Giant War

There were signs at my birth.

I was husky, at three-fourths of a stone.

They track any baby over 9 lbs since this started. When I was born, they didn’t know how to look for this particular gene abnormality.  It had not been diagnosed yet. There were hints.  There were clues, but, like any global paradigm shift (which this became in short time) …we just didn’t now.  We didn’t see it coming. I realize, old news now.

Most big babies are just big babies, fully 999 out of 1,000 will be “regular”.

To have a big baby back then didn’t create the same level of fear it does today.  I’ve read old articles, back to my grandparent’s days, and, unless it was just unreported, people didn’t get abortions because of the size of the child.  You have to understand…I need you to understand…that throughout history all the way up to the earliest parts of the 21st century people were simply not afraid of giants.

It didn’t take long for me to be outed – it was obvious.

I was only 10 years old when I exceeded my first HRL (height restriction line).  Fourth Grade. End of the year, we had a field trip to the Middle School to see what being in a new school would be like.  I was eager to eat lunch in the Cafetorium – it was a fun and silly word I loved but didn’t understand.  It wasn’t until many years later that I realized the school was too old and small to have separate cafeteria and auditorium (and too small for my kind).  They promised lunch would be hotdogs. I boarded the flat-front school bus with the green vinyl seats. The upholstery, if it could be called that, was without pattern, except that it was embossed with a sort of venous structure, I think meant to look like leather culled from a Capricorn’s lower half.

I was in the seventh row on the driver’s side, alone. My forehead was resting on the strip of aluminum holding glass window to steel frame. And in a child’s way, I thought I was hiding by waist-bending and pulling my shoulder blades in. I could say I was looking out the window, but I was really just trying to be less.

Sometimes, I think, “if they’d let me take that trip...if they let me go to the school and eat the hot dogs and see the cafetorium would we be at war today?” Could there have been a way out? 

Maybe even at ten, I would have understood…that being so much more than the people around me, physically and emotionally, was an untenable situation. Who can say if all of this could have been avoided? A civil war averted. A global war left unstarted.

But that isn’t what happened. That moment, being forcibly removed, ejected was unarguably the start of the end of our time of relative peace. The shot heard round the world. I was the catalyst, but I was only a little boy, albeit of immense stature and stentorian voice. The factions used this moment as clarion call to arms. Both sides knowing this was a fight that was worth dying for.

-Opening page from the Autobiography of Cujo Jones, Giant Rights Advocate.