I just wanna re-write my history

Many of you know that we are going through the process of adopting our four-year-old grandson because we have become his last, best hope for a normal life.

Yep, I hear my detractors out there whispering in the breeze that if I am anyone’s last, best hope, the world is surely doomed.

I ignore small minded people.

I put up with the typical red tape crap for more than a year. But lately, I have found myself less and less magnanimous toward the nearly daily intrusions into our life by someone, from some agency somewhere with a few dollars to conduct some survey or study on something.

If I sound confused, rest assured I am.

Last week I was asked for the fourth time in less than a year to write a narrative describing my own childhood.

The fourth time. By the fourth different agency.

And each person who asked me to do this is being paid by a different agency to ask me to do exactly the same thing I have already done, once, twice, and then thrice.

Huh?

Trying to be understanding, I spent some time on each of the first two requests—after all, the narratives were going to different states. I still fail to even remotely comprehend why even differing states can’t share the exact—repeat exact—same information, but I’m familiar enough with bureaucratic nonsense to ignore the obvious question and just do passively as was requested of me.

My patience wore a little thin on the third request, and now my patience has disappeared from the face of the planet on the fourth request.

What I wanted to do was tell the fourth agency who they could call and what particular package they could access to find the exact information they sought.

But alas, I knew that the sarcasm would be lost on those upon whom it was poured, and like a good little old, fat man, I proceeded to write, in boring detail, the same things I had written three times already.

And then, I got the bright idea to put some of my creative writing skills to good use.

After all, these agencies were never going to share this information with each other; else they would have in the first place. I could write a whole new history for myself, and only one rote bureaucrat in one lower-ladder rung state agency somewhere in either New Hampshire or Florida would actually read the damn thing.

But I would have set the stage for a whole new identity history.

I could write that instead of growing up in your average middle-class, semi-rural neighborhood with few neighbors and farm houses for spitting practice, I was smuggled into the country in a military footlocker, placed there by those who would later seek information about things of which I know nothing.

I could write that I was raised by a seemingly innocuous average middle-class family in a seemingly innocuous average middle-class neighborhood, but I was really raised in an underground enclave below those facades, trained to write hilarious, yet compelling, and just believable-enough-to-pass-muster narratives for people who would later in life be asked to write four narratives on that exact subject.

I could write that I routinely dug snow tunnels in the drainage ditch in front of our home so I could lob slush balls at unsuspecting motorists, with no more an intent that to force them to turn on their windshield wipers against their will.

I could write that I routinely built scarecrows at Halloween and tossed them into the middle of the road where they would be run over by those same unsuspecting motorists, who would then stomp on the brakes and bound out of the car, only to find that scarecrow, which looked like a small man, had been pulled into said drainage ditch by a heavy-duty fishing line attached to his neck and was no longer visible in the pitch blackness of southwest Ohio in the late fall.

Or I could write that I routinely rubber-banded firecrackers to birthday candles, lit the candles and used the resultant wax to stick the whole shebang just under the toilet seat in the nearest girls bathroom at whatever school because girls never raise the lid and wait outside in the next hallway to hear the muffled explosion followed by the muffled screams of mild terror.

And who would know that I wrote those things.

Oh wait.

That would be the truth.

Or……..would it?

The hunt begins.

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