My Uncle Bill and His Love Everest

Introduction - a glimpse at my family roots, my uncle’s ancestors, especially my uncle’s  

 

When you say that “in fact - this story is what it is” you could add that “the fact is that it could be told in such and such manner and prove not to be what it was”.  That was the way people think about their past. I called it “scrap philosophy”. The long story I would like to write using that philosophy could start somewhere in the past when I was naïve and young.

When I look at the wrong direction my life took and I get the impression that it doesn’t make sense, that is, it does not have any meaning, the only thing I least want is to write about it. I hope by writing about it I’ll be able to clean up the mess – including the mess of the world I lived in, at large.

I don’t think I remember my life in any kind of a sequential order. All memories become lies if they follow some trail and organize themselves in time and space one after the other. As I extract past events from my memory I don’t think that it would be possible to arrange them in some precise order. Nobody could do that.

I’d rather remember my life in the order of my recent frustrations, delusions and misfortunes. Those can be easily sorted out. As I tried to put this un-sequenced story of my life together I found that I could not even go over lots of events of my recent past. In memory we all live our past by jumping from here to there. Go on, try it and you’ll see.

If you try to lock the remembering at a certain time or place you hit a hard wall; behind that wall there is nothing, nothing left to remember. As you get back in front of the wall you see your life as you knew it, disappearing in the foggy distance.  That’s why it is of no use to get frustrated and look anxiously on all directions to realize what happened to you, what were those important events that could come to life as your story.

I imagine sometimes that my life could have been better than the one given to me by birth and chance. That is because I like to live my life at a fast pace. Sometimes I take a pause and listen carefully to the sounds around. As the noises quite down I try to bring back whatever memories are still living with me and I find out how astonishing my life was. 

Certainly, I could claim that my life went away at a too fast pace and that the future is not a sure thing anymore. That’s the point! Long time ago a wise man said: “Hang on the present by roll calling your best memories from the past and you’ll live one hundred years”.

As far as I’m concerned and if I wish, I could see my past as I wanted it to be, by imagining it while still being surrounded by Mom, Dad, Uncle Bill, the women I loved, the farm creatures and the living things of the forest. Not a single soul had been forgotten. I just have to take care of memories that try to escape through the door left ajar and pull them back.

If you want to bring about your past you’d have to choose one event, any one, and let your past roll from there. I could start for instance by looking in my family photo album at the small house in which I spent my childhood. The distance between our house and the new railroad was less than one hundred yards. You could hear the horrible screech of the freight trains passing by. At night there were only two trains, one at 11:00 p.m. and another at 4:00 a.m. If you were awake you’d try to let them pass before going back to sleep. If you were asleep they’d wake you up. Mom would always say: ”They shouldn’t keep you awake. You need rest, tomorrow you have school”.

Half a mile away from us lived Uncle Bill. He used to raise bees (as a beekeeper of course) and to make contemporary paintings on small canvases. As Mom would take one of the Uncle’s lousy paintings in her hands she’d mutter: “You might expect some bees to get in that black hole depicted here and sting you…” Uncle would have said for instance that he cannot use his imagination if he doesn’t do some menial jobs. “For some of you the future seems to be far away. Not for me though. When I do something, like I paint, naturally I feel like my life is going away with some purpose. That can’t be anybody else’s concern. You have to be “me” to understand” uncle would say.

“No bees, I told you I’m going to sell the beehives. No bees. I still like to have a jar of honey when I eat dinner. A steak with no honey on top tastes like shit… I am going to sell all and live like a true artist by selling drawings and paintings”  

He called himself an artist that tried to shun away his beekeeper job. He had plenty of hives and made a comfortable living by whole-selling bee products.

One day, Aunt Marlene moved all “that junk” into a basement closet and thought that that was the end of Uncle’s career as an artist. She’d keep pushing him to hold a practical job like Dad had. Mom hated what Aunt Marlene called “a regular job”. Lately there was always that stingy war between them that mom thought was amusing and worth every penny.

“I gave you twenty dollars yesterday” Aunt would say. “You always spend whatever you have in your pocket and then ask for more”.

“You’re disgusting” Uncle would say.

I was always on my Uncle side but I liked Aunt Marlene for her directness and the way she cursed Uncle all the time. Short time after one of those quarrels uncle got employed as a tourist guide and adviser to mountain climbers. He made lots of money while working there. But he’d always throw money around. Then he lost his job because of irregularities like too much drinking and smoking on the job. Once he lost his gear, as Aunt would say, Uncle was back playing like a puppet in Aunt’s hands.

Things weren’t going well on Aunt’s side also. When the theater closed because it couldn’t make any profit throughout the year, she didn’t have any other things to do but sing Frank Sinatra potpourri in select restaurants.

Every day she complained about money and about her life with Uncle Bill. “Of course you never give a damn about money if you have them”. I remember what Uncle used to tell me: “My advice to you” he said “is to split your life in two - your passion first, and then your way to earn money. Unfortunately in the world we’re living in you cannot follow your passion if you don’t get money from somewhere. Don’t forget though, money is everywhere. I have to get some for myself as you know. Not from a job. I’m fed up with all jobs! Sure, I’m not young like you. And I need lots of money. The higher the mountain you have to climb the more money you need. Aunt Marlene used to ask me, why I don’t do some menial work to get money. Now she is in trouble. She can’t find a job so I give her change to spend every day. Then she complains again about my project: there are six or seven billion people living on the planet and you’re the only one at your age that wants to climb the Everest. So she asks me to earn some money and forget about my passion. Understand?”

I’d always remember Mom and Dad as two middle aged people, two reasonable folks twisting their heads around to participate in events that seemed to abide to moral and religious norms. I remember Mom, moaning while walking in pain, and Dad, - being shaken by the prospect of failing to earn enough money to feed us - or Uncle Bill that tried to break his prosaic life by designing a sky-high illusion that he’d be able to reach the Mount Everest’s peak – alone – and come back home safe and sound.

