Mostpeople

Not everyone but mostpeople used toothpaste; my family brushed with tooth powder. Mostpeople celebrated Thanksgiving. My mother declared it was a religious holiday and we didn’t do religion. I knew early on we were different, not like mostpeople who smoked, drank highballs, read the Daily News and subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post. We had our own ways not at all like the world of Arthur Godfrey, Andy Hardy or even Dagwood Bumpstead. We didn’t drive a car even as passengers. I didn’t know one model from another; still don’t. Unlike mostpeople I never went to summer camp, hated Mounds bar and couldn’t carry a tune from here to there, Still can’t.

Most people were not like mostpeople, I later found out. Norman Rockwell painted mostpeople. Edward Hopper caught the rest of us. The restofus had a piece of spinach on our tooth, a hole in our change pocket and a spot on our favorite shirt that wouldn’t come out. None of us had proper handwriting. The restofus wondered why all our friends couldn’t stand each other. We were all a little dumber and a little smarter than average. Now that I think of it I didn’t know any mostpeople personally. The restofus knew enough not to be mostpeople.

We were lost, then found, then lost again. The restofus couldn’t hit a curve ball, dropped bullet passes, missed lay-ups. We succeeded in our separate failures, fumbled, stumbled and out of all that… heard a calling, discovered a voice, owned our name, found our mate. One by one the restofus got to know who we weren’t. Through blurts and bogus moves we found the step to our drum.

And if we didn’t at least we aren’t mostpeople. We became first-person singular. I love words, particularly gibberish, the sound of chicken fricassee and barely was there barley. Mostpeople stand for the pledge and the anthem…and to the republic for Richard Stands one nation under blah, blah blah.  

There are flowers that split the rock and words that tear me to fractions, alchemical words, combustible and incandescent. Words, stretched and bent that mostpeople are deaf to. My first language is invented; it’s the tongue of the restofus.

We’re in this elevator going up, going down, in our separate space each with bubbles overhead painting/sculpting/scribbling/singing ourselves alive between floors. There’s one more of us, there’s one less. Mostpeople might get in and become like the restofus particularly if we get stuck in a power failure and share our bubbles.