norris flowers,, like many people in today’s pitiless world, had a horror of being perceived as mediocre.
all he wanted was to be accepted as a human being.
he had a brother named ben who dreamed of being a revolutionary.
and a sister named elsa who just waned to get along from day to day.
when norris was six years old, ben was nine , and elsa was eleven, their mother, jennifer, left the three children with their father, wyman, an underling in a vast international conglomerate, and got on a bus to las vegas to pursue her dream of being a standup comedian.
but the jokes were few and far between that cold winter without jennifer’s paycheck being deposited regularly in the family’s bank account.
wyman flowers lost his job in the vast international conglomerate, and, unable to secure employment elsewhere in a reasonable amount of time, joined an old college classmate of his, omar plunkett , in a crew of aggressive panhandlers living in a large cardboard box on the sidewalk in front of city hall.
the three children, norris, ben, and elsa, were placed in foster homes.
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on a rainy tuesday afternoon. little elsa arrived at the home of mrs judith taft.
mrs taft was a full time foster mother , and had four other girls under her care when elsa joined them.
three of them were elsa’s age, and one was two years older.
the older girl’s name was flossie, she had a torpid disposition and made no attempt to dominate or boss the younger girls.
the alpha girl was actually the youngest of the lot - by a few weeks - and she was a hellacious little hellcat.
her name was gardenia.
mrs taft was content to let gardenia exercise most of her hellaciousness on the other girls , rather than on herself.
not that mrs taft did not rule the establishment with a cast iron hand.
there was supposedly a mister taft, but none of the girls had ever set eyes on him.
he was said to be a salesnan, always “on the road” and the girls speculated among themselves that he did not really exist.
such was mrs taft’s home for girls, though it was not officially called that, or anything else,
so she could take a boy in if she wanted? elsa asked on her first day.
everybody asks that question on that first day, she waa infrormed by the second youngest girl, hortense.
and they alwlys get the same answer , the last girl, imogene, added.
and what might that answer be, elsa persisted.
nobody knows, gardenia asserrted decisively.
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