Special powers notwithstanding, I wasn't a likely candidate to ever become a superhero - not even a regular hero, if there was such a thing. All I had to do was open my mouth and no one took me seriously. You see, as a result of a playground accident when I was six involving a teeter-totter, a pretty girl named Judy, a bully from the fifth grade named Jake and my chin, I bit the end of my tongue off. It required seventy-four stitches but ever after I have spoken with a lisp.
Because of the speech impediment, sometimes people have trouble understanding me. Generally, I hang out with people I know to minimize the confusion. Otherwise, I don't talk much, especially to strangers.
Another thing wrong with my superhero potential was the name of my hometown, Normal, Illinois. No kidding, it really is named that. Kind of ironic for someone who has made a life of being abnormal. I suppose it's better as a place of origin than some fabricated somewhere no one could ever visit like Smallville or Gotham. If I ever become famous, maybe they'll erect a statue of me somewhere in Normal. I'll have that one up of any superheroes from fictitious places.
Sometimes, Normal is a little too real for those of us who actually grew up there. Oddly, a lot of people I grew up with still live in Normal. Some do so by choice, other have no choice. For the rest, who knows. Mostly it's just you have to be from somewhere, I guess. There are probably worse places to be from.
Anyway, except for being accident prone, susceptible to childhood diseases and having two big sisters who bullied me badly until I was around thirteen, I had a fairly average go of it as a kid. There were the requisite number of run-ins with tough kids. They picked on me before the accident with my tongue. It only grew worse afterwards. At first, I got pissed at my so-called friends when they ran off leaving me to take a bully's thumping. But after a while, I realized I'd better hang onto the few friends I had because they were hard enough to come by. No point in losing any of them along with my lunch money. As far as being bullied, all I can say is, if only I knew then...famous last words, right?
My vivid imagination survived everything every adult authority figure in my life tried to do to it. By the time I reached the age of being sort of grown-up, I wasn't too mature to believe my strangeness derived from coming from another planet. That wasn't really the case, but it was the best I could come up with for an explanation of my difference from everyone else. It just happened I was a human in a fringe kind of way.
There were girls I liked before I was supposed to. You know, boys and girls aren't supposed to connect until maybe fifth or sixth grade at the earliest. It was fine that I noticed them, though, because not that many of them noticed me. So who knew but me? But that's normal, too - for me anyway.
There was always Sandra, though. She was a little different in a lot of the same ways I was. She never liked to dress up like a girl unless her mother made her do it. Then she looked about as silly as I would wearing a dress. Yes, I did that once. Only once and it was on a dare. It also happened to be one of the few times any of the girls in school noticed me.
At the time, when Sandra and I were seven or so, I didn't think of her in the same way as I did everyone else, especially the girls. You see, she was one of those special people you meet in life who you just know you're going to like being around most of the time. So you end up being around them a lot and feeling pretty comfortable with the situation. I guess she felt the same way about me back then. I never asked her, but since we're still best friends, how could it be otherwise?
Sandra and I hung out nearly everyday - except for when one or the other of us was sick - which happened a lot for me - or grounded - which happened a lot more often for her than me. She was into games, the arcade ones - not like playing the kinds of tricks girls do on guys. I never understood why girls think it's funny to make guys look like fools which, granted, isn't all that hard to do. Never once did Sandra string me along or lie to me. In return, I never was anything but totally honest with her. I guess that's why we're still close friends.
All day Saturday, except for the aforementioned times when we couldn't, we spent hanging out at the arcade. Whatever my best score was on my favorite machine, she came along and trashed it - cold, without ever having played the game before. That was one of her special powers, I think, though she never admitted it. Like me, Sandra was superhuman in particularly unusual ways even for a superhero.
By the way, have you ever noticed how the female of hero is heroine but the female of superhero is not a word, but the hyphenated super-heroine. Why is that? Are the political correct police sleeping on the job or what? Fair is fair.
You'd think it'd be a bigger issue, but I guess a lot of superhero types out there don't realize it for a long time, if ever at all. You see, we all have special powers, just most of us don't ever realize it - or if we do it happens kind of later on in life. Like my great uncle Carlton. People used to call him Carguy, which also became his superhero name. He could make anything broken work but his true talent for which people knew him best was his ability with automobiles. So, naturally, his cover was being a mechanic, which he did for forty-five years, until he retired. Then Uncle Carlton became a legend, patrolling the road in his pickup helping motorists when their cars break down - usually for free, unless someone refused to accept no for an answer and paid him anyway.
