Excerpt
“That’s an awkward and difficult subject,” she said. “I don’t want to talk
about it right now.”
Miloo became the central focus of his life and as their friendship deepened,
Ken confessed that he liked her – but far more than the word implied.
He liked her very deeply.
“You can’t like me that much,” she said. “You come from one world and
I come from another and there is no hope that we could ever be more than
just passing friends. It would be nothing but trouble for everybody.”
Ken felt a familiar rebel anger stirring in him. “Why? Did somebody
make a rule?”
“Yes,” she said. “Those are the rules.”
“But if the rules are bad, do you still accept them?”
“It’s everybody,” she said. “It’s everywhere you turn. That’s the way it is.”
“Well, I don’t accept it.”
“You’ll get into a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t care. It seems that all the best things in my life are trouble and
I just won’t accept it.”
Ken’s father noted the growing friendship between his son and Miloo.
Perhaps thinking to distract him, he asked him one late summer day what
he would like for his next birthday. Ken opened his Michelangelo book to
the photograph of David. “I want to see that,” he said.
“Why that?” his father asked.
“It’s probably the most perfect thing I have ever seen. It has only one
flaw.”
“And what’s the flaw?”
“Look at his hand,” Ken pointed to the picture. “He’s holding a stone in
his hand and that’s the stone he was putting in a sling to throw at Goliath.
Everything else is perfect but this hand is weird. Why would he do that?
Why would he make such a strange hand on such a beautiful body?”
“I don’t know,” his father admitted. “So, that’s what you really want to
do?”
“Yes. I want to go to Florence.”
On the morning of his thirteenth birthday, he and his father boarded
the train to Italy. In Florence, they stepped into a line that seemed
to stretch to infinity outside the gates of the Accademia delle Belle Arti.
Slowly the line inched its way to the spot where the colossal 17-foot statue
towered over the crowd. Ken wanted to feast his eyes, but the relentless
throng forced him to walk by it after only a passing glance.
As they left the museum, his father asked, “Did you like it?”
“How can you look at something that way?” Ken asked. “I want to
spend a lot of time there.”
Manolis Aligizakis 