The Beginning of a Short Story...

The old women. They knew that I was coming long before my father ever met my mother. Heads of glistening grey left small gifts on the porch for the baby that was to come. Sometimes they brought flowers from their own gardens. My father would open the front door and shake his head. Crazy old women! There was alot going on around that time. His mother had left him this great big house. One he had never grown up in so it was of little sentimental value to him. He stood in the large livingroom, looked around and thought only of the most it would cost for its upkeep. He thought of finding his mother lying on the floor. Lifeless, her heart coming to a deliberate stop. This woman who had locked the door and refused to open it until he turned around and fought some of the neighborhood boys who had chased him home from school. The same woman who had given him his first set of paintbrushes because her baby "was good at drawing". Memories of a woman who knew that her only son, who would rather painting and laughing and daydreaming, was going to have to be tough to claim his happiness. When he cried and threw tantrums, she gave him that look that instatntly made him straighten up. And when he got too big and too tall for her to discipline him, she called her father to come in and chase him aorund the house. Back then, he seemed like a giant to Lee. A man who, when he wasn't swinging his belt, smoked cigars and told his grandson stories about "the old days" when black men walked around rocking Afros, dreamed of revolution and freedom, and changed the world. Lee ate it up. marveled at the picture of his Grandfather, no older than twenty, leaned an old car, cigarette in his hand, staring into the camera with the swagger of a young man who had the world at his feet. An angel in an Afro, the boy thought. The day they lowered Grandpop into the ground, he asked his mother for that picture, and held onto it ever since. It was the first picture that he hung up in the bedroom of this new house. Grandpop staring at him with that look reminding him of what he should be doing and reprimanding him when he was doing things that he shouldn't. It was all too overwhelming to a young man of twenty-nine who had yet to establish himself.