mrs. Es' to show of my new treasure. Christine was in the shower so I couldn't show her, so I took it to Mrs. Es' who was decorating her latest master piece. She looked up long enough to look in the cup and get very angry. She promptly told me that I was evil (unlike my brother who was a saint) and that she "detested" my existence. I ran from the house crying. I don't remember when the egg cup was broken, but I remember I destroyed it to get the picture out. I remember asking my mother why she hated me. I think my mother went to talk to her about what happened, and I think I got a piece of cake out of it.
I held on to the picture for a long time until I lost it. Needless to say, I did not go to the Es' quite so often, which did not matter anyway since Christine left to live in Kingston and date her husband to be. Mrs. Es and I did not talk for years, until I was eighteen and I walked into the post office where she worked. She seemed genuinely glad to see me, and a few years later I went back to her house to say good bye to her for the last time. She died a few months after I last saw her. The thing was, what she said to me never died and I did not get over it until recently. I am now 32 so that is not a good thing. I remember that a few months later I told my mother I wanted to marry 7 women, and she laughed and told me I could not because: 1. I was not a boy and 2. I was not Muslim. I remember vehemenently protesting such an injustice that would make me not a boy, and I was sure that God made a mistake with making me a girl for I was surely supposed to marry 7 women. It was not until eons later I understood that "I am gay", and began to deal with all the things the past had given me.
Today I live thousands of miles from Highfield Drive, Spanish Town, St. Catherine, Jamaica W.I. but inside I still go there, sometimes I still run away crying, and sometimes I let one ignorant sentence dissolve all the good in me. I wrote this because I am at constant war with myself to eliminate or at least control the crass, unruly, and less than lady like side of me. I have been told I should embrace it and accept it. I do not agree. I think what makes humans unlike animals is that we can improve ourselves. That is humanities dream from the time beyond time. We have made gods, and devils in a attempt to control, and overcome our baser instincts. We try all our lives to touch the heart of God.
The apostle Paul put it aptly..."The good that I would, that I do not; and that that I would not, that I do." [paraphrased] Frequently I find myself reducing another person to a "piece of meat", nothing more than the physical, but fortunately for me, I frequently find myself rising above that urge and elevating them to what they really are, humanity made in the image of God.