Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.
God, I have to tell this story but it is ugly. Have you ever heard those words. It was more than 40 years ago. I have little doubt why I moved away. Little opportunity but also I need to be someplace that had advanced into the 20th century. I came home from school to work for the summer, I could live rent free and save my pay to pay my room and board at school. This year I was working in a textile mill dye house. I had not only graduated high school but I was going to college. All the other workers (not the dyer or management) workers had not graduated high school. They were not bad people, they worked hard to support families, they all had families. I was so naïve and clueless. I gave a granola bar to a guy with no teeth (if he had dentures he did not bring them to work). When I figured it out and apologized, he said no problem, he thought it was great, it was one of those hard ones. One of the other guys threw this out there “if its old enough to bleed, it is old enough to breed.” I had heard this before but that was between two teenage boys, not some man talking about his daughters. At the time I did not try to wrap my head around this but it went into the memory banks only to pop up every once in a while. The best spin I can put on this is he was suggesting that I consider a relationship with his young teenage daughter. I put out of my head the idea that he was having incestuous pedophile rape sex with his daughter but I could not grasp that he was trying to make me part of the family. He did not seem to be sexual predator. He was a sexist or a patriarch, the leader of the family the “Man,” Doing the best he can. I only escaped that town out of shear immaturity and ignorance. I wanted to be an Aeronautical Engineer. The girls gave up on me even before their fathers. They could see that I was a dufuss. I had stars in my eyes and while I was horney as hell, I did not have a clue about how to get laid. I did not realize that all I had to do was ask the right girl. Even this Dad as much as offering went right over my head.
In today’s “Me Too” expose’ it really talks to how far we have come. Don’t get me wrong, I woke a few years later and also waited a decade to get married and counted every relationship I missed or sabotage in my younger years a blessing. I have seen the wreckage in the 4 decades that followed. Women thrown under the bus and then in some places the women being elevated for the merit the bring to the work place. God, he has done some shit. Some people just don’t understand how bad it was and how much better it is. I know and understand because it still sucks hard. I have had two wives and sent three stepdaughters out into that world. Even a strong man would cry and be tempted to punish evil men personally. Even some good men need a good smack up side the face.
TEK