The long story wouldn’t be fair and romantic without talking about Uncle Bill and Aunt Marlene, and how they met. Years ago when Uncle Bill was young and Aunt Marlene was still playing leading young roles in a Kentucky theater – now derelict – he had nothing better to do but drive to town and have a drink in the Irish pub before seeing the play and again after. One night he went to see “Our Town” by Thornton Rowdy, which he called a menopause play, in which Aunt Marlene played the role of Camilla. In those times her voice was wonderful, as “a drop of water reverberating in a crystal bowl”. She was a little bit fat but this didn’t prevent her from moving flexibly from a scene to another. My Uncle figured out that she could be flexible to the same degree in bed if she was not lazy.

“A wonderful prospect” he told me. By chance, that night, Uncle followed Aunt Marlene’s car back home. “For amusement only” he told me. As he lost his interest in following her and slowed down he cruised for a while in the right lane to get off at the next exit. He thought that the play was boring but that Marlene was fascinating. She was chain smoking on the stage which Uncle didn’t like. Also she was kissing on the stage a character that carried a suitcase full of marble eggs. Plenty of shaky dialogs and situations… Without Marlene playing the role of that resurrected woman, the play would have been a kitsch bull. That’s why Marlene was so fascinating. Forget others characters, the gray haired man with the suitcase and others, like the extras that were moving all over the place, the crippled and the hunchback… Marlene was moving so gracefully among them…

Then this full praxis review of the play got blurred in Uncle’s mind. He thought that he took by mistake a wrong road… The traffic was jammed at the stop sign before the next exit. A policeman would direct all cars to move to the left lane to take the next exit. Moving close to the light he saw Aunt Marlene, out of her car and crying. Her car was a wreck. Two police cars stuck together in a V shape were blocking the exit. Other police cars came by flashing and whirling. The truck that Aunt Marlene’s car collided with was also twisted and turned upside down.

“All I needed was courage to intervene in the process” Uncle said. “I walked by and I simply said addressing Aunt Marlene, “I liked the way you played tonight Camilla. It’s unfortunate…” While I was talking to her a policeman came by and asked Aunt Marlene:

“Do you know this man?” With some hesitation she said “Yes, he is a friend of mine”.

“Amazing, isn’t it? Then the policeman gave her a paper to sign and asked me if I could drive her home. He also looked at Aunt Marlene for her consent. She said yes. When she got in my car she said “I hope I’m not going to regret this”.

And this was it. She was so frightened, she couldn’t talk much; she would just say that in the last moment before she could make a turn with her car the truck lights blinded her. Then she heard a bang and she felt the heavy smell of gas getting in through the air conditioner and she saw the steam erupting from the engine.

“I don’t know how it happened. It was so fast. The truck was in worse shape than my car. Those trucks are made of plastic and pressed cardboard. What would you expect?”

“After a while she calmed down. When we got home it was already midnight. She sat down burping nervously after each sip of mineral water. My bed was large enough for the two of us but I decided to sleep on the couch in the living room. The next morning after she took a shower she came into the living room smiling and pulled the blanket gently over my shoulder. Between breakfast coffee and snacks she kept busy asking me question after question about what I do and then all of a sudden she said that she is a very sexual person. We had sex that early morning and this was it. We got married a week after…”

I remember Uncle Bill and Aunt Marlene’s wedding invitation. It was typed in Gothic characters. People that design wedding invitations, that are graphically full of twists and turns, tend to have a short marriage. It attests that they are formal, that is they don’t have substance… It’s just a matter of years when the split happens. Years pass by fast. You’re in love and all of a sudden you see yourself divorcing. That’s because of the Gothic or Script lines on your wedding invitation. After divorce you find out that you don’t remember anything about your marriage. You think back and try to find some all preserved memories in which you could stick your finger in and you find none. And you feel like vermin.

A wedding is such a foolish event. It doesn’t mean that living with somebody outside the wedding promises a better outcome. It’s just that, if you don’t give a shit about getting wed, the commonplace relationship is better. If you want to break up one day you could do it without much of a legal or sentimental trouble. That’s my philosophy.

One would have to summarize the whole past, Aunt Marlene’s wonderful mind and her good intentions when she tried to steer my Uncle’s ambitions and illusions. One also couldn’t assume that Aunt Marlene was the primordial source of Uncle’s delusions that he could climb up Mt. Everest alone.  

Uncle Bill was the most colorful character in our family, “a vibrating fool” dad would say – kneeling in front of the church before going to climb a mountain. I still remember him wearing his brown Texan hat and driving his old green Chevrolet that began shrieking like a wreck. He got hooked up on this idea that he’d be the first American to climb the Mt. Everest alone. He was already fifty years old and going those days though he felt that the whole world was for him a training camp for a great youthful adventure.

It looked like everybody continued to live their life as they pleased while Uncle Bill lived his in a delusional world, locking  himself up in the school gym, sometimes two hours per day, doing weights and bar exercises, running up on every hill around the village which wasn’t so easy for a fifty year old man.

He even found a motto for his adventure which he displayed as a banner in his studio: “Performance is foolish! Discipline and persistence is the real strength! Try it, worry about it later! Climb up onto the unknown!” Whenever I read it I felt like cackling.

Sure, Uncle Bill had something worth thinking and doing; not like Dad who wanted to do plain stuff and struggling to maintain our mediocre comfort in place and protect his day to day livelihood from change and excitement.

Going back to Uncle Bill I remember his merciless training before he went to climb the Everest. He put so much frenzy into it that Aunt Marlene used to call him, in an unsympathetic way, the “training bull”. You could feel the floor moving with him. I was very young at that time, trying to figure out why Uncle’s life seemed so different than ours. I even had this stupid thought that I needed so much a Dad like Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill’s Mom, Aunt Mercedes, was Dad’s Mom’s sister, if that makes sense at all. Mom called her Aunt Mercedes. She insisted that I should call her Aunt Mercy.

