You wanna listen to this?

“You wanna keep listening to this?” I kept asking a lady I didn’t know. She met me earlier at Kershaw Park north of Canandaigua lake. I was walking my dog.
We met again. It wasn’t the supermarket, so we weren’t blocking aisles.
Somehow we started talking about my dreadful childhood. “Are you sure you wanna keep hearing this?” I asked. “This is long ago. It’s a sob-story.”
“It’s interesting,” she said; “but you can stop if you want.
If yer south Jersey how did you end up here.”
“Chasing my wife-to-be I guess. But that was Rochester at first.”
“Why Rochester?”
“Escaping my hyper-religious parents,” I said.
“That’s interesting. My parents were extremely Catholic,” she noted. “You Catholic too?”
“Nope,” I said. “My parents were tub-thumping, Bible-beating Baptists. My father was incensed I couldn’t worship him as worthy of the right hand of Jesus.
That made me rebellious and of-the-Devil. And above all stupid. As if I could lead a rebellion. That’s Patrick Henry.”
Yada-yada-yada-yada. Also the Hilda Q. Walton School of Sexual Relations. Hilda was my neighbor and Sunday-School Superintendent. All men, including me, were disgusting.
Mix that with overly judgmental parents, and imagine what that does to a callow five-year-old.
“My mother later became depressed my father was turning me away. I had to split. Run away from home, I guess.”
“So now you seem okay.”
“Sorta. You don’t just flip-flop a childhood like that.
The fact I’m even talking to you has Faire Hilda and my parents spinning in their graves!”
And much to my father’s angry chagrin I didn’t return the Prodigal Son. (“Slay the fatted calf,” etc. —What, pray tell, does the fatted calf think?)