Page 6 - Mateo and the Gift of Presence audio flip book Ch 1-2

Mateo and the Gift of Presence

Why play baseball for his school team when he could
play hyper-baseball on the moon? There, home-runs soared
several miles and the members of the opposing team had trans-
parent skin and slithered around like snakes. Why work hard
to make top grades (like his younger brother Alex did) when
he could ski across Greenland with a pack of friendly wolves?

They didn’t care whether he could read, write, or do enough
math to pass the boring standardized tests his teachers seemed
so worried about. Why should he clean his room, help his
mother with the dishes, feed the animals, take out the trash,
or do any of the other hopelessly dull chores that his parents
insisted that he do (and yelled at him when he didn’t)? He had
invisible friends to play with, up inside his head, who had bicy-
cles with wings.
“You’ll never amount to anything! You’re just too

LAZY and SELF-ABSORBED!” his father often scolded him.
“You have so much potential, Mateo, but you’re wasting it! If
you keep this up you’ll turn out just like your Uncle Alonzo,
back in Italy, living off the family fat!”
His mother was equally concerned, but she tended to
cajole rather than yell.
“Come on, Mateo, I know you can solve this math

problem,” she might say encouragingly. “Just apply yourself a
little harder. And stop fiddling with your pencil. It’s not a sword,
you know.”
Of course, to Mateo, the pencil was a sword—or at least
it could be! And slaying a dragon with it would be much more
exciting than using it to do his math homework.

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