A Learning Experience

A Learning Experience

If it’s true that we learn from our failures the following is what I believe to be an excellent learning tool. It is a short, short story that I submitted for a contest, that did not get selected. The theme of the contest was Moxie.

A Hero, Unsung & Unknown

Each morning Mike woke up at 6:00 a.m. He didn’t have to be up until 6:30, but Mr. Eckert, the baker who lived next door, left for work at 6:15 and he loved to sing opera while he drank his morning coffee. The walls between the apartments weren’t paper thin, but they might just have been cardboard.  Mike never complained about waking up earlier, because every-so-often Mr. Eckert would bring home extras from the bakery. Those doughnuts were the only sweets that would come to Mike’s apartment.

Mike would start his day with a small glass of milk. At least that was the way it started on the first two days of the week, after his sister went to the store with her paycheck. By the third day the milk was gone, and there wouldn’t be any more for the rest of the week. Mike lived with his seventeen year old sister and her one year old daughter. His father had left them three years ago, when Mike had been seven. Their mother had been arrested and convicted for drug use and sales, just about a year after that.

The apartment was in their mother’s name but the system hadn’t caught up with the fact that she didn’t live there, and the “super” didn’t care as long as they paid the rent plus ten percent for his silence.

Mike went to school almost ten months a year but he prayed for summer school. School provided a free lunch and it was lunch that would be the most food Mike would see during the day. He didn’t complain since he knew that his sister took him in when he had nowhere else to turn. She worked in a diner during the day, and asked for extra shifts whenever they were available. An old lady on the next floor watched the baby during the day in exchange for Mike and his sister helping to fix her meals and cleaning her place one a week. That was OK with Mike, even though he hated cleaning the old lady’s bathroom.

Mike liked school. He liked to learn new things, and the school had a library with books that Mike could take home at night. Sure he was small and got beat up a lot because he didn’t have any lunch money to pay off the gangs. But that was ok, and a lot of times they were too busy shaking down the kids with real money to bother with Mike.

Mike was a bright student, all of his teachers said so. They couldn’t understand why he seemed to be less attentive during the latter part of the week. He couldn’t tell them that it was hard to hear the teacher, when his empty stomach was making so much noise. Still he was getting good grades, and that meant that his sister didn’t have to take time off from work to attend the parent-teacher conferences.

Life for Mike was a balance of problems and solutions. Since they didn’t have many solutions, Mike felt it was his job to make sure that there were as few problems as possible. If Mike going to school hungry was a problem, he ignored it because there was no solution. There was a food bank that they went to, but they could only afford the bus fare to that church with the food bank once a month. They had no car or friends with cars.

At night Mike would read those books from school, and would do his homework in the kitchen where there was a ceiling light.  The noise from the apartment next door, where they played their TV too loud, was a distraction, but Mike liked it. He would listen to the sound from the TV and try to imagine what was on the screen. When Mike was younger they had a TV, but their mother sold it to support her habit.

When his sister got home from work he would tell her about his day, and she would describe the customers who came into the diner. There was one guy who would come in and leave a big tip. He had asked her out a lot, but she knew that he was a runner for the local drug gang and she wouldn’t get into the drug life again. Fifteen years with their mother had taught her one thing, “Life with drugs was like no life at all.” His sister believed that it was their mother’s drug habit that had driven their father away. Mike didn’t remember him all that well, so he believed his sister’s version of what happened.

Mike would stay up to hear the weather on the TV next door. If it was going to be cold the next day, he would be sure to wear three shirts to school. He had a jacket they got from Good Will, but it was light weight and didn’t help much in the cold. Shoes were a problem too. His were worn and had a small hole in the left sole. That meant that when it rained or snowed he was going to have wet feet at school. It was another problem that had no solution, so Mike made sure his sister never found out about his shoes.

Mike would go to sleep at night thinking about the three shirts he had to wear, and his shoes that would be wet for most of the day. He tried to plan how he would avoid the school bullies, while making it to the lunchroom. He couldn’t get into a fight and have detention after school, because he had to get home to take his sister’s baby from the old lady. In the morning he would get up to start another day, and that proved that he had moxie.