Notes from the Edge 03-09-24

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A brief explanation of me

Home:
I was watching TV a little while ago and remembered an incident from my twenties. Racing down a farm road in the middle of winter; icy surface; snowbanks higher than the cars, and me and my buddy chasing each other and barely keeping control of those cars, glancing off the snowbanks, laughing crazily. Sounds irresponsible, I know, but it’s a real memory from my life, irresponsible or not.

When I was nine my parents moved back to northern NY, a place I did not remember and did not like at all. The kids thought I had a southern accent from living in the south, of course I didn’t, they just didn’t realize that all of them had accents instead from living in New Yak.
I got my sister and I dragged into the principal’s office at ten years old (Me) nine (My sister) when I volunteered in class that we were mixed race and had Native American blood, something that you weren’t supposed to acknowledge in those days (1966 – 1967). Good thing I didn’t find out until later in life that we also had African American blood too.

Mom and dad came to school and tempers flared, but we were allowed to stay in school. I apologized to my sister for being dumb and saying it, but when I told my dad he told me not to worry about it. He did ask me why I said it, and I told him it was because no one ever told me it was a bad thing. He said it wasn’t.

Dad was in and out of our lives, and if you notice many of the people on this page, my friends, call each other brother or sister, it is because we are. Many of us suspected, but none really knew for sure about each other until just a few years ago.

I am the oldest, but not by much. Turns out I have a brother nearly as old, and of course my sister a little more than a year younger, and then the rest of us are scattered over at least fifteen years.

Embarrassing? Not really. I don’t think it bothers most of us anymore, believe me, even those of us who have done well have paid some dues growing up mixed race and fatherless, projects, trailer parks, and worse places. But one thing I have learned from all of us is the love that is there, and the ability to care about one another. It means a great deal to me.

Some of us had guidance, some of us didn’t. Some went to work; some went to the streets. Most of us have traveled everywhere trying to find home; that place that feels right.

I used to hate Facebook. I have had an account for years and never used it. Hated it. Too intrusive. I just didn’t want anything to do with it, but if not for Facebook I would not have the relationships I have now with family and friends. I hate to give credit to Facebook, but it is true. All of us were able to do a better job getting to know one another because of this social app.

At 13 I was living in the mountains with an aunt and uncle. I mean real mountains, a kind of life that has forever stayed with me and is the base to the Earth’s Survivors series.

At 14 I was living on the streets in Western NY, Rochester: I mean in abandoned buildings and wherever else.

At 16 I was in the service.

At 20 I was married living here in the Northern part of New York and hated it, so I went back to Rochester which had always seemed like home and spent years working and living there.

I say all of that to say that for all my youthful wanderlust, that took me all over north America, Mexico, Canada, south, west, north, I wound up right back here, writing the same story that I was trying to write when I was a kid living here and had a dream about being a writer. I only read that story to my sister Connie * when we were kids huddled over the heat registers one cold, winter morning in the house we grew up in on Olive street.

Funny, I have been everywhere, done things that would scare and maybe even scar other people and I am back where I started and finally content to be here, to die here eventually, when God is ready to have me. And I am just a few miles away from where I was born, where I grew up, the river my brother David and I fished is right behind this house I now live in.

God has a plan for your life. I don’t know what it is or where it will take you, but I can tell you that family and friends are sometimes all that really matters besides keeping your relationship with God; so you should hold them close to your heart always.