The Full Cleveland by Terry Reed Page A

midsob. Her eyes lit up. She took the rose and smiled prettily, not to mention modestly, lovingly, and purely.
    It was not a huge leap to assume, then, that somewhere in the world at some other Breakfast Meeting, the rich had just gotten richer, and those poor people downtown were still poor.
    I stopped attending Breakfast Meetings, claiming I had pressing business elsewhere. Now that I’d been nominated for class president at school.

THIRTEEN

It was a black day and I don’t know why anybody would want to hear about it, but it was a Saturday in summer, and I was sitting on my bed with a cast and a crutch, writing a kind of letter in my head, to my grandfather, who I already said was dead.
    I guess I just felt like letting him know what I thought of Canadian tennis is all. Also, I owed him a thank-you note, for the pearls he had given my father to give me when I turned thirteen, which was my birthday, the day before.
    I knew it was crazy to write him the letter, even in my head, but I still started doing it anyway, mostly complaining about Canadian tennis, because it has three players, and though you do get a partner, then you have to switch off, so your partner becomes your opponent and then your opponent becomes your partner again. All I’m saying is, you shouldn’t trust anyone in Canadian tennis. I really started to complain about it to my grandfather, saying what a sorry excuse for an export Canada had. How once they came up with the bacon and the quarters, maybe they should have quit while they were ahead. I also asked my grandfather to check on a few other countries, including our own, now that he could see the whole world from the vantage point of heaven, that is if there is a God.

    I started in the morning, and it got to be quite an elaborate letter by later on. The first thing, when I woke up and found out I was wearing my pearls with my pajamas, I just began. I told my grandfather how I had played Canadian tennis on my birthday, with my two best friends, the two Mickeys. How when we switched partners my knee went numb, but I kept playing like a madman anyway, and then when I fell down and got up and then fell down again, the two Mickeys came and stood over me in their tennis skirts and Mickey said, Hey, maybe I had to go to the hospital or something. Which, when my Mother arrived in her golf skirt, is what we did.

    At the hospital, they gave me a cast and a crutch to walk around on, then told me not to walk around.
    The Mickeys bought me presents at the gift shop, including a Seventeen magazine, and Mother pretended not to notice it, I guess rewarding me for not crying too loud when the doctor turned my kneecap back around. Now I was on my bed, and I’d been staring at the cover of the Seventeen for about an hour. I was just getting incredibly stubborn about starting it. I told my grandfather I sometimes get perverse like that, wanting something all my life, then thinking, This isn’t exactly philosophy, now that I have my hands on a copy. Besides, it was too quiet to read it. Dad was down there in his library with the door closed.
    I told my grandfather it was a Saturday in summer, and I was all alone in the house with Dad. But I tried not to say too much about that one, because Dad was his son and I didn’t want to blame my grandfather for him.
    I also told my grandfather he may want to have a meeting about eliminating the thirteenth birthday along with Canadian tennis. I suggested they try what they do in some tall buildings, when the elevator skips you straight from twelve to fourteen. And nobody has to worry they’ve landed on the most unlucky floor.
    Anyway, the advantage to this kind of letter is you can do it all day long. There’s no time limit. It’s not as if you have to get it to the post office or something, or have it ready for when the mailman comes. Also, you don’t have to go in logical order, and there’s not a lot of extra explaining to do. The