THE BUCKET LIST – A Short Story

He was a brown skinned boy with hair of curl. Smart beyond his years, he was happy with pretty much every aspect of his life. Clay was short for Clayton but most people called him Scooter, a nickname given by his mother who noticed, at a very early age, his proclivity for “scooting” from from one spot to another, no matter the distance. Scooter was the product of a broken household. His mother raised him and his sister with no assistance from from the sperm donor whose tendency to beat the ones he purported to love got him ousted from the home quickly. Mom saw Scooter's potential very early on. Perhaps she was just a loving mother being washed by a wave of wishful thinking or, maybe it was spotting him reading a book by Michael Crighton, on his own accord, at the age of 7 that tipped her off. Scooter was very bight and needed more stimulation than he could get from a public school system that prided itself on the number of students who were able to pass the state assessment test. By 3rd grade, mom had managed to get him into one of the most prestigious private schools in the area. The family didn't have the means to pay the hefty tuition but Scooter had brown skin and these schools gladly opened their doors to people with complexions that satisfied funding obligations. The system was pretty flawless – you give them $10 a month and they put your kid in the front row to showcase the diverse environment of the school. They also give him a quality education in return for being able to use him as a poster child. In the long run, mom figured, it was a pretty small price to pay. For years, things went smoothly as Scooter excelled in a number of sports and maintained a high academic profile. He was challenged scholastically and physically and was really beginning to spread his wings so he could step out and soar into the journey to find himself. He was right on track and he was thriving. It was somewhere in the ballpark of midway through high school that things began to change, as they often do but for Scooter the changes were accompanied by a cultural phenomenon that would alter his entire way of thinking and the timing couldn't have been worse. He was a young man of color in an environment that set him off to the side and, in an attempt to relate more with people he looked more like, he discovered the negative world of Gangsta Rap, which was in it's infancy, and trying to find itself as an art form. The lyrics were destructive and offensive, the beats, however, were infectious and his mind was receptive. He started to dress and talk and act like the proponents of violence and misogyny he had adopted as his own, forsaking his family and his studies and ignoring the ethics, morals and values he had been raised with to that point. He began to walk around with a big, unwarranted chip on his shoulder and he became a bully, intimidating kids he didn't know and isolating those who had been friends, classmates and teammates. It got so bad, that he dropped out of school just before his senior year and left his 5 bedroom house in the suburbs for a more adventurous existence in the inner city. The straw that broke the camel's back for Scooter was the frequency with which he was being racially profiled in his own neighborhood. His journeys took him around the country to a number of cities he had just read about. Because his sensitivity ran deep, he was profoundly pained when his travels took him to the nation's capital where he bemoaned the crack heads and the homeless living in the street in such close proximity to the White House. He called his mom and cried. But this was a private moment where he was able to step out of the persona he was creating and be himself, the Scooter that his family missed and loved, but, who was now in too deep, at least in his own mind, to turn back. He had allowed himself a moment of vulnerability that gave his mom a glimmer of hope that someday, he might realize his true self “come home.” Scooter was now 21 years old and the school of life was giving him an education about hard knocks that he would never have gotten at his private school. But was he finding who he was or who he wasn't? One evening after getting back to the apartment in the projects that he shared with 3 guys he referred to as his “boys,” he made a decision that would change his life forever. There was an armed robbery and Scooter had chosen to take part. In his now completely twisted value system, his mind told him that all of this was not only OK but it was just how things were. This was the new normal. But things didn't go as planned. Someone began shooting wildly and Scooter was hit. Twice. When the police got there, they took him directly to the hospital for treatment and placed an armed guard directly in front of his door. Because shooting victims are admitted to hospitals under assumed names. His mom, who had received the disturbing call and immediately got on a plane, couldn't find him. It didn't matter because Scooter was in a coma and she wouldn't be allowed to see him anyway. He was under arrest. Scooter came through the coma and was eventually tried, convicted and ordered to serve 10 years in prison. It was during that time that his mom, who spoke to him every single week and wrote to him every single day, suggested he make a “bucket list.” She understood the concept of the bucket list and knew this was different but Scooter had almost kicked the proverbial bucket and had been given a second chance at life. Why not use the list as an outline for what he wanted to achieve after he got out at the ripe young age of 31? For nearly 10 years, in every daily letter, he was chided to create his future by way of listing positive outcomes for him to manifest. Early in his sentence he was forced to “prove himself” 3 or 4 times, which made his mother cry. “Don't worry, mama.” he would tell her, “I won. They won't bother me anymore.” He was right. For the rest of his time, he was able to parlay an education. He read voraciously and got a barber's license, which allowed him to work at a paying job while pursuing the education he had walked away from after his junior year of high school. He not only got his GED but his bachelor's degree in business as well. He then went on to pursue his masters. Scooters mom kept the level of support at the highest setting and never waned. The day Scooter walked out of prison, he and his mom hugged, cried and and started to talk. “Did you ever make that bucket list I've been hounding you about for the past 10 years?” she asked “Yes, mama, I did,” he responded, “I wrote it 10 years ago. It only has one thing on it and today I can check it off. Do you want to see it?” She nodded and he reached into his pocked and pulled out an old, folded sheet of paper and handed it to her. She opened it and, although the years had faded the words, she read : “Bucket List - Be free and live a productive life!”