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When I was a little kid by Daniel Tariku April 4, 2007 When I was a little kid--First through about 6th grades in the small town of Dessie, Ethiopia, many school children ridiculed me for wearing glasses and for having eyes that didn't look right. They treated me as if I demanded to have these things from my parents by kicking and screaming. Being one of the taller kids and the only one in the entire school student body that wore glasses didn't help either. "Hey, four eyes!" they would yell, pointing up to the sky, "Can you see that airplane?" Most of the time I ignored their taunts and walked on along, but occasionally I answered, "Yes," without looking up. "That is not an airplane!" They'd bark back, "That's kura! [Crow]". Once one of the heckler kids came up to me and asked to see my glasses in his hands. I handed them to him. He tried them on and quickly took them off. "Whew," he said, "They pulled my eyes right out of the sockets! How do you do it? I can never be four eyes!" I didn't reply. In stead I put them back on. "Wait a minute!" he said, "You look completely different without those glasses on! Take them off again!" He saw my face intently. "You look absolutely different without them! If you ever did something wrong and took them off, the police could never find you!" Maybe because I heard so many, "Hey you four eyes!" in grade school, that I reacted to it by thinking of the number four as a nice number. As I grew older the harassing stopped bothering me, but the kids grew older too and stopped the name calling. Here is a poem I wrote for the number four. FOUR IS SPECIAL Spring, summer, autumn, and winter; Morning, afternoon, evening, and night; North, south, east, and west. There are four gospels in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Four giant gas planets in the Solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. And four phases of our moon. New Moon, First Quarter, Full Moon, and Last Quarter. Butterflies and dragonflies have four wings. There are four wings on a bee too and four leaves on a clover Even the Beatles, those "Fab Four" Started up some songs shouting, "One, two, three, FOUR!" 4 is special although some may consider it unlucky The horsemen of the Apocalypse are War, Famine, Plague and Death. And some cultures skip the 4th floor as we might the 13th. But four is how many chambers we have in our hearts Beating away messily in the dark cavities of our chests. How many wisdom teeth we are given Our life is four dimensional if you include time. In a molecule of DNA, just four bases Are used to make up our genetic code. And if your eyes are weak like mine, You turn them into four by wearing a pair of glasses. Without the number four, our life would be? Entirely something else. About the author: I was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to America when I was almost twenty. I studied civil engineering at the university (mainly because English scared me at the time and most people at the college of Engineering seemed to not care if you spoke or wrote rotten English--just as long as you got the numbers right.) I have been working in construction and management for 22 years. I became a fan of PHC only a couple of years after I arrived in California. A girlfriend I dated at the time thought it odd that an Ethiopian will take such a liking to a nuanced radio program such as this. But what did she know, she was from Texas. I'm married with two children (there is the number four again) and in my spare time I diddle around the backyard by keeping chickens and bees and planting plants. When I can't sleep through all of the dark hours of the morning I sometimes get up and try to write essays or poems as what seemed to have happened here. | | | |
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