the wonderful and cruel mind-the lost years

Along with the nvld, he was given a vivid imagination and an unusual memory.
He could, for example, remember life in a crib, watching a plan fly past a window beyond his bars which he held onto like a baby monkey, not quite tall enough to chew on the top bar.
He had also been sick one year, perhaps the summer he was eleven, and had spent the entire week laying in bed and carrying his fantasy of sailing ships at war which made him almost regret it when the day came that he could rejoin the other children, his measals or chicken pox, gone; the other disease having run through all the children one christmas at grandma's house.  How she must have loved that.
The mind gave him insight into many things; science, motors, books, the ability to open and close the watch.  It gave him worlds that were more exciting and safer than the world around him.  But it isolated him.  He did not understand other people and they did not understand him.
It is hard to remember all the things that happened in this brief interlude in his life, because he was so isolated.  There was school which had not yet turned hostile, but that would happen very soon.
Right now life was made up of strange adventures.  A group of kids pointed to a ditch that was tall enough for the young kids to stand up in the entry pipe.  It was dark, but there was enough ambient light to walk and the rats, if they were in there, moved away.  He was told that there was an exit at the far end.  And then he was there by himself, walking through this underground sewer, which he could never fully realize would not support an adult.  At one point he was scared, or perhaps curious, and climbed one of the ladders up, only to find himself in a wooded back yard.  He breathed deeply and went on, lowering the heavy metal manhole cover behind him, leaving the day behind and going back to the world of constant twilight.  And then he was on top of the hill, never realizing he had climbed it water dripping down from a metal grate, but it was open enough for his small frame to fit through and he looked back towards the way he had come and back through the woods.
There was a swamp that led to a lake where large bass swam, but would not bite a line. These were in the middle of what would be a city.  Soon the swamp would be drained to make way for the road, but now it was wooded.  You could run through it, but if you stopped and walked you would sink up to your knees in the thick mud.  So he spent that summer trying to catch the fish that would not bite and running through the swamp so that he could feel what it was like to walk on water.
There would be the first lies, memories of the death of small animals, there would be the braces.  And there would be the move that would tear him from this temporary child's paradise, but first there would be the coward assailant and the lost tooth.
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