Uncle Bill would joke that Aunt Mercedes wanted to be called Aunt Mercy because she liked the “French wobbly smell of American pomegranate”.

One day, Aunt Mercedes told Mom that she got pregnant with Uncle’s Dad while being on a trip to an Indian Casino, four hundred miles away from our town. When she got there she had this idea to go and visit a hut to see how Cherokee Indians live. As she got inside, she saw a Cherokee man sitting on a stool and staring at the door. He looked like an overgrown child, still puzzled or rather perplexed by the world moving around him. Aunt Mercy thought that it would be a good American way to greet him by kissing him on his cheek. Once she did that the Cherokee threw her in bed and left her pregnant. You couldn’t see a Cherokee trait on Uncle’s face.

He’d tell us that “that Cherokee from nowhere is hid Dad” just to put us at ease with the subject. “It’s like having an underground Dad” he’d say. Uncle’s towering statue, six feet ten inches tall was surely a Cherokee peculiarity. I mean, I read in the history books that local Indians hunted boars in the primordial woods: they were all tall and the rest of them, I mean Cherokee women, were almost naked wearing their elongated breasts decorated with graffiti. One of them gave birth to Uncle’s Dad.

The eighteen century census lists Cherokees by their height. They were obviously the tallest humans among the local population and the new incoming Americans. As warriors they were the real stuff, not just legends.

Uncle’s background was something I used to think about when he was around. One expects a Cherokee to be some kind of a warrior, an every-second warrior, hopping from here to there, a spear in his right hand, in pursuit of boars. Uncle wasn’t like that at all; when he sat on a chair he hardly ever changed his position or ever moved to another chair; he must have been ignorant of his background given that he never read our school history books in which they show places where Cherokees used to live before the American Revolution.

As far as Uncle was concerned his name was Jalesh, like ours. When it comes to tradition a name says a lot. I also heard Uncle Bill saying that he didn’t give a damn about his fifty percent Cherokee inheritance. Uncle was neither the warrior kind nor the plain-defenseless peasant kind that thought that the whole world was all right if his crops were okay.

To write a story having only a few characters could be a hard matter. As I think back about those characters that make up this story I understand that all of us – I included – look with respect, admiration or deep disgust at people of “exception” like exemplary people, heroes, strange people, evil people, people who are living in a foreign territory to what is ordinary and banal in our common living.

I heard writers saying that, while writing a story, they felt that the characters took over the story. This is real B.S. Aunt Marlene for instance: if she’d take over her role in this story she’d stop belching and burping. She couldn’t control herself after she drunk or ate.

If Uncle would take over the story he’d keep saying stuff about avalanches on Mount Everest, the latest snow statistics – between one and seven feet per month – a scintillating dream about his ascent, or the pseudo-intellectual notes about Buddhist abbots serving rice in a silver bowl to climbers. My conversations with Uncle would always start up on that subject - our dreams. When Mom had those electric pains in her legs my dreams were knocked out, cold. Not always though. Uncle kept encouraging me to start reading serious books on exploration like “How America put a man on the moon”. He thought that the only interesting thing to do for a young man was to explore unknown worlds. All you should do is let your mind free to sail and go.

If Mom would tell the story she’d start by saying that walking is more important that hearing or talking and that her love for a horse was more insightful than her love for Dad. Then she’d tall tales about our neighbors, all farmers raising pigs, sheep or turkey. You wouldn’t like to mix with those people if you listened to them. You’d have less trouble just walking away. They were so vain. Mom would describe them as wonderful people; she obviously got a feel for them. That’s how it is when your pride depends on people; you overlook their defects, you look at the other side of the truth and put their defects aside. Mom liked to get involved in local events, like the community meetings where she competed with Catherine Blancher for supremacy. That was until Mom became a jockey and acquired national fame by riding the legendary champion horse, “Rabbit”.

If Dad would tell the story he would mumble something against the importance that everybody is placing on their life, also, as an accountant that he was,  he’d say that numbers are the roots of the universe in evolution and that the ego-story is a bad road to follow.

If Mr. Bellow – the owner of thoroughbred studs - would take over the story, the human race would be a race horse world. He’d gesticulate rather than talk or shout instead of gesticulating. He’d also stop burping and farting. Addressing a horse he’d say: “If you disappoint me I’ll drag you to the butcher!”

When Mom had difficulties moving her feet around, and had to moan with every step she made, Mr. Bellow used to tell her: “Come on, stand up, you couldn’t have forgotten how to put a foot in front of the other”.

Our maid Elaine would say modestly that she doesn’t have the right to get involved in a story that concerns her masters.

If a genealogic tree would dictate the order of characters in a story than Mr. Bellow’s family would deserve first place. You may recall from what I said before that Mr. Bellow was a thoroughbred stud owner. He also took care in his stables of twenty polo horses. I never knew that a player has to change four to five horses during a single polo game. Of course this whole game was invented to deplete horses of what is horse in them and wear and tear them out to help them die. Dad called them polo-ridden horses.

Those times are gone and as I look back at them they seem so beautiful and so easy to manage. The days used to pass peacefully and our lives were OK until Mom got those recurring problems with her legs. Sometimes she couldn’t move at all though she never crawled. We - Dad and I - were always around to comfort her. But again  all those painful things I lived through look like a gray background on which Uncle Bill’s face shines, with his draped eyebrows over his small eyes that used to say so much.

Something what should be said about Uncle Bill - if one wants to know how he was – is that he didn’t want to know what other people thought about him.

When Mom would say that what Uncle was thinking was what he was doing she was totally wrong. He’d say for instance that he’d get mixed up in what people call life and that in actuality he didn’t really live; and also he said that he was the incarnation of emptiness put together in a shape and form of a human and thrown into living.

