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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My mother pretty much tackled everything as far as parenting in my teenage years was concerned but there was one nut she couldn’t see fit to crack (excuse the pun soon revealed). That was the ‘sex talk’. The sex talk is famous in parenting lore as an exercise in discomfort and probably every tact...
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By the time I was 3 years old I was still without the use of the English language. I indicated my preferences with finger pointing and various grunts and groans. “Son, would you like some potatoes?”, and then I’d give some garbled response that, I’m assuming, my mother had learned to decode because then...
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Occasionally during the summers my mother and I would go and visit my Great Aunt Louise at her cabin in Brainerd, Minnesota but from about the ages of 10 to 12 I got to go alone, put on a bus with a note pinned to my chest and Greyhounded off to the north, land...
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