TM Prompt 236: What does respect mean to you?
I think it was probably Queenie who taught me about respect. Before I met her and her family in the rock garden of my parents' house, I had only thought that I understood respect. Really it had only been fear.
I'd gone to work and completed my assignments, and even taken work home and worked on the weekends, all out of fear. I was afraid of failing my parents, afraid of losing my job, afraid of being a nobody with no purpose in the world. And, one afternoon, I met Queenie when my mother had sent me out to kill rats.
It was a life-and-death situation. Not something that happens very often to a boy from the LA suburbs, but I could have killed all of them. I told Mother that I had. But I spared them. I couldn't bear to watch innocent creatures being crushed like that. Someone could so easily decide to crush me like that too.
When Socrates was born, Queenie respected me enough to know that I would look after him, that we could be brothers, he and I, struggling against the world together. And Socrates does respect me, too. He listens to me, and I listen to him.
And maybe that's really what respect is - listening, and seeing the world from the other person's point of view. Once you've walked a mile in their shoes (or paws), it's hard to hate or fear them at all.
I'd gone to work and completed my assignments, and even taken work home and worked on the weekends, all out of fear. I was afraid of failing my parents, afraid of losing my job, afraid of being a nobody with no purpose in the world. And, one afternoon, I met Queenie when my mother had sent me out to kill rats.
It was a life-and-death situation. Not something that happens very often to a boy from the LA suburbs, but I could have killed all of them. I told Mother that I had. But I spared them. I couldn't bear to watch innocent creatures being crushed like that. Someone could so easily decide to crush me like that too.
When Socrates was born, Queenie respected me enough to know that I would look after him, that we could be brothers, he and I, struggling against the world together. And Socrates does respect me, too. He listens to me, and I listen to him.
And maybe that's really what respect is - listening, and seeing the world from the other person's point of view. Once you've walked a mile in their shoes (or paws), it's hard to hate or fear them at all.