God, The Early Years

He was a god like no other. That much was apparent almost right from the beginning.

I’ll be the first to admit that I thought there was something sort of funny about the boy; and though you probably won’t find anyone to publicly acknowledge it now, many thought his problems went beyond funny. Lots of folks thought he was just plain off his rocker.

I’ve never seen a lad so ambitious at such an early age. Ambitious, and smart as a whip. He was always building things, creating little animals and plants, all sorts of unusual stuff nobody had ever seen before. I can also tell you that he made a lot of noise. Certainly at least early on there were some very vocal people who didn’t much care for either his attitude or his monkey business, and who felt something should have been done to discourage him.

I remember when he built his first chicken, and then his first body of water, with a mountain range alongside it. At that point some were fascinated, while others were flat-out scared to death. He was emboldened by those early successes, though, and seemed to only get more and more ambitious and even reckless as time went on.

The day he pulled off his biggest trick you just had a sense that this time something really big was going to happen. It was early evening, and he’d been raising a racket and brewing up fearful storms for almost a week. And then, almost as if on command, it all blew over, the sky opened up below us, and everything grew sort of eerie and still.

That night pretty much everybody left their dinner dishes in the sink and took their lawn chairs out to the curb to watch the world be born.