Pool_1

>> The Basement <<

( What cups? ) "Marcus, what's that got to do with cups?", Shannon complained.

"Everything. You in a hurry or something?" He continued, telling her that in college, he was an honors bio major. As he was the last of four children of parents trying to get all of the boys, eventually, through college, spending money was hard to come by. His sister, the oldest, did not want any part of college, preferring to withdraw into her own self made isolated artistic environment. Mom and dad Macaluso were jazz musicians. As with so many youths during the great depression, their schooling was sacrificed to survival. Economic coercion forced their generation, as children, into mills and mindless jobs for less than slave wages as there was no provision made for food, living space, nor any kind of sustenance that even a valued slave would require. There was no investment in these children of any kind. The injured or exhausted were discarded for new, at no cost. The great depression, didn't take away anything that they had but did cut off escape possibilities. Mankind was trading futures in a time of economic savagery. The only hope was to somehow hold the family together. No belief, bond, goal, or commitment superceded family. No salve existed for deprivations beyond family. Family could kill you or family could heal you. Family had inescapable gravity. Time went nowhere. The future was so far away and people so infinitesimally small. Yet even in the worst of times, there are survivors. It isn't a question of a rising above, but more a matter of simply being left alive, even if dazed and dumbfounded and even if only by sheer chance. The Macaluso parents were such survivors. She as