Flatrock

As a young boy, Joseph had one charge, one duty, and one honor that he respected above any other domestic or mundane one that his caretakers or parents assigned him. He was the Custodian of Flatrock. Flatrock was a large piece of granite embedded in the ground where a stream, in its icy might, had split a perfect canyon through which to run. When he woke up in the morning and could smell the breakfast that Polly was cooking, he went downstairs to eat and then certainly made his rounds to the rock so that he could clear it of leaves and debris. When it flowed freely and clear, his world was restored to natural order.
The natural order of things. This was intuively important to Joseph. Pockets could be full of napkins or tissues or wrappers, but never thrown on the ground. One could spit into streams, or even onto the dust in the woods, but not onto a sidewalk or near the house. Socks had to be worn pulled up as high as they were made, as the makers certainly intended for them to be worn as such. It was acceptable to roll them down into little sock anklets, although this usually provoked antagonism by his aunt who found it comical. She, apparently, had decided this was "gay". In any event, Joseph was already chained to ritual, symbol, perfection, and order.
Joseph excelled at his early schooling, he was tested and given special priveleges and access to programs which would engage him. He would sometimes feel superior to other students, but mostly he just performed to the best of his abilities, which were not for wont, because that was the natural order of things. Problems had solutions, and information was romantic and mysterious. When he read National Geographic magazines, he wondered if he was learning something secret. Something hermetic, maybe occult. He once read an article about fulgurites, natural glass forms which were created when lightning struck sand on beaches and fused the silicon and other minerals into winding glass sculptures that represented the discharge's patterns into the earth.
He loved rubber band driven propeller planes made of balsa wood that he would buy from the variety store in the neighborhood for 25 cents or so, army men with plastic parachutes made from the same material a clear plastic bag would be made from and strung to the little plastic soldier by thin strings, legos that were never enough to build anything like a cathedral, just little square houses that looked more like prison cells than a home to live in.
Mostly he felt like luggage. He was moved about from one house, Polly & Roy's, to his father's apartments when his father had them, to his mother's apartments, to Beatrix & Desmonds'. Too often he wasn't sure where he was going when he got into the car with his mother or whomever may be driving. The things he loved were rarely ported, so he had to make due with what was available where he was staying.
Joseph often had one of three recurring dreams as a child. One was a small him bring thrown out a car window over a bridge crossing an autumn valley, where he would fall with his heart flipped in his chest until he woke up landing on the soft padding of his mattress. Another was the visitation of two characters from Sesame Street that brought compound words together. They were aliens, and would take turns, "Tele," ... "Phone," until they completed the single compound word. Those two fuckers would be bouncing against the door window in the living room where he slept at the Wardells' house like a moth on a light bulb, singing, "Jos," .. "Eph." That frightened the fuck out of him. He did not want any late night messages from aliens, puppets or not. Their mouths circulated in a perverse oscillating ovulation, and they chorused, "yip yip yip, uuuuhhuuuh uuuuuhhuuh." The third dream was that he was able to breathe underwater, like Jacques Cousteau but without any mortal breathing apparatus. He loved Jacques Cousteau and the whole underwater world. He would want the ability to breathe underwater at that point in his life if he could be given any superpower. He would pray for it.