Virginia was the bad girl…the junior high bad girl who occupied a special niche in school culture. There could only be one Virginia because it took such unbelievable balls to be the junior high school bad girl, so nearly all the other girls fell back into their familiar roles of ‘unpopular’, ‘popular’, ‘pretty and...
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It’s odd that on this particular Father’s Day, after feeling the short-shrift the majority of my life, I’m strangely released from the sadness of my paternal upbringing (if you can even call it that). Maybe I’ve just hashed the living prose out of it so much that I’ve set free some of those demons...
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With each passing hour, I get more protective of my time and, more precisely, how other people sometimes waste it. I do not like this from anyone but from dysfunctional family members it nearly turns me criminal. Time wasted dealing with the narcissistic, selfish meanderings of knee-jerk, neurotic control freaks is taking its toll...
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When we’re young our thought processes don’t include much personal maintenance. Youth doesn’t have to think about eventual degradation because, for the most part, every thing’s in working order and body parts can still take a fair amount of abuse without something falling off and rolling across the floor. This is the magic of...
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For the most part, I do not understand any families that I’m associated with. They often seem like foreign countries with agendas and a language that is, well, foreign to me. They hide things from me that they think I shouldn’t know or create attributes for themselves that they don’t possess so that they...
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By the fourth grade I should have known better. I should have known that I was going to take my lumps for hanging onto Santa Claus the way I did but, damn, I’m nothing if not dogged in my point of view and that pretty much brings up another associated problem at the time....
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Raymond, among the many middle-class families in our extended neighborhood, was very poor indeed. One look at the disheveled exterior of his house, crying out for the touch of a paint brush and a weed whacker, and you could see that not only was there little cash flow but an assumed degree of neglect....
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When I was growing up in the ’50’s and ’60’s, environmental concerns weren’t on the average person’s radar and, in fact, Rachel Carlson’s ground breaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the only serious look at pollution and was primarily concerned with the use of poisonous chemicals, dispersed in the ground water supply. So, when...
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After years of assessing my strengths and weaknesses, there’s no doubt I’m a highly distractable person. What would that be in today’s coded vernacular…HDP? I’m sure if I were in high school now, psychologists would be breaking it all down into a neat little prescription to be filled at the pharmacy but all it...
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When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries. It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was...
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