Sandra also has some superheroes in her family tree, though the traits appeared most often on the female side. Her Aunt Flo could hold her breath for a very long time, which she claimed was a talent she developed from growing up around her brother Raymond who was particularly flatulent. Ray, of course was known as Gasman. His cover was talking with a fake - and very bad - Australian accent easily mistaken for an equally bad British accent. He claimed to be the 'foul wind from down under' - the entire reason for the fake accent in the first place. But in truth, he was from Encino, which is somewhere in California. I've not cared to go there because Ray's still around and probably his legend precedes him.
Aunt Flo's superhero name is Proud Mary. Not sure why. Her talent is being ignored, which comes in handy a lot, I think. She has a slightly different perspective on that, especially after the number of times she has almost been struck while crossing the street.
Sandra was the one who taught me everyone has something they are good at and that can be turned into a superpower. Take my uncle, Jon. He's the one who gave me the talisman I wear with my superhero costume, not that he ever needed it anyway. He was really good at sneaking up on people. People accused him of being able to turn invisible - which is not to be confused with being ignored. Since no one ever caught him doing it, though, there was never proof. When you think about it, it's hard to catch someone being invisible, you know? But that's getting way ahead of where I need to be in telling this story.
Back to Sandra - on any given day she could look like she was someone else. Really, it was kind of creepy, in special sort of interesting way. She decided I should call her Sandy or Sand, just so we could keep her different appearances straight. Occasionally, she was Cassandra, which was her real, official birth certificate name. She told me she was named after some mythical Trojan princess, who was psychic and stuff. Interesting story to tell a kid of eight. I asked her how she knew all that. Her mother and father told her, sort of as justification for what they did to her saddling her with that name. You see, normally she didn't like being called Cassandra. It made her sound too old, she said.
She found out later that she had a great aunt by the same name who was very mysterious - like she was into witchcraft and occult things. I could see why her parents never told her about her namesake when she was a kid, but it never made sense to me why they would go ahead and name her after a relative hardly anyone knew and fewer yet liked all that much. Sandra told me it was an obligation. She didn't explain; I didn't ask. Eventually, you find out about obligations in the course of your life.
Maybe her folks told her about the Trojan princess thing as a cover for their obligation to her great aunt. That makes more sense than just naming her that for 'what the heck', you know?
Namesakes can be a problem. For example, I'm named Wilson, like the last name expect it's my first name. That always starts off things on a confusing note for me. You see, I always go by Will because I don't want to even start the explanation about Wilson. But people sometimes want to call me Bill, like I'm named William - which I'm not. If I tell them my name is Wilson, usually they stare at me for a couple of seconds and feel obligated to make some comment, usually innocuous, but sometimes kind of offensive. Something along the lines of, "Isn't that unusual."
Yes, it is unusual. My grandfather thought it was, too, but that never stopped anyone from naming me after him. It's a family name. Yeah, well, it was a mistake that has been perpetuated ever since - as mistakes are often prone to do.
So, I could totally relate to Sandra's thing with her official name. I hardly ever went by Wilson, and she hardly ever went by Cassandra, unless she was being very serious - in a funny, overly formal and dramatic kind of way.
When she got a little older, she told me it was really her secret identity, as if she were a spy. That was kind of cool. We played like we were spies a lot when we were kids - always a fun thing to do. It became good practice for what was to come in our adult lives. It's not a coincidence how the play thing works with kids, by the way. The more you play at doing something, the better you are at those things later on in life. It's like playing sports and becoming a professional jock just because you've got the necessary practice time in from an early age. So don't ever tell a kid not to play.
Sandra decided her name was very useful for having secret identities without really having to change her name all that much. She could be Cass, Cassie, Sandra, Sandy or Sand. Each one was a different persona for her. I knew them all and had no real preference. Any one of them was immense fun to be with.
With my name, I didn't have any real options. Dad called me Sonny, which was also what people called grandpa when he was young. But Sonny always seemed generic to me. People called me Willie when I was little. That didn't work any better than Will and kind of irked me. So, mostly I went with plain old Will and was done with it.
Sandra grew-up just as a nerdy as me. We were soul mates before I knew what that term meant. It means a lot more than how it's commonly used, though. You see, part of my special abilities involved always being able to find her, no matter where she was in the world. We weren't always born in relatively close proximity in our past lives. - Yes, I believe in reincarnation and you should too because you made it back, after all. It just happened that, in this particular lifetime we came to share, we were both from Normal. Two of the most abnormal kids ever in the history of being kids, and we were born a few days apart in the same hospital in a small city in Illinois.
If you've never been to Normal that's understandable. You may not know where Normal is, but you probably have at least heard of Illinois. If you weren't good with geography in school, think of the map of the United States. Find the middle, which is actually a place called Lebanon, Kansas. That's a piece of trivial knowledge for sure, but it comes into play later on, which is how I know about the place. Anyway, move your finger kind of northeast from there, toward Chicago. Normal is on the way, north of Bloomington, which is just about smack-dab in the middle of the State. That's where my story and Cassandra's begins.
