I am supposed to write about what happened so important that I was changed. I am supposed to tell of what it is beyond the facts that my life meant.
I have secrets.
Secrets are weapons in our world. That is of course one thing you likely learned by the time you could read by the time you struggled to have friends as friends were not assumed by proximity.
For the 40s and 50s and 60s the news was about a strong nation with jets flying around and people in nice new ranch homes with cars with fins on them.
It was not at all unusual for families to move, according to the magazines like Time, or Life, which were on most every coffee table, Move, every 2 years.
My Family, moved often early in my life.
We may have fit some National profile they reported as a trend in Time of Life, but far as I can tell it was absolute bullshit once we got into the South.
We did end up in a very nice house that had made my mother and father happy to find and buy. It was at the corner of Lee and Lebanon, and I have a photograph of it take about 4 years ago on the wall. I do not remember the phone number of that day. Nor do I remember any number for the street address because we had a Post Office Box.
Lawrence O-Brian was the Post Master General whose name is on the Post Office in Elon College which is the last place I and my brothers and sisters and mother and father lived as a family.
Mom divorced my father because he was having affairs with men was the way she put it. “You haven’t told my brother and sisters.” was the first thing out of my mouth and we never did tell my brother and sisters till all were of High School age.
They could figure it out themselves. Dad could tell them one by one if he wanted.
As a secret in the small college town of Elon College a good deal of pain and violence came from the fact that dad was gay, or gay, homo.
I believe he felt that Black people deserved Civil Rights because they shared with him suffering.
Turned out the Black people in the Baptist churches looked, and look down on homosexuals or those living on the Down Low.
All I ever learned out of some of these things was you need to beat the shit out of people who go out of their way to hurt you because you are set apart as available and approved of as a target.
The homosexuals who fought with NYC police over there on Stone St. did it when it was just too much and they had had enough, and there were enough of them to basically win, or not lose too bad.
You do discover that if you declare who you are and who your friends are you may get enough of a corp together to fight the majority who are your enemies while you are in a minority.
There really is supposed to be a difference between Democracy and Mob rule.
These days as I write there are a great number of fundamentalists who are to the benefit of the Grand Old Party ignorant of the ethics of good government and attached to mob rule.
I come from rich and poor people who have lived best they could on the East Coast of the United States going back a good ways we have discovered.
I used to say I came from Sailors and Priests, and that actually isn’t too far off, but not near the whole story.
We must have been poor or unlucky up till a certain time like the times on when everybody could leave a picture in the form of a photograph, for there are no paintings of family.
Hell the best known artist of the family made pictures of war buddies, and barns and factories, not family.