If you keep the truth in your back pocket… you’ll spend your whole life standing.
I went bobbing for apples at the Thanksgiving day state fair when I was around six years old. There was a teenage eskimo named Elsinore that ran the apple booth that I knew from down the street. I knew him because he worked the crosswalk on schooldays and would always help the younger kids get across the busy intersection. I think I was the only one that ever spoke to him as we waited for the traffic to clear. He was different, angry, and always looking up into the sky, like it was too much trouble to just tilt his head down to see who you were. I stood in line at the fair and tried to get an apple a total of seven times that day and never once even came close to biting into one. Elsinore said that my mouth just wasn’t big enough to wrap itself around a big apple yet, much like some brains aren’t big enough to wrap themselves around some ideas. He said that he couldn’t change the apples, but not to worry because the years would change my mouth. Elsinore always said weird things, but I liked him anyway.
One day at the crosswalk I asked him what it was like to be an eskimo, if he’d ever seen any elves, and why they would EVER choose to move away from Santa!! Elsinore said that he used to not believe in any of that stuff, but that his identical twin sister Elsie, who still lived in an igloo up at the North pole certainly did, and that she convinced him… and then he proceeded to tell me a story about believing, the same story that Elsie had told him.
Se mantieni la verità nella tua tasca posteriore ... passerai tutta la tua vita in piedi.
Sono andato ad afferrare mele con la bocca alla Fiera del giorno del Ringraziamento quando avevo circa sei anni. C'era un eschimese adolescente chiamato Elsinore che gestiva la cabina di mele e sapevo che abitava in fondo alla strada. Lo conoscevo perché aveva lavorato sulle strisce pedonali durante i giorni di scuola ed aiutava sempre i ragazzi più giovani ad attraversare l’incrocio trafficato. Penso che io fossi l'unico a parlare sempre con lui mentre aspettavamo che il traffico fosse sgombro. Era diverso, arrabbiato e guardava sempre in cielo, come se fosse troppo disturbo inclinare la testa per vedere chi eri. Sono rimasto in fila alla fiera e ho cercato di prendere una mela per un totale di sette volte quel giorno e non sono mai arrivato nemmeno vicino a morderne una. Elsinore ha detto che la mia bocca non era abbastanza grande da avvolgersi attorno ad una grande mela, come molti cervelli non sono abbastanza grandi da avvolgere alcune idee. Ha detto che non poteva cambiare le mele, ma di non preoccuparmi perché gli anni avrebbero cambiato la mia bocca. Elsinore ha sempre detto cose strane, ma mi piaceva comunque.
