Sweet Sixteen ©
By
Michael Casey
Well today 10th Jan 2018 I’m starting on my sixteenth book, as I start the tally is 1,230,000+ words, or 3600+ plus pages. I don’t watch the tally like a speedometer, but as it’s there I’m telling you. Sweet 16 will be the next book to amuse or bore you all with. Online I’ve had 58,000 plus readers, when I was on Google+ I once had 300,000 but I did not believe it. What matters is book sales, but sadly nobody buys a book as they can read me online, maybe I’m just too innocent like a sweet sixteen. But I can direct the world to Amazon in vain hope people do finally buy my wares. Or you can all just google me, michaelgcasey the fat silver haired writer in shades. Don’t be confused by others with the same name.
Well it’s 10 to 10 and the wife is out visiting some new Chinese friends while on her trip to Shanghai over Christmas. So like the good housewife I have heated the bath water so she can have a soak when she gets in. She is the breadwinner now, I am derelict now, well some say that or assume that. Though I still have some useful functions.Like a discarded toy you discover and realise it’s still worth keeping, that’s me I suppose.
When you are 16 you are naive and full of hope, though I must say in my own life I was 10 or 11 when I grew up. Because I grew up in one way I retained my child like innocence in another way. My sense of imagination and hope, some would say it was a defence mechanism, I’d just say you adapt to what’s around you.
When you first go to work you follow one person just like a bird imprinting on the first thing you see. I can vaguely remember a guy called Steve Jay Callaway, he’d be 70 now maybe. My brothers at home scolded me for quoting him all the time. Steve this and Steve that, I seem to remember he wanted to become some kind of preacher. Though he could be dead or in jail now. If you read this Steve I’m sure you’ve had a nice life, but frankly you wouldn’t want to know me now.
As you grow old you are not as naive, though I was naive in another job, and that led to tears on my dad’s birthday. I know who they are and maybe if ever my words are famous I can tell the whole tale. Basically its about prejudice and abuse of power. See I bet you are intrigued now, but I’ll let it be till my 27th book.
When you earn a few pennies you rejoice and I hope you help out your mum and dad, or at least offer. It’s the thought that counts, if you don’t even offer that really is where the child has abused the parents’ love and care for them. You don’t have to hug and kiss, the love can be far far deeper, but do remember your parents, and never treat them as cleaners in a hotel where you never pay the bill.
They say the greatest joy is in giving, not spending 1000 on a new phone, then giving your dad a 5 quid tie, which he’ll never wear, so you wear it yourself. I once bought my dad a made to measure suit, there was a Jewish tailor in Smethwick who made it for him. So we should all praise the tailor and remember him in our prayers, and my dad too who’s anniversary looms.
My dad used to come home from the pub at weekends with cheese and onion crisps stuffed into his sports jacket, I can remember pulling them and his snotty handkerchief out as we all tried to get the crisps out. This innocent memory sticks with me over 50 years on, it is sweet. Yes I have many more memories, more than 16, more than 1600 even. Perhaps I can boast that each word is memory, so is that 1,230,000 plus memories?
We should all try and stay sweet and sixteen, I always say I am 20 in my head, though my birth certificate is nearly 3 times that, and as for my body, well that’s battered and gives me plenty of pain at times. If we try and maintain a young outlook we are happier, even if there is lots of pain in our lives.
I’ll finish with a story from 50 years ago. I was climbing the old air raid shelter and slipped, so I landed on the bolt that held it together. It went right into my left buttock. I put my finger in the hole and fainted. My sister just laughed, she remember this tale exactly as it happens, and she was 5 or 6 at the time. Dad took me to hospital, the same one I’m going to next week for a kidney scan. I sat on my belly for 6 hours before finally a few stitches were put in. Then we came home and dad distributed the cheese and onion crisps. It was a Sunday and Bob Hope was on tv, with a kid in a cage in a film.
When my big brother came home from Oxford I had to show him my bum and the 2 feet of plaster from my waist to the back of my knee. And he laughed at me too. I had to sit side saddle for months till it healed, it could have been over the summer holidays. Maybe that explains why I used to sleep on my belly, until my quadruple heart bypass and now I can only sleep on my right side.
All this is sweet and innocent mishaps in a family, so I hope my readers everywhere know that this the first story in my book Sweet Sixteen really is a bum story.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC
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