The Impossible Dream, Part I

Mr. Patterson's angular white melon face destroyed the impossibility of my dreams.

The colorless, long, top-heavy thing was leering down at me, framed in a crooked top-hat, cruelly encouraging me with that odious sneer.  His face was like a lower-case g on an old Smith Corona, round at the top, with a sagging mouth and chin rounding out the bottom.  He said something, the lower portion of his head wagging back and forth, sucking in air and blowing out words like some kind of freakish sea cucumber.

While his huge black boot pinned my chest and his sea cucumber serenely and grotesquely lectured me, I kicked and screamed and writhed and spat and vented and squirmed and seethed and thrashed.  I eventually gave up, not due to a lack of will, but to an utter physical exhaustion.  My limbs failed me, my head sagged back on the cold rock floor, my eyes relaxed into an unfocused stare somewhere just beyond his hideous head.  But my mind still rebelled.  I refused to understand him.  His words held no meaning--they were as foreign as his pale, oceanic, unwelcome face.

I don't know how long the lecture over my prostrate form lasted and I remember almost nothing of what was said.  But what I did hear, though a short phrase, has haunted me in the two decades since.  And as of this morning, I'm willing to do something about it.