Because of the speech impediment, sometimes people have trouble understanding me. Generally, I hang out with people I know to minimize the confusion. Otherwise, I don't talk much, especially to strangers.
Another thing wrong with my superhero potential was the name of my hometown, Normal, Illinois. No kidding, it really is named that. Kind of ironic for someone who has made a life of being abnormal. I suppose it's better as a place of origin than some fabricated somewhere no one could ever visit like Smallville or Gotham. If I ever become famous, maybe they'll erect a statue of me somewhere in Normal. I'll have that one up of any superheroes from fictitious places.
Sometimes, Normal is a little too real for those of us who actually grew up there. Oddly, a lot of people I grew up with still live in Normal. Some do so by choice, other have no choice. For the rest, who knows. Mostly it's just you have to be from somewhere, I guess. There are probably worse places to be from.
Anyway, except for being accident prone, susceptible to childhood diseases and having two big sisters who bullied me badly until I was around thirteen, I had a fairly average go of it as a kid. There were the requisite number of run-ins with tough kids. They picked on me before the accident with my tongue. It only grew worse afterwards. At first, I got pissed at my so-called friends when they ran off leaving me to take a bully's thumping. But after a while, I realized I'd better hang onto the few friends I had because they were hard enough to come by. No point in losing any of them along with my lunch money. As far as being bullied, all I can say is, if only I knew then...famous last words, right?
My vivid imagination survived everything every adult authority figure in my life tried to do to it. By the time I reached the age of being sort of grown-up, I wasn't too mature to believe my strangeness derived from coming from another planet. That wasn't really the case, but it was the best I could come up with for an explanation of my difference from everyone else. It just happened I was a human in a fringe kind of way.
There were girls I liked before I was supposed to. You know, boys and girls aren't supposed to connect until maybe fifth or sixth grade at the earliest. It was fine that I noticed them, though, because not that many of them noticed me. So who knew but me? But that's normal, too - for me anyway.
There was always Sandra, though. She was a little different in a lot of the same ways I was. She never liked to dress up like a girl unless her mother made her do it. Then she looked about as silly as I would wearing a dress. Yes, I did that once. Only once and it was on a dare. It also happened to be one of the few times any of the girls in school noticed me.
At the time, when Sandra and I were seven or so, I didn't think of her in the same way as I did everyone else, especially the girls. You see, she was one of those special people you meet in life who you just know you're going to like being around most of the time. So you end up being around them a lot and feeling pretty comfortable with the situation. I guess she felt the same way about me back then. I never asked her, but since we're still best friends, how could it be otherwise?
Sandra and I hung out nearly everyday - except for when one or the other of us was sick - which happened a lot for me - or grounded - which happened a lot more often for her than me. She was into games, the arcade ones - not like playing the kinds of tricks girls do on guys. I never understood why girls think it's funny to make guys look like fools which, granted, isn't all that hard to do. Never once did Sandra string me along or lie to me. In return, I never was anything but totally honest with her. I guess that's why we're still close friends.
All day Saturday, except for the aforementioned times when we couldn't, we spent hanging out at the arcade. Whatever my best score was on my favorite machine, she came along and trashed it - cold, without ever having played the game before. That was one of her special powers, I think, though she never admitted it. Like me, Sandra was superhuman in particularly unusual ways even for a superhero.
By the way, have you ever noticed how the female of hero is heroine but the female of superhero is not a word, but the hyphenated super-heroine. Why is that? Are the political correct police sleeping on the job or what? Fair is fair.
You'd think it'd be a bigger issue, but I guess a lot of superhero types out there don't realize it for a long time, if ever at all. You see, we all have special powers, just most of us don't ever realize it - or if we do it happens kind of later on in life. Like my great uncle Carlton. People used to call him Carguy, which also became his superhero name. He could make anything broken work but his true talent for which people knew him best was his ability with automobiles. So, naturally, his cover was being a mechanic, which he did for forty-five years, until he retired. Then Uncle Carlton became a legend, patrolling the road in his pickup helping motorists when their cars break down - usually for free, unless someone refused to accept no for an answer and paid him anyway.
Sandra also has some superheroes in her family tree, though the traits appeared most often on the female side. Her Aunt Flo could hold her breath for a very long time, which she claimed was a talent she developed from growing up around her brother Raymond who was particularly flatulent. Ray, of course was known as Gasman. His cover was talking with a fake - and very bad - Australian accent easily mistaken for an equally bad British accent. He claimed to be the 'foul wind from down under' - the entire reason for the fake accent in the first place. But in truth, he was from Encino, which is somewhere in California. I've not cared to go there because Ray's still around and probably his legend precedes him.
