And the boy said:
I know it's not unusual for kids to imagine things like this, but I really felt there was another way of walking through the world. When I was a kid, I always thought that our neighbor's dog was my grandfather. I assumed it. The only thing I'd known about my mother's father was that he was a traveling salesman, that he smoked a cigar, and that he was superstitious. I swear that this dog looked as if he should be chomping on a cigar. And I remember the first time I saw one of those velvet paintings of the dogs playing poker, I really thought that my grandpa really should have been one of those dogs. And since they all had scarves, we should be giving Max, the dog, a scarf as a gift, since he used to be grandpa and he used to smoke. Max, unlike a lot of animals, would go sit next to my father when he smoked cigarettes. He liked the smoke. It always seemed natural -- never occurred to me to mention any of these things to anyone. And then I would see auras - never knew them as such - just saw them as colors around people. I sort of suspected it would be a big mistake to mention this to my mother. But I did.
I was 6 or 7 when I mentioned it to her. She had one friend from school--she started taking classes to finish her diploma--who would come over to the house. I would be playing while he would sit and talk to her. I didn't realize I was the chaperone. My parents were separated at the time and there were custody issues, so she was being cautious. She seemed startled when I said: "Mom, whenever Benny comes over, I always see the color around you change." She thought I meant blushing or something.
She said: 'You know, when you react differently to different people, this happens."
I said, "No, no, no. It's not how you look, it's how the colors around you look."
That's when she paused and said: "The colors around me?"
And I said: "You usually have a kind of blue grey around you, but when Benny's here it sort of becomes more like a purple, sometimes goes off to a red and it looks more like the color around his head, which is more like a red yellow sort of sunset color that he's got."
And she's goes on: "Okay I don't understand."
And I said: "Well, pretty much everyone has got a color..."
And I was in one of those states where I was like "It's like looking at the color of someone's eyes." I didn't understand the big deal. There was really no reason to mention it. After all, you don't go around mentioning eye color. It would be like saying the color of your eyes change when you wear certain colors. Not something a kid would think of. And that's when she started paying attention to this and she started asking questions that made me feel uncomfortable.
The next time Benny came over, she took me aside: "Mommy has a question for you." She took me into my room and asked, "What color is the color around my head now?"
And I said: "Well it's blueish, but it's more blue than silver..." I didn't know what she wanted me to say. I wanted to say the right thing. I wanted to make her happy. That was a big part of what I wanted to do as a kid, especially after she and my father split, because I felt that there wasn't so much that was making her happy, so the least that I could do would be to try and do my bit. I wasn't sure what she wanted to hear. If she wanted it to be different or not different. What did she want me to say? I really felt guilty. I really felt that I was going to let her down and she was asking me if it felt like the right thing that she was doing, talking to Benny, were things going in the right direction? And I didn't want to answer these questions because I didn't know what the right answers were, but I could tell that there would be a right answer.