Yet, Mom would say, it looks like you manage the life of so many beings. Uncle was a beekeeper and Mom obviously was referring to bees. Fame, money, small things or great things, all that good or bad stuff was, for Uncle, alike and equal crap.

Mom knew that Uncle was hiding a big ego under his anonymous cover. Uncle would cleverly say that following any side of a road one could reach the same destination. Mom kept bothering him, especially after his wife Aunt Marlene left him.

“Do something impossible” Aunt Marlene used to ask him, “Like running the marathon around the globe; if you do that I’ll stay with you. Otherwise I’ll be gone soon…”

Uncle’s house was surrounded by a huge garden where Uncle grew edible roses - from which he would make jams and preserves - and Japanese Lilliputian chrysanthemums called “Hirohito Zen Kendo”. His entire life Uncle Bill took care of the garden and his bees. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to his bees if one day he would be gone for good. He was the only bee keeper around.

Aunt Marlene would always tell him that he denied her everything a woman wanted like jewelry and clothes and that if she could she’d throw him into a beehive to be consumed by bees. I always liked Aunt Marlene. That she was an actress meant a lot to me. Her skin was thin and peach colored. I remember having the urge to squeeze her nipples.

One day after she ate with us I heard her belly making strange sounds. Whenever this happened she would look at me, smiling. I will never forget that smile mixed with embarrassment. I felt she like that made her vulnerable. She went to the bathroom a couple of times to clear the sound out. When she came back the sound was still there. I was so excited being with her during those intimate moments that some strange desire got under my skin.

Mom, Dad and Uncle Bill were out to play cricket in the backyard of the Irish pub. As I sat on the bench I watched Aunt Marlene’s moves. “I ate too much pudding” she said. “I’m belching and burping like a pig”. Her voice drove me nut. She’d cover her mouth and change her position on the bench to make the belly sounds go.

“When Mom and Dad aren’t home who is staying with you?” she asked.

“Madame Elaine! But on the weekends I’m alone” I said.

“Oh, my, are you here alone by yourself? You’re a grown up then…”

I remember asking her timidly and out of the blue: “Can I kiss you?”

“Of course you can kiss me” she said smiling.

I jumped and I locked my mouth on her cheek and as I moved down to her mouth she pushed me gently:

“That’s it, no more…” she said as I was pushing her arms to get back to kissing. “You’re strong!” she said, “Pretty strong” and she held me at arm length distance and forced me to sit a little bit farther from her.

I suddenly got upset with what I did. She looked at me and said: “Everything is all right… Every boy starts knowing women like that, with their aunt… You understand, I’m still married to your Uncle. If I was single I’d have let you kiss me”.

“Would you?” I asked. I felt like paralyzed.

“Of course, you’d have to understand…”

“Understand what?” I asked. If I have said “I understand” I would have made a better impression on her.

When Uncle Bill came back and was ready to leave he said to me: “You little cheat…”

It made me believe that somehow he knew what happened. I blushed and I felt like suffocating. Mom and Dad where heavily drunk.

Mom said: “Did you behave?”

I couldn’t answer but I didn’t care anymore. The house began to stink of liquor as Mom arranged the table for dinner. As I went to take a walk in the garden I understood what my Aunt meant. I had now my little secret. In case Aunt Marlene divorced Uncle Bill she’d be mine.

Later on mom got a phone call from Aunt Marlene. She asked mom if she’d allow me to go with her to the theater one evening and see a play called “The green window” in which Aunt Marlene played the role of a young thief that falls in love with a police sergeant, kind of a catch 22 situation, I’d think, and you’d agree with me if you saw the end of the play in which the policeman couldn’t make up his mind as either to book her or to help her get out of the house she robbed and kiss her. Pretty nice plot and pretty close to become a full drama when the policeman catches the masked thief in the act and is ready to shot: “Freeze!” he says, “Lift your mask” and you see the thief trembling, literally trembling, saying something that I couldn’t understand, that she has a permit, or something like that.

Anyway, the evening when Aunt Marlene came to pick me up to see the play was hot and humid. My white shirt got sticky and made me feel uncomfortable.

“It won’t make any difference if you wear a tee-shirt” Aunt Marlene told me and she watched me smiling while I changed. I’d have to confess that I never saw a play until that night. When we got to the theater she introduced me to the stage guys. I forgot their real names, but I remember one of them, Rockford, that sounded like a misspelled cheese brand. Aunt Marlene whispered in his ear for a while and I got the feeling that they’re cooking something because they looked at me and they seem delighted.

After that Mr. Rockford took me by hand and helped me hide into a stage fixture, a large box that had on one side a small opening the size of a ½ dollar coin.

“Watch… free of charge”, he said and laughed as he closed the box door and left me waiting there alone in the dark. I looked through the opening and my, o my, what a spectacle? The ½ dollar coin opening gave into the dressing room used by actresses to apply makeup and put on their costumes. Some of the actresses were naked. They were flapping their arms and apply stuff on their armpits. Then I saw Aunt Marlene come in and I heard those flying “Hi!” and that geese sound that women make when one of them is coming or leaving their flock.

After that Aunt Marlene got naked – sort of - and sat on a makeup stool. She was beautiful. I couldn’t see much of her body. She still wore her panties and stockings. I saw though her breasts and her round belly. “What I am going to do when I see Uncle again?” This thought was torturing me while watching Aunt Marlene naked. Then in no time all the actresses got dressed in their costumes. Aunt Marlene dared to blow a kiss towards the box where I was hiding. It must have been my impression, though I think she did it on purpose because she slipped her hands under her dress and did one of those things that I’m sure I never saw again in my life, holding her panties and shaking them in the direction of the box.

“Whom are you showing your panties?” an actress asked Aunt.

 She looked in the direction of the box and laughed. “I have an admirer hiding there” Aunt said. Then Aunt put her panties on and both laughed.

“Bring your admirer over here” the other said.