Aunt Flo's superhero name is Proud Mary. Not sure why. Her talent is being ignored, which comes in handy a lot, I think. She has a slightly different perspective on that, especially after the number of times she has almost been struck while crossing the street.
Sandra was the one who taught me everyone has something they are good at and that can be turned into a superpower. Take my uncle, Jon. He's the one who gave me the talisman I wear with my superhero costume, not that he ever needed it anyway. He was really good at sneaking up on people. People accused him of being able to turn invisible - which is not to be confused with being ignored. Since no one ever caught him doing it, though, there was never proof. When you think about it, it's hard to catch someone being invisible, you know? But that's getting way ahead of where I need to be in telling this story.
Back to Sandra - on any given day she could look like she was someone else. Really, it was kind of creepy, in special sort of interesting way. She decided I should call her Sandy or Sand, just so we could keep her different appearances straight. Occasionally, she was Cassandra, which was her real, official birth certificate name. She told me she was named after some mythical Trojan princess, who was psychic and stuff. Interesting story to tell a kid of eight. I asked her how she knew all that. Her mother and father told her, sort of as justification for what they did to her saddling her with that name. You see, normally she didn't like being called Cassandra. It made her sound too old, she said.
She found out later that she had a great aunt by the same name who was very mysterious - like she was into witchcraft and occult things. I could see why her parents never told her about her namesake when she was a kid, but it never made sense to me why they would go ahead and name her after a relative hardly anyone knew and fewer yet liked all that much. Sandra told me it was an obligation. She didn't explain; I didn't ask. Eventually, you find out about obligations in the course of your life.
Maybe her folks told her about the Trojan princess thing as a cover for their obligation to her great aunt. That makes more sense than just naming her that for 'what the heck', you know?
Namesakes can be a problem. For example, I'm named Wilson, like the last name expect it's my first name. That always starts off things on a confusing note for me. You see, I always go by Will because I don't want to even start the explanation about Wilson. But people sometimes want to call me Bill, like I'm named William - which I'm not. If I tell them my name is Wilson, usually they stare at me for a couple of seconds and feel obligated to make some comment, usually innocuous, but sometimes kind of offensive. Something along the lines of, "Isn't that unusual."
Yes, it is unusual. My grandfather thought it was, too, but that never stopped anyone from naming me after him. It's a family name. Yeah, well, it was a mistake that has been perpetuated ever since - as mistakes are often prone to do.
So, I could totally relate to Sandra's thing with her official name. I hardly ever went by Wilson, and she hardly ever went by Cassandra, unless she was being very serious - in a funny, overly formal and dramatic kind of way.
When she got a little older, she told me it was really her secret identity, as if she were a spy. That was kind of cool. We played like we were spies a lot when we were kids - always a fun thing to do. It became good practice for what was to come in our adult lives. It's not a coincidence how the play thing works with kids, by the way. The more you play at doing something, the better you are at those things later on in life. It's like playing sports and becoming a professional jock just because you've got the necessary practice time in from an early age. So don't ever tell a kid not to play.
Sandra decided her name was very useful for having secret identities without really having to change her name all that much. She could be Cass, Cassie, Sandra, Sandy or Sand. Each one was a different persona for her. I knew them all and had no real preference. Any one of them was immense fun to be with.
With my name, I didn't have any real options. Dad called me Sonny, which was also what people called grandpa when he was young. But Sonny always seemed generic to me. People called me Willie when I was little. That didn't work any better than Will and kind of irked me. So, mostly I went with plain old Will and was done with it.
Sandra grew-up just as a nerdy as me. We were soul mates before I knew what that term meant. It means a lot more than how it's commonly used, though. You see, part of my special abilities involved always being able to find her, no matter where she was in the world. We weren't always born in relatively close proximity in our past lives. - Yes, I believe in reincarnation and you should too because you made it back, after all. It just happened that, in this particular lifetime we came to share, we were both from Normal. Two of the most abnormal kids ever in the history of being kids, and we were born a few days apart in the same hospital in a small city in Illinois.
If you've never been to Normal that's understandable. You may not know where Normal is, but you probably have at least heard of Illinois. If you weren't good with geography in school, think of the map of the United States. Find the middle, which is actually a place called Lebanon, Kansas. That's a piece of trivial knowledge for sure, but it comes into play later on, which is how I know about the place. Anyway, move your finger kind of northeast from there, toward Chicago. Normal is on the way, north of Bloomington, which is just about smack-dab in the middle of the State. That's where my story and Cassandra's begins.
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