Whale Story
I didn't know how to run up to the age of four, but I already knew how to read. Both was because most of my early years I had spent in a cast to have my hip joints stretched to right shape.
"Animal Life in the Ocean and in the Deep Sea" was a marvellous book then, with colorful pictures of the huge blue whale, the ugly dark sperm whale and his enemy, the frightening red giant octopus.
I was taught to run when I came to Kindergarten. "There is a fish, as huge as this house", I had told the other children, pointing to the walls of our Kindergarten building. None of them would believe in it. "This is but a fairy tale", they jeered, just having reached a mental level on which they believed they could see through the customary made-up stories of adults. So, every day they haunted me all along the playground because I would not admit having lied to them about the giant fish.
I remember that later, when nobody was looking (and this nobody included all my family), I sometimes turned the pockets of my navy blue anorak inside out, imagining I was a whale with these two tiny fins on the sides, a huge whale swimming easily in the ocean.