M is for Mom and Mars
When I was a toddler living in East Fort Myers, my mom bought me a Fisher-Price red plastic telescope. She showed me how to insert rectangular slides with images of the moon and planets through the viewfinder. The telescope couldn’t show me the real night sky, just the printed images, but sometimes the two of us would sit and watch the moon with our naked eyes from an outdoor picnic bench, while neighbors shouted obscenities at each other from open apartment windows.
After my two brothers were born, we moved to a house across the river in North Fort Myers, and I started school. By fifth grade I had been wearing thick-rimmed glasses for a few years and had been picked on regularly, even by close friends. I sometimes wished I was a robot, even imagined what it would be like to be a perfectly programmed machine and not a weak, pale little boy with freckles and a bowl haircut. Faking sick was my reprieve, which became a daily occurrence.