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By Jack Joseph Smith

Violence is UNREAL TIMELESS huge America to the steel of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, the cellar of Heaven. I was four years old, when I was told I was adopted. My father would hold me on his knee and tell me of the way it was, when our feeling's became entwined forever. My imagination had no need to return, with his love remembering the sweetness of the three of us fire, touching. My nearness was new, and my eyes were clear watching his face. And then, when he saw me feel his sincerity, I was no longer the adopted one, but the prune picker from California. And I never asked why I was with them. I could only look back to being three, when we were three leaving Pittsburgh's Greentree Township and the winding cinder red-dog roads, running off long and narrow and half-paved Patomie Avenue. Away from the backyard fountain and awning house just above the housing-track, where children's noses against windows sprayed by a girl holding a bright new garden hose made for a moment a belief in a modern rain, we moved to where I began in the beginning of my begining to leap grabbing the begining's of grass begining their growth green in spring. In that time of mere milage, between middle and upper middle class; I stood in a great little pair of brown shoes on old yellow cobblestone streets, that rested within the winding lawn valley's of Mount Lebanon Township. Cedar trees lined sidewalks, which stepped occasionally to let lots empty of houses, but thick with brush and bark chipped trees good for shacks reach the streets. I saw ivy cover the deep red brick of our home-rich with a new age. And then the wind slowed across the ivy, and I watched my mother and father sense the inside of the house drawing them to it's fresh wealth. The field across the street was as long and as real as the farm running over the far hill, and a low prickly hedge grew firm in clover, between good lawn green and uneven sidewalk cement. My mother took me from the street, across a narrow strip of bumpy tree-stomped grass, and we walked with my father up the

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

The page begins with a stark handwritten claim that violence is unreal, then recalls an adopted child's early belonging through his father's Pittsburgh memory and the family's movement into Mount Lebanon.

The corrected reading makes the page less abstract and more embodied: the father's knee, the steel city, the garden hose, ivy, cobblestone streets, and new house all become a geography of adoption, class passage, and remembered closeness.

Claude

The handwritten headings 'Violence is UNREAL' and 'TIMELESS' crown a memory that turns 'huge America' down to 'the steel of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, the cellar of Heaven'. Told he was adopted at four, the boy sits on his father's knee until sincerity dissolves the label and he becomes not the adopted one but 'the prune picker from California'; the stuttering phrase 'begining of my begining to leap grabbing the begining's of grass' enacts a child's first growth. The family's class passage from Pittsburgh's red-dog roads to ivy-bricked Mount Lebanon is rendered as a geography of belonging, where mother and father 'sense the inside of the house drawing them to it's fresh wealth'.