Saturday, February 22, 2014

White Boy

albinos

Last week, the Washington Post website published a series of pictures that had won World Press Association Photo Awards.  This one is of a group of albino boys at a school for the blind in West Bengal, India.

It reminded me of an incident from my childhood; the first and only time I ever interacted with, or even met, a true albino. 

It began in the summer after sixth grade.  I had ridden my bike to the home of my friend Robert. 

I have mentioned before that when I attended first grade at Garden Oaks Elementary, my class contained three boys called Bobby, two Roberts and me.  At the teacher’s urging, I got stuck with Robbie, a name I hated and spent years trying to outrun.

Oak Forest Elementary opened in time for me to go there for second grade, and I lost touch with most of those boys – all of the ones who didn’t transfer except the Robert in this story.  He lived on Thornton Road a block or so west of Shepherd Drive.

Robert and I, along with a few other neighborhood kids, had started a game of touch football in the street in front of his house when we were joined by his next-door neighbor, a kid our age named Martin.

Martin was the whitest kid I had ever seen.  His hair was snow white, his skin was translucent, and his eyes had almost no color at all. Otherwise, he seemed perfectly normal.  He had a wry sense of humor, could cuss like a normal twelve-year-old, and was a pretty decent football player – certainly more athletic than I was.

Time has no meaning to a kid who is having fun, so I can’t really tell you when Martin decided to remove his long sleeved shirt or how long he played shirtless in the hot Houston sun.  I do know that he had to be hospitalized that evening and that his mother blamed us.

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