Welcome to My Imaginarium

“It snowed yesterday.  Big golf ball flakes floating all about, only the snow in Cambridge, England isn’t frozen.  The snow there floats a little longer, as if it were filled with helium.  The flakes look like astronauts vacationing in their zero gravity spaceship.  Another difference between the snow here and the snow back home is I am violently allergic to the snow here.  Punched in the face swollen eyelids and the kind of sneezes that make your ribs hurt. 

I grew up in a small town called Somers, CT.  Somers is the kind of place that hosts annual Chili Fests and Four Town Fairs.  Somers is also renowned for its’ purebred lacrosse players and horses.  Matter of fact, Somers boasts of having the most horses per capita in the nation.  Cambridge reminded me of Somers in a way, except their horses were actually young University students on bicycles, and their Chili Fest was really a multi-cultural farmer’s market. 

 The majority of Somers’ population is crammed into two prisons; minimum and maximum security.  The lights of the minimum security prison often doubled as the sunrise and sunset from house I grew up in.  The minimum security prison also had an outdoor basketball court and inmates who were still deemed worthy of an existence outside.  That is, of course, for an hour a day, surrounded by barbed wire fences and prison guards wearing bullet proof vests, guns, and most often a mustache.  I distinctly remember as a child the times I would pass the prison in route somewhere with my parents.  Butterflies of excitement and anticipation would flutter out my heart and into my throat with the thought of possibly seeing the inmates outside.  This was my San Diego Zoo.  All these caged animals and their criminal offenses only feet away; my very own pack of lions living in my backyard.

 My father used to always tell me about this infamous prisoner who broke out of the Somers prison.  Supposedly this man’s mother would send him jars of peanut butter with different weapons buried inside.  I always secretly hoped my mother would do the same for me.  Once he had enough ammunition to escape, he did.  The story goes on to say he was then transported to the Somers’ maximum security prison, which is allegedly underground, where he escaped again.  In some ways the Somers Prison’s walls outstretch much further than the guards in their watchtowers and its barbed wire fences.  Thankfully, I found away to get out and somehow without the assistance of my Mother’s peanut butter.”