Loaves & Fishes | Sacramento | 2018 | William
The following are excerpts from a conversation I had with William Jincks, a 59-year-old high school educated tradesman and father or two who grew up in Sacramento. William lived and worked as a mason until an act of brutality robbed him of his future.
William recalls the day when everything in his life stopped, “In 2005 a motorcycle gang member tried to kill me with a baseball bat while I was asleep. I was in a coma for six-months, suffered severe nerve damage and I had to learn how to walk again.” William lifts up his white t-shirt exposing his soft belly. He shows me a thick, angry two-inch-wide scar that carves a trail six inches down his torso and stops just above his belly button. “See, I had a feeding tube keeping me alive.”
The scar is witness to William’s life-changing event and is a physical mark that sparks his memory. After showing me his scar, he becomes silent and lowers his head. We sit together for a while not speaking. The swirling sounds of the speaker announcements in Friendship Park mixed with the rattling rumble of the nearby light rail trains take up the space where our conversation used to live.
A few moments pass. I reach out and say, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
Willian raises his head and looks up and over at me. “I’m so thankful that I’m able to walk again and ride a bike again. I was an adventurer as a kid.” William recalls of his youth, “I’d tear through fields on my bike. I’d walk through the tall grass and go fishing in the rivers around Sacramento. I loved this place.”