I wouldn’t go so far as to say they tried to kill me, but one shot me in the eye with mud packed with gravel. I was six. When I was seven or eight, another ran over my head with a dirt bike while I was in the leaves. When I called out to complain the shooter’s mother burning of material which billowed black smoke over our yard, my father slapped me hard in the face. Another day, I watched him slap my mother in the face over some discussion on household expenses.
I learned that my father’s friend’s son molested my younger sister, and my parents did nothing about it. I learned that my brother’s kindergarten teacher locked him in a closet for what seemed to be an hour, and my parents did nothing about it.
We ate three day old bread. Often it had mold in it. We just picked out the mold and kept eating. I thought that was normal. We ate food from cans from which the labels had been torn, and other discounted goods. We never took a benefit from food stamps of any other welfare. I started working for quarters when I was seven, polishing shoes. Later, I did garden work, cleaned out cellars, basements, garages, sold newspapers, worked as an aide in a nursing home, worked at McDonald’s.
I wanted to sing in the choir, but my mother and father said that was for effeminate boys. I wanted to play sports, but had to work to buy clothes, help out with the household budget. I didn’t complain. Work was what made us strong, kept us independent. As the oldest son, I was expected to help out and be a good example. Sometimes this was hard, as I had no sibling or cousin to show me how things worked at school or at work.
I didn’t see my Dad much. His work consumed him and his time. I used to wonder at the wrinkles on his forehead. I knew he worried about things. He suffered from ulcers and stress. He didn’t get to know his father much. That man, my grandfather, was divorced from my grandmother. She, whom everyone called MAC, banished him from town and took over the business, the weekly newspapers of our city and the neighbouring town. She managed the business with a Spartan discipline and a Dickensian obsession for work and frugality.
MAC mistreated my mother, so the latter says, when she first came from Mexico after my parents’ marriage. Her mother in law ordered her to do housework for her own apartment, which was below ours, in a Victorian house which had once served as a funeral parlour and morgue. When my mother offered her some peaches cooked and served in syrup, harvested and prepared by her own hands, my grandmother scorned her efforts and ridiculed her. She was made to feel less, because she was from Mexico. My mother said she forgave her, but would never forget the humiliation and comtempt.
All this might have made me bitter, and it started to. But with time, I began to see that for me to hold grievances against my elders would hurt me, and really not do much to help others. In order to go on with life, and to learn to love others and be loved in return, I had to learn to forgive, to let go of the pain and the anger. This was by no means easy, and would take more words and time to think out how to express them than space and time tonight allow.
I only write this so that if some one who reads this, or some one you know, might benefit from my experience, than may this be my way of helping another to avoid years of bitterness, anger, emotional and psychological struggle. Of course no life on this earth is without its problems. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you can go on to resolving other things. And there will always be other things.
After twelve years of homelessness, after losing loved ones, after struggling to find work and shelter, to learn skills and use them, today I am blessed with a house for which I’ve toiled and paid, and continue to pay the mortgage. Our truck is paid off, partly with earnings from my deployments in the Balkans, in NTC in Fort Irwin, in Iraq and Kuwait. My wife and I have celebrated eight years of marriage. We have a lass and a lad, 6 and 3 respectively, who are a joy to us and help keep me going even when things seem tiresome or troubling. We have our Catholic and Lutheran heritage, our Quaker faith, and a determination to succeed in life and love.
