BREAKING BARRIERS
Blind Rites of Passage the Extraordinary Stories of Uncommon People
FOLK TALES AT MY GRANDMA'S KNEE TOLD BY A NATIVE SON OF CALIFORNIA by Daniel Breault
[an extract from Breaking Barriers]
Note: I'm only telling this story because Mrs. Neer asked me to.
I WAS born in a foggy area of Northern California just outside Eureka, on a windy cliff called Bloomers Bluff. I must have been an awfully ugly infant, because from what I've been told, my father said. "Send him back, he's too ugly for me." But he was stuck with me.
I started walking when I was less than a year old, but shortly thereafter I succumbed to the first epidemic of what is now known as polio; it was called "infantile paralysis" in those days. It left me with feet that didn't seem to match and it made walking difficult, but I never let it slow me down any. As a toddler I'd crawl up onto my great grandma's lap and listen to the stories she told me about crossing the Plains in a covered wagon…
Breaking Barriers - Blind Rites of Passage the Extraordinary Stories of Uncommon People
by Frances Lief Neer. Published by Creative Arts Book Company, 2000
ISBN: 0-8873929-9-7
