I never quite detected any real affection from my dad (father #2) when I was a kid and, as detailed in many prior stories, he seemed to be a never ending source of disappointment. I want to believe that he loved me but there’s no concrete proof of that since deeds would be a...
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When I sat and thought it through there were very few cherished moments with my dad (father #2) but there were some and, perhaps, that’s why they’re so striking in my memory. There are chunks of my childhood that defy detail but those scant few moments where my dad and I are actually interacting...
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From the age of 6 to 11, my adolescent after-school care-taking was done by Mildred, an older woman with a reasonably large family right around the block from our house. We met as a result of my befriending her son, Glenn, and after my mother met Mildred, they worked out a financial agreement where...
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Male role models were in short supply around my house and what’s been detailed so far in this blog sums up the vacancy…but I was always looking. I used to study men that I admired and imagine what sort of upbringing brought them to the point where someone like me looked up to them....
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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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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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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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In the 1950′s, unlike today, TV broadcasts had a daily shelf life and at some time in the morning, say 3am or so, after the late movie and some nebulous local half hour show no one watched, the voice-over announcer would explain that the broadcast day had concluded and would return at such and...
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