T P O

T   P   O
The Patient Ox (aka Hénock Gugsa)

G r e e t i n g s !

** TPO **
A personal blog with diverse topicality and multiple interests!


On the menu ... politics, music, poetry, and other good stuff.
There is humor, but there is blunt seriousness here as well!


Parfois, on parle français ici aussi. Je suis un francophile .... Bienvenue à tous!

* Your comments and evaluations are appreciated ! *

Saturday, December 28, 2019

Adolescence - by Hénock Gugsa



"Between the gaps in memory" by Dominique Appia
Adolescence
 – by Hénock Gugsa

Discoveries continued, but at a much faster pace.

I was doing well in school, I joined my school’s boy scouts club for a couple of years. This was character-building time. My new-found love was reading, I loved hanging out in libraries. Another obsession was going to the movies every weekend. In fact, my dad used to say that I was using his money to enrich the white man (the ferenjii) both there and in foreign lands. He was right about that; but I was also benefiting from the fact that my language skills were growing at a rapid pace.

These were the "teen years" ... adolescence had arrived ... new problems began to appear and they seemed super impossible to tackle!  To name a few --- shyness, social awkwardness, and complete ignorance of the new social role.  My friends and I were all in the same boat, we were what you would call today: nerds !  Some of the disadvantages were outside our control.  For instance, the school we went to was not co-ed ... and that led to complete ignorance of the opposite sex.  But then again, even the whole society was segregationist when it came to genders.  There was always a kind of ingrained male chauvinism (machismo) which meant that hardly any friendship existed between boys and girls.

Yet, however frustrating life seemed at times, I was simultaneously realizing that time was flying by at a faster pace than ever before.  Books opened my eyes a lot, I learned more from them than any living person in my sphere.  I was now sensing that more adventures and enjoyment of life were just over the looming horizon ... a new beginning, perhaps.

By the time I was eighteen, I was fluent in English and had a good working start in French. And to cap everything, I had the great fortune and privilege of coming to the United States for my last year of high school. I had at last come to the States, as an exchange student, at the tender age of seventeen; and it was my first big adventure in life!

[In my next installment in this series, I hope to be tackling my "adulthood" years.]

Abyssinian cats !


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