RESURGENCE

CHAPTER 9 & Conrad's diary

CHAPTER NINE

ADOLESCENCE

Nick and his grandmother, Yvette, sat in cane chairs on the front porch of her six-bedroom house. A jack, a four, and a nine were the three cards sitting on the glass table in between them. Nick held a pair of tens in his hand as he looked at his grandmother’s wrinkled face. 

Yvette was a heavily built, strong woman and very active for her age of sixty-two. The only sedentary activity she loved was playing poker with her grandson every Sunday afternoon. They played with real money, and Nick was allowed to gamble and lose half of his weekly allowance and not allowed to win more than double of it. He was also prohibited from gambling with anyone except her. 

“What you got, boy?” she smiled and raised the bet by a quarter.

Nick shivered a little and said, “It's cold today, isn't it Ma? I think I need a sweat shirt,” and he matched her raise with a quarter.

“I’ll fix you some hot tea as soon as I am done winning back your pocket money,” she said and dealt a card from the stack.

A three of spades.

“Does your wrist bother you on days like this?” asked Nick as he tapped the table to check.

“No. My wrist bugs me when it gets real cold in the winter. That's when I feel like cutting my wrist off.”

She smiled and threw a quarter on the table.

“Last year, when I had the flu,” said Nick as he matched her raise with a quarter. “My throat hurt so bad that I wanted to cut it open and drain all the poison out. I hate this foggy weather. It chokes me.”

“When I was in college my physics professor used to say, ‘In twenty years, man will be able to modify the weather and have eternal summer in the cities.’ It never happened. It’s been fifty years now and I can’t even trust the weather people on TV.”

She buried a card and dealt a jack of hearts.

“I’ve read in some magazines that the government is secretly controlling the weather,” said Nick.

“If they can turn a city into ashes in a few seconds with an atomic bomb, I wouldn’t be surprised if they control the weather. But I’ll tell you one thing: Never believe everything you read. Nowadays, it’s hard to tell the difference between fact and fiction.”

“What about the concept that humans evolved from monkeys?” asked Nick with a smile. He knew how Granny was going to react to that question.

“Blasphemy, it’s pure blasphemy,” she said and tapped the chair to check.

Nick tapped the chair as well and put his cards on the table. She looked at his cards and sighed. She had a pair of nines and Nick’s pair of tens had won him the hand.

“I’ll make tea,” she said as she rose up from her chair and walked to the kitchen.

Yvette was a very proud grandmother. Nick was one of those kids born with an exceptional mind. He had learned to speak by the age of two, was an avid reader by age five, and as he grew older he started to show interest in tools and machinery. He had a natural flair for engineering and often spent his free time taking apart appliances around the house and then putting them together. Last summer, the lawn mower had broken down.Nick had not only fixed it all by himself, but made a remote control for it. Now every other Sunday, he mowed the lawn while he sat on the porch controlling the mower by the small remote he had created. Yvette knew that the boy would do well for himself but grew sad sometimes, considering he never showed much interest in visiting the house of God or learning about the holy scriptures.