The Pervasiveness of Criminality

Criminals were all around us and this pervasiveness of criminality entered into our deepest sense of being. It's been said that in any family it takes only two bounces to get to a criminal but no one needed to tell us as much. In the woods behind our cousin's house we played at Godfather. Our crimes piled up, asked at our debts, our Sicilian messages, our retaliations. But good and bad, us and them, black and white, all of it became smudged grey with the passage of coastal seasons. We developed an acceptance of wrongdoing as an inevitable aspect of adult life or perhaps of life in general.