Maybe it’s this damn heat that made me remember this story.
I was young. Young enough to have more nerve than sense.
We lived out in the country, and there was this girl who rode my school bus. She and her brother lived way back off the road. I mean WAY back.
Every morning the school bus would pull up and damn near have to wait on them to come walking out of that field toward the road.
I knew where she lived.
And one hot summer day, for reasons that made perfect sense to a young fool, I decided I was gonna ride my bicycle down there and see her.
Now this wasn’t no ten-speed racing bicycle.
This was some little raggedy-ass bicycle.
And it was HOT.
That Southern heat where the road looks like it’s cooking. July flies raising hell in the trees. Cornfields sitting there still as death.
But I pedaled that raggedy bicycle all the way down that dirt road.
When I finally got there, something happened I wasn’t expecting.
I saw how they lived.
That house was rough as hell.
I remember it looking like there wasn’t even a door on the place. Maybe there was. Memory gets funny after all these years. But that’s how I remember it.
Open.
Bare.
Poor.
And I knew poor.
Hell, we weren’t rich.
But standing there, I realized there were different kinds of poor.
For the first time, I wasn't looking at that girl from across a school bus.
I was looking at her life.
I remember looking around at that house. Looking back toward those fields. Thinking about that long dirt road I had just ridden down.
And something inside me said:
This road goes farther than you think.
I didn't have those words then.
I just knew I wasn't ready for whatever lived at the end of that road.
So I turned my bicycle around.
And rode my ass back home.
Funny thing is, all these years later, I don't remember much about the ride home.
But I remember making the decision.
Because sometimes when you're young, you go looking for one thing and life shows you something altogether different.
I went down that road thinking about a girl.
I came back thinking about weight.
About poverty.
About how another person's life can carry troubles you can't see from the school bus.
And maybe, if I'm telling the truth, I understood something about myself too.
I wasn't ready to carry anything heavier than that raggedy ass bicycle.
Maybe that's what growing up is.
You ride down enough roads thinking you know what you're looking for.
Then one day you get to the end of one and realize:
Boy, you don't know shit yet.
You ever had a road take you somewhere that changed the way you saw the world?