 Then I heard the first three gong sounds. After the last gong sound I heard again the geese rattle. It was time for the play to start. Mr. Rockford opened the box door and asked me to get out.

“I’m told you’re a genius boy” Mr. Rockford said.

“Won’t that be nice to say that after I watched my Aunt getting naked?” I said.

“You’re kind of a direct guy, aren’t you?” Mr. Rockford replied.

After the play ended Aunt Marlene came at the door entrance to pick me up. I told her that Mr. Rockford locked me up in the stage box next to the makeup room.

“Oh. God! What a sneaky bastard” she said. “I hope you hadn’t seen anything. You must have seen something. If you saw anything you won’t tell what you saw to anybody, promise?” she asked me.

When we got into the car she kissed me on the lips, a real kiss, not like grazing the tip of my lips but getting inside a bit. After that whenever Aunt Marlene came to see us again she never mentioned what happened that night. Never! She’d just laugh about everything I was saying. She’d interrupt me sometimes and say that I was a bad boy. I felt sad. I thought that what she wanted to say was tragic to me and that her approach to morals was very light. Not mine.

After losing her “forbidden love” I think I lost my man-pulse. But she was still the darling actress to me. She could play any role she wanted, I thought. Why not the role of a mean bitch? In real life though, actors are vulnerable like anybody else. What is strange is that she used to cry with Mom while watching some stupid TV sitcom. She took seriously any theatrical plot but wouldn’t take seriously her own life.

When Uncle came with his plan to climb Mt. Everest alone, Aunt Marlene told him that he couldn’t do such a thing, that such a thing is madness and tried to shut down his plan, to tell him that it wasn’t right for a man his age to attempt to do such a crazy thing.

“Ego, only your ego, drives your acts. And you should know better that ego is as empty as a rotten log” mom would tell him.

“Did I ever ask you to tell me how I was? I am the King of the Universe”. That’s how Uncle used to talk.

One day I had a biology class. The lesson was about copulation. I thought about Aunt Mercy and how she went to an Indian reservation to be impregnated with Cherokee sperm. When the teacher began talking about the varieties of human races and their mixes, I raised my hand. When I told the teacher that I have an Uncle with Cherokee background everybody laughed, including the teacher.

“Good joke” he said. “Now sit down and let your Cherokee imagination learn about what copulation is” he said.

Again, everybody laughed. “This joke is as good as the one you told us in the previous lesson that your Mom raises green and pink pigs on your farm; or the one with that colt that had split hoofs and three eyes”.

Kids began laughing, stomping on the floor, banging their desk. The teacher liked when he was the one who originated pandemonium. I felt like crying, thinking of what Uncle would have thought about that laughing. And then I thought about Aunt Mercy, who brought such shame upon herself having a love affair which wasn’t sanctified by our Episcopalian church.

I couldn’t stand Aunt Mercy. Nobody could contradict her while she was talking. “I know what you want to say” she’d quickly intervene, “don’t interrupt me”. When she got sick with some ovarian disease she’d give off that weird smell which, I thought that time, resembled the smell of the frog that leaped in our pond. It was a pretty thick smell, it could knock you down. When she got into a room you’d suddenly sniff it. Dad would immediately light a cigar to fashion a smoke curtain between him and her.

Aunt Mercy refused any intervention like medicine or chemo or surgery. “They are my organs” she’d say, “they are living organs; I’m not going to let anybody take them out of my body”. The last day of her life she used morphine and marihuana. She got some relief from those. The last time I saw her “mass” was 76 pounds. That’s what she said. I think her weight was much less than that. She was like the thin side of a toothpick. But she was still acting strong.

Those times she’d come to see us almost every day, thinking that the next day it could be all over for her. I heard her saying to Mom referring to school, “The problem with the current curriculum is that it discriminates between mathematics and linguistics. In fact, in antiquity”, she’d say, “Pupils were taught as if they were part of the same universal thinking. Nowadays there are so many sciences and they’re taught as if sciences could act separately. One science is a scapegoat to the other”.

She didn’t have any idea what radicals were and she didn’t know how to solve a simple equation with x and y as variables.

“Do you know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide?” she’d ask. “That’s all that there is to it” she’d say. “What the hell are we going to do with so many sciences? Everyday a new science appears while it is well known that there is one and only one truth? Today, our mental truth has to be cured of too much information. To know the atom or to know the cosmos those are the last truths people need to know”.

I remember that whenever I got a bad grade she used to alleviate my pain by saying that “you have to admit that you don’t put any passion in that crap; you don’t need to; and I don’t blame you; I told Bill to give you some money from time to time, to take care of you if I die”.

Mom would say always that to grasp her talk you’d have to listen to it in an “inward” fashion, whatever inward meant to her.

I remember also Aunt Mercy stretching on the floor with the idea that at her advanced age she would still be able to grow one inch farther.

Uncle Bill didn’t need to grow. He would have rather prefer to shrink. He was as tall as the tree that grew in front of my window. That’s why he couldn’t go into basement without hitting the doorframe. I remember that day when he broke the two bulbs hanging from the ceiling. We took a candle to see what other damage he may have done.

“Bill doesn’t know how to bend” Mom said.

Whenever Uncle went to rest on the veranda I could hear mom shouting: “Be careful not to break something”.

For a while Aunt Marlene called him “Frankenbill” until she realized that Uncle wasn’t pleased at all by that name. Unfortunately whenever I saw him walking he reminded me of Frankenstein. Then it was Uncle’s fake voice that amused me, grouch and snappy, as if he swallowed chopped peppercorns while talking. The only velvet word he ever pronounced was “pussy” since whenever he pronounced it he’d close his eyes and his voice would go idle. You had to concentrate to get the meaning of his talk. I always tried to guess what he meant by that.

