Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [15]
For instance, the way I would transport myself in my initial years. Crawling and then walking, like most babies did, wasn’t good enough for me. I had other plans. To begin with, I refused to crawl. I would not crawl for anyone. My parents would set me down on the floor and I would go on strike. Motionless. “I’m not going anywhere. You can stand there and look at me allllll you want ’til the cows come home, but I ain’t movin’!”
After a while I could sense their disappointment, so around my ninth month I decided to crawl—backwards. Put me down and I would just go in reverse. Never forward, only backwards. And I mean as soon as I hit the floor I would shoot in the opposite direction. But I never ran into anything. It was weird, like I had eyes in the back of my diaper. My little body was somehow stuck in reverse, and if you wanted me to come to you, you had to point me in the opposite direction so I could back my rear end toward you.
This became a source of amusement for the adults—too much amusement, I thought, as people were now stopping by just to see the backwards-crawling baby—so I decided to change it up. I began slowly, methodically, crawling forward. Not all slaphappy-forward like most babies. Just a very determined, thoughtful, one hand in front of the other—and not before feeling the texture of the floor first (a little here, now a little there) and then picking just the right spot that was acceptable to my aesthetic and my taste. And then I would crawl. If I felt like it.
Walking seemed overrated, and as I watched the other toddlers in the neighborhood lifting themselves up and hanging on to furniture and pant legs in order to steady themselves before crashing down a few hundred times, I preferred to wait out this phase of my life.
It became quite the standoff in the household. There was already another baby on the way, and even after Anne, my sister, was born and ready to crawl herself, I still hadn’t walked. Why? Why did I need to expend useless energy? I could already see what most of life involved: A third of it was lying in a bed, sleeping. Another third of it was either standing on your feet in one spot all day on an assembly line or sitting at a desk. And the final third of the day was spent sitting either at the dinner table or on a couch watching TV. And why did a baby need to walk as long as there were strollers, scooters, walkers, bouncy walkers, tricycles, and parents to carry you? Give me a break! Plus it wasn’t like I had anywhere to go or someplace to be.
This attitude was not winning me any praise from my parents. A one-and-a-half-year-old needs love and adoration, and these seemed to be quickly fading away. So one day, in my seventeenth month, I thought it best to rise up and show them what I was made of. I leapt off the floor like an East German gymnast and walked straight as an arrow over to the fan and tried to stick my tongue in it. The parents were overjoyed and horrified.
You want me walking? This is what it looks like!
My mother knew that I was different, and so she decided to share a secret with me when I turned four. She taught me how to read. This little bit of empowerment was not supposed to take place for a couple of years, and for good reason: If you could read, you knew shit. And knowing shit, especially in the 1950s, was a prescription for trouble.
She began with the daily newspaper. Not a kid’s book (of which there were plenty in the house), but the Flint Journal. She first taught me to read the daily weather box. This was