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I’ve been told so many stories about why we relocated to Denver. Honestly none of them were the best, and it doesn’t help that I thought my mother said we were going to “Dinner”. I remember packing up all my leather dresses and fur coats in a box. My mother’s father was a gangster to many but to me he was the man with the plan. He always had a smile on his face when I seen him. He brought me a lot of those expensive clothes that we were leaving behind in Chicago.
We drove West to Denver; I remember us eating sandwiches here and there but was like dang when are we really going to get us some dinner. I just knew that dinner was going to be worth the wait. I had fallen to sleep and woke back up in the same car, looking out the window at what seemed like the same dirt road. We finally arrived and I found out that my aunt who raised my mom was already living there and it also happened to be my birthday when we arrived. Go figure right, My aunt walked up from her garden apartment with a Beauty and the Beast cake and was singing to me. I remember never liking Denver from the beginning. I couldn’t breathe when we first got there, and the kids were weird to me (Some of those same adults still are to me). I remember going to school at a school that offered tracks – So I was on purple track. Your track determined when you would be out of school and what group of kids you saw. I had June off for summer but went back in July while Orange track was out of school in July. It was confusing living it and it’s confusing trying to explain it, good thing it only was for a short amount of time because a playa had to go back home to Chicago for the whole summer. I remember my first summer back in Chicago after living in Denver for a few months. In my head, I turned up! Well only when I was with my Auntie LOL, remember I wasn’t allowed outside of that gate.
Every one of my siblings, including myself will say that we had the best aunt in the world. She took us on field trips – we would literally get on the bus and pick all of the kids up; food and parks were included. She was so tough on me, and I could not understand for the life of me why. My Dad recently explained to me that she was his baby sister, and he was tough on her. She stayed on me because she loved her big brother, and I was an extension of him. I didn’t mind especially if it meant that I got to turn up and mind you it was the very few times I got to spend time with my siblings. We would go to Wisconsin Dells and come back dark skinned from the sun burn. I ate good and got to watch all the stories with my Grandma’s. I would cry before I would have to go back to Denver, and I remember my family would try to negotiate with my mom about me staying. Literally every summer and  It didn’t work! I would get dropped off at Mid-way airport err time. When I returned back to Denver, I would go back into my little shell. I felt like that inside of my home was Chicago and everything outside of it was Denver. In my house we ate Fish and Spaghetti on Fridays, My mom would throw card games, and I pronounced Deddy and not daddy.
Let me take back something, I said I didn’t like Denver from the beginning. My first day there me and my cousins went to the Eazy Mart ( You know we was in the hood right) and the Boys and Girls Club. I learned what running the streets looked like in Denver, I wasn’t behind a gate and maybe this is when I did my turning up LOL. Still after the cake and running the streets I have always wondered when were going to make it to “Dinner”.
I love this I feel like it should be a movie or short film series…