After a while I got used to it. “Are you listening to me?”  Uncle would often ask. He used to blow words like “delightful”. That was his genuine praise. “Your laugh is delightful. Like a gliding bee”. Before Uncle Bill went away to do his once in a lifetime climbing he told us that he would not change his life for anybody else’s and that also he wouldn’t change his death (that’s for sure).

Human species live usually in the middle of the extreme world, a common and anonymous thick layer of billions of people who don’t possess anything out of the ordinary, people who - for their whole life - don’t go through unusual events and who could barely know who they are and why they are here. They don’t possess anything out of the everyday thing and so they cannot lose anything when the extraordinary things happen.

If they are part of a group they can say “Hey, here I am”, and, as they say it, nobody could see them. They’d never stand for their rights. If something bad happens to their group they survive unaffected. If things turn for the better they don’t know what benefit they get from the change. I think you already might have construed an image of such people.

Dad was like that. I never heard any noise inside him. His soul and his heart though were not vacant. It was as if any kind of excitement wasn’t worth the trouble. Uncle called his attitude “the discipline of amounts that amount to nothing”.

I loved Dad. He wasn’t exactly an ordinary person but he wasn’t going to jump all dressed up in a pond like Uncle did a couple of times, or to become an industrious and unlawful investor like Mr. Bellow did. He didn’t want to raise a finger when the wind was blowing hard; he wouldn’t raise a finger to find out how to adjust his boat to take advantage of it. His best way of looking at things was “If everything was ok than everything was fine”. Nothing would disturb his peace if you’d leave him play his “economic game” with his scientific calculator.

People like Dad are the stable part of society. Without them no trade would work, no bank would have their books in order; no IRS would keep being a respectable institution; that is why accountants like Dad are gods. I might say that Dad as God is the only anonymous character among the five characters that struggle to take over the story line.

On the other hand Uncle Bill was the black sheep of the family: he didn’t give a damn about anything. He didn’t give a damn about mundane life, for sure. He wasn’t greedy or penny-pinching like some of us are. He didn’t talk a lot about money. I don’t even remember any day when he ate as we did, I mean a lot. Sometimes he’d go to the pub to have an Irish talk and some Irish stout beer. I don’t understand why Aunt Marlene complained always about him being a drunkard. Uncle also was a spiritual man, that’s why ordinary life’s values were not important to him. His image though became huge when he left us to climb Mount Everest. People who want to conquer the impossible, last longer. People who don’t exit their shell and go nowhere just vanish.

When Uncle was only a beekeeper and nothing else – I mean before he got this idea to climb Mount Everest – he’d put on a funny show for us, like he’d clown for Mom to make her laugh, he’d dance like a ballerina or he’d sing opera, things that ordinary guys don’t do. When Mom asked him to do a fierce Cherokee dance he did it gladly. Anyway, after a while I got tired of his show. Dad didn’t mind it. He thought that Uncle’s capacity to be free to express himself was marvelous.

Nobody else in our family had this gift, to clown around, to make a fool of himself. Other people held on to every moment controlling their life to the penny. Uncle was breaking loose, every moment, throwing his breathes around, roaming like a mad dog. In this regard I couldn’t learn anything from him. He must have been a born clown.

He’d shout “Ladies and gentlemen, I came here to bite your neck. Who’d like to get the first bite?” Mom would show her neck, moving the collar down, which was quiet disturbing to me. Dad was not in the mood to show his neck. The important thing is that whenever Uncle was around Mom felt well. Her smile would come back from the gloom.

One day I heard Uncle complaining to Mom that Aunt Marlene is probably lying to him and cheating on him for years.

Mom promised to talk to Aunt Marlene. “Lies are monstrous” said Mom.

Aunt Marlene always seemed to be theatrical. Now she was squeezing her hand under her calf keeping her head up in a kind of arrogant pose: “We have been married already for fifteen months” she told Mom. During those months Bill didn’t make any effort to change. He abused me all the time and this is not the reason that made me decide to split. I don’t want to be one of his pets. He can’t think of anything else but beer and sex; or scotch and his damn bees. Sometimes I lock myself in the bedroom and try to understand why, all of a sudden, I have this idea that this marriage was wrong. Bill pulled me down. He hangs around pubs and then he comes home drunk and talks horribly to me. At the beginning I thought that I would be strong enough to put up with his talk but I couldn’t. He made me cry all the time. He chose our one year anniversary to sneak out at eleven o’clock in the morning, it was actually ten o’clock and I thought that he was going to buy flowers or a present which was a good chance for him to get great sex that night. Instead, he came back at four o’clock that afternoon asking for food, drunk as a soaked boot and smelling like it and with a garlic black blue peel under his eye – from a brawl I suppose - and giving me a nervous stare because I didn’t have the meal already served on the table. I ran like a bullet out of the house, I drove to town, I got into the theater, I saw the stage guy who always talked to me like an enamored teenager and I took him by the arm and pushed him down the stairs and as we got naked somebody switched the lights and everybody saw us. The stage guy was crashed, you can imagine, a village boy caught having sex. He got all tensed up and shouted that it was me who started the whole thing. I couldn’t tell Bill where I was and that’s nothing, because I decided to leave Bill, not because the director replaced me as a leading lady in Miller’s play, but because he is such a pig. I hope you’re not going to judge me harshly. Bill is a pig is a pig. You see only his pink side because you think you understood his other side better than I do”. 

I felt sad; grown up people break up in a wink of an eye. You have to give time for a break up to occur, you have to move slowly, you have to sleep on it. This business that people call love is made out of faith, truth, lies and distrust. You have to use precaution and think about what is safe for you to do. Sometimes you’d have to bend. Being firm and rough gives you the illusion that you are in charge, that you can destroy love as long as you are right in your judgment to do so.

