Writing Choices of Choice--Mainly posting this again for Karma.

[Mitch]

[size=1] Well, this is no longer on OB's database--I did a search for it--so I'll just post it here again. It's a personal narrative, very old.[/size]

[center]?Choices of Choice?
By:Mitchell Smith[/center]

We stopped at Albertson?s. ?Go and get some bananas,? my Grandpa said in his familiar stuttering voice. He handed me a five-dollar bill. Receiving the crisp paper, I opened the passenger door. ?All right,? I said casually as I stepped out into the sun lit pavement. I walked into the store and approached the produce section. Finding the bananas, I slowly searched for the ripest bundle I could find. After making my selection and paying for it, I walked back out into the hot summer day.

As I walked out of the store, I noticed two transients sitting next to the front door. They were clad in heavy metal band shirts, and had various piercings about their misshapen faces. As I peered cautiously at them, one thought came to my mind: They looked like the dirtiest pile of trash I had ever seen. Besides this first harshly placed conception of them, I felt a slight tinge of sympathy for the life that they must lead. As I approached my Grandpa?s van, I pulled aside my feeling of sympathy, and gave no more glances in the transients? direction.

Stepping into the van, I reached into the depth of my pockets and withdrew the various bills and coins I had received in payment of the bananas, handing them to my Grandpa. ?Thanks,? he said vaguely, receiving his payment. He was glaring at the transients, a look of remembrance plastered upon his face. I gave the transients another glance, now within the safety of the van. One of them was now smoking a cigarette. ?He got that out of the garbage,? my Grandpa said. As I stared at the transient smoking, the sympathy gave another uprising as I tucked it back away again in my anguish.
Horrified, I turned and asked: ?Did he really get that from the garbage??
After a brief moment of silence, my Grandpa turned his head, an escaping look of remembrance leaving his face. ?Yup,? he simply said, turning his head again.

After a moment more, he ignited the ignition of the van, and the engine roared to life. We then backed out of our parking spot, and drove by the transients, straying a passing look as we did. ?That could have been you, Grandpa,? I said.
From what I had heard of his past, he seemed to have started life off on the wrong end. He had been a bully, and gotten into numerous fights at school, home, and almost everywhere that he went. Sometime around his teens his Dad had given him a choice. A choice, which, as I saw it, would rule out the life which he would lead. The choice was to either go to reform school, or to go to barber school. To take his life and throw it away, or to make it into something. To take the easy path, or to take the hard. And even though it seemed he hated so many things, namely life, he had still made the right choice. He had chosen barber school.

This choice had changed his life for the better. He had then become a barber, working along side others. After doing that for some time, he had rented out his own barber shop, giving five-dollar haircuts and being his own boss. It was at that moment that how hard of a life my Grandpa must have lived really became a truth into my mind, something which I actually saw. I felt a very keen sense of respect for him, one that went so deep into me that it became something which I could relate to and contrast into my own daily life. It gave me a sense of inspiration, a sense of if he could make something out of nothing, then shouldn?t I be able to if I have a will and an effort? Couldn?t even those transients make something out of the nothing that they had, no matter how small? And as he turned his wrinkled, admirable face toward me, I couldn?t help but feel that sense of deep understanding, of deep inspiration, that sense of deep respect. I don?t know if he felt it, but I certainly did. And all he did was simply turn his head, and said as if it were the easiest realization he had ever known: ?That?s right, that could?ve been me.?

[KarmaOfChaos]

[color=deeppink]
Nice. I just love those moments of amazing realization, when you just feel it hit you, this wave, like a tsunami. Something you never knew before, and in knowing it now, you feel as if just one more piece of life has been put into to place. =)

-Karma
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