Mom told me one day that things should be always decided in such a way to allow room for a compromise. For Aunt Marlene her split turned out later to be irrevocable. That is when I heard Aunt Marlene saying that her decision was irrevocable. I wanted to tell her that what she wanted to do was stupid. She cried and then she calmed down and she cried again and she talked uncontrollably about bees, Uncle Bill, how he was going crazy with his wild drinking and his absurd Everest project, “a man who practically has no ambition, his life is out of control, who thinks that he could take a round trip to Mount Everest, all that makes me feel that I was duped”.  

I remember how Aunt shook her head in disapproval. For her, Uncle was a clown worth nothing, a delusional fool that could do foul tricks and nothing else. Those times she couldn’t stand his attitude; she wouldn’t understand what Uncle Bill was doing with that Everest project either. For her the Mount Everest Project was also another of his foul tricks.

Aunt Marlene was so naive… She’d often tell us that those mountains were touching the sky. She’d use the same phrase over and over, that those mountains are so high that they are touching the sky. She would say: “The sky is dangerous…”

What she wanted most on those final days was to get back to some normal life. She couldn’t accept that this “Everest aberration was inspired by her”. She felt alone and that there was nothing she could do to get back to “normality”.

Obviously those were major events I could talk about. Though there are so many other events left behind that my memory would never be able to unfold and no thinking would ever be able to unwind…

Mom, Mrs. Molly said one day that “Nowadays fish is more expensive than meat. There are plenty of cows. Fish are dying because of pollution. Cows are more resilient to mad cow disease”. I remember that conversation vividly though this is not an event of some significance. Mom talked mostly about nature.

Or I remember when she told me repetitively to look carefully for the incoming train. “If you noticed it too late you could get hurt”, she said.

I looked at mom as she was laying there snoring, her mouth was slightly open and one of her hands was hanging inert on the couch edge touching the floor. If I want I could remember how Mom looked when I was five or six years old. I was so proud when she came to pick me up from the nursery school. She was the most beautiful mother of all. Her hair was long and she used to wear those white blouses with embroidery that were the envy of other moms. She’d eye me cautiously when I’d take her hand with both of my hands and let her drag me out of the school. Every kid knew my routine. They’ll wait to see Mom drag me and then they’ll laugh.

Mom didn’t like to do it. She’d whisper: “Stop it!” But she didn’t want to make a scene. When we would get to the car she’d shout: ”How many times did I ask you not to embarrass me in front of those people? They may think that you’re retarded. You just have to stop doing that or else I’ll ask Elaine to pick you up. Did you hear what I said?”

I stopped doing it. “You see, this is how a grown up behaves” she’d say.

If I take a look at that distant past I could see Mom playing with me “Gotcha!” game around the turkey enclosure.

“So there you were all the time… Where did you get this scratch? You were playing again with your pig friend? Or you must have upset the Thanksgiving roast… Nobody asked you to feed the turkey”, which shows that I didn’t forget my past completely. The scar is still above my eyebrow.

 Then I remember how I ran and kissed her and that she carried me to the table to have my Sunday breakfast. The day was sunny and the sunlight shadowed the first steps of the stairwell. Dad – Dad’s name is George - picked up the newspaper and spread it all over the table covering my cereals bowl with it. As opposed to Mom who lived in her own world, Dad lived in the world of printed news. When Dad talked politics Mom withdrew into the kitchen where she could barely hear what Dad was saying.

During those times she used to rest in bed almost the whole day.  Dad would come home and massage her feet and her legs for one hour or so to keep her muscles active. Mom felt that Dad shouldn’t work so much on her legs but Dad wouldn’t take chances. All he had to do was to massage her legs up and down. Sometimes Mom would complain that Dad’s massage was too harsh.

“That’s how you’re supposed to feel” Dad would respond.

Soon after that Mom went to the town hospital to treat her legs with electric shocks.

When the treatment began the doctor asked all of us to leave the room except Dad. I heard Mom screaming. It made me tremble. After twenty minutes it was over. Dad helped Mom to the car in a rush as if he wanted to go away as far as he could from the hospital.

Uncle Bill was suspicious of such treatment. “It looks like the beginning of the century nonsense… when Edison was God, and Freud was an angel…”

The treatment worked partially. Who’d ever imagine that Mom would have to go through other dozen procedures to get relatively cured?  Mom was able to get up from bed without being helped and walk a few steps.

Uncle Bill would count her steps until she’d complain that the pain was coming back. “One hundred and eleven steps today” Uncle would count.

Dad would urge Mom to go to bed which, she thought, was the worst thing of all. Most of the time she was in a good mood and she wanted to do funny stuff. She’d even ask Uncle Bill to show her how much he progressed in his research for his Mount Everest project. She’d look at maps, made some silly comments about the best route to the peak and laugh.

Then, I remember that we moved to live in a little Kentucky farm which Grandpa bought for us. I remember that I was twelve years old and our life was still full of worries and grief. The three pound gold land that grandpa paid for and we now owned used to be disputed by rabbits and foxes that made their home there. The house was surrounded by six hundred square feet of grass land and bushes. We built a beautiful house there. The house was so big that it could have lodged four families of our size. We also did a lot of farming but most of all we raised animals, mostly pigs and turkeys. In the next text-stories I may repeat this proposition many times in order to make you feel that you know everything about what we do.

I wouldn’t be able to make it through my memories without talking at length about that beautiful farm. Mom was fond of it. For her a pig farm was like a showcase. The walls of our house were covered with a spread of pictures of all the pigs we raised, including those that were a nuisance to us.

At six o’clock in the morning if I was awake I could see deer and wild rabbits playing by the pigs’ fountain. Usually they were timid during the day hours. Talking about timidity; in my memory they might have adjusted a little bit to the grunt of our pigs.

I could see Mom slapping the big sow on her back as she gets on the way of Mom feeding the baby pigs. That’s when one could hear sow’s big grunt.

Coming to our farm was like visiting the past time of a primitive farming. To make clear to you what I mean, imagine that you abandoned voluntarily your comfortable living and accepted to sleep on an uncarpeted floor while watching intruders like roaches or ants getting under your cloth. Just kidding!

Our house was all carpeted and Mom would be glad to offer you everything we had, and she’d also let you use the sauna for a small fee. You’d exclaim of course: “so that’s how people live in this part of thecountry!” and you’d smile, amazed by the clean and tasty water and the thin and perfumed air in our orchard. You would also love to walk barefoot and pick berries that we grow next the North fence or watch Dad putting on his boots as he gets into the pigsty to clean the mess and feed the big pigs.

In the morning the porch floor and the banisters were always wet with dew so I had to walk prudently from a point to the next. I would wait to see the Estonian hawk landing graciously on the porch pillar. There are no other hawks around here.

 

Backwards reassessment: ignoring reason to overcome triviality of life

 

Whenever Uncle wanted to have a small talk with Mom he’d talk about his fascination with history novels and architecture. Those subjects were important that time. He talked about his desire to build behind his house a huge pavilion with a steamy sauna and a see-through ceiling”.

Mom would get exasperated by Uncle’s nonsense talk.

Uncle even designed, if I properly recall, a “constructivist” gazebos with deco style interiors that he showed to mom: One of the erected structures outside the gazebo was a copy of the Louvre’s pyramid. Uncle would point to the glass walls and insist that the design was original, no imitation there: it goes all back to Egyptians…The pigeons would fly around the tip of the sauna and penciled it with white and blue balls of dung and downs – resembling a Piazza di Pedro illustration.

“Anyway, when it is cold I’d have to warm first the bottom of the sauna”, he’d say.

Sometimes though, when Uncle came to see us he’d talk mostly about his plans to climb up the Everest. He’d show mom the known routes to the mountain peak. He said he was using a wall map to time every move and weight every risk. I couldn’t think of anything going wrong except the strength of Uncle’s old legs.

When he’d talk about other mountaineers that preceded him he’d always say: “Those young people could climb fast, I wouldn’t be able to keep up with them. What I can do is to outsmart them, to take shortcut paths, risky paths and get there in good time. If I cannot keep up with the climbers that went there before me, in a week or so, I’ll have to give up. Then he said that his bowels were worrying him. The obsession that he could have cramps or constipation as he had a couple of days ago was his worries.

But there were no other worries he talked about like dying of cold or getting wounded or getting exhausted or getting caught in an avalanche or dying of heart attack.

I had my unusual doubts given that his stories began bothering me lately. What the hell was so exciting about climbing a mountain to reach its peak? What was the big deal to reach it? Why does somebody need one year of preparation to get it done? Why didn’t Uncle have this idea when he was thirty years old and why was it so important for him, now that he was fifty one years old, to do it?

I knew how he looked when he was forty years old from a framed photo of him surrounded by his beehives. His hair was long and dark and curly. Lately his hair thinned out. Whenever he came to see us, as he opened the gate one could hear his shout “A free man is coming to see you” and he’d go and sit on the porch bench and stare at the sky and the duck pond for hours.

I used to look at the duck pond also and look at the ducks and look at the woods across the pond and I couldn’t find anything interesting to watch. As I walked down to the pond and as I got in the pond and splashed myself with the green dirty water I heard him laugh. “It is all one” he told me that day. I could expect to hear Mom shouting from her room, “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know that the water is infected? Get out of there!”

The ducks were not afraid of me. But they were afraid for sure of the hawk that made his habit to fly by whenever we ate on the porch. He would fly off the porch once we finished our Sunday lunch. He knew that we saved the leftovers for somebody else, which in our case were our turkeys and pigs.

Mom screamed like crazy when she saw the hawk for the first time. Uncle calmed her down. He said that he knows everything about hawks. Mom was doubtful that he knew a thing until Uncle said that the hawk that landed on our porch was an Estonian hawk.

Mom checked in the Encyclopedia Britannica the page about hawks that read: hawk (hôk) 1. any of the numerous birds of prey of the family Accipitridrae, having a short, hooked beak, broad wings and curved talons; informal Estonian hawk, wearing a red tail and a short yellow goatee; it could fly vertically and land horizontally; in pursuit of clouds he can vanish from the sight of general public for months at a time; easily tamed he could still be perilous: If he catches one of your fingers, he would never let it go”

I guess our ducks knew also what kind of hawk he was because they would gather together in a big hurry under the wooden bridge and keep quacking. We used to feed the hawk with roast stuff. During first encounters we’d all keep quiet. We fed him so well that we noticed after a couple of weeks that the hawk put on weight. As we finished the lunch, we’d hear his croak (Mom said that this was his way to say “Thank you”) before he flew away. First, he’d make a wide circle like any nice adopted bird would do then he’d fly vertically very fast.

If Mom wanted at the beginning to do something to get rid of him she was the one who’d feed him by cutting meticulously her food, one piece, then another. She began to get closer to him lately. Uncle told her not to try to touch him. “If he catches one of your fingers, he would never let go!” he kept saying. If we went out and had a drink on the porch the hawk would fly down and sit on the banister.

One day we realized that the hawk didn’t come back for a long while. Mom used to call him “Honey!”  Uncle would call him “Great Chief” in his naïve belief that the bird was the reincarnation of a Cherokee Chief. Dad would call him “Sir”. He left traces of his claws on the banisters.

“What had happen to our hawk? Maybe after he ate with us he forgot to hunt”, Mom questioned herself.

“He took his liberty to go elsewhere” answered Dad.

Mom was okay again those times; I mean she was running like a deer and work on the farm the whole day with no respite. But the farm work was a real challenge. Also, paying for the house mortgage made us poor like junkies. For a while the only reality in our life was - as Mom put it - “a hopeless perspective”. As I recall those years, my fate didn’t look as a solid slice of living. On the contrary, it was like an accumulation of black drops that hanged and gathered in frightening abundance above my head. I could see them glowing like ice balls, getting bigger and dirtier, ready to fall on top of my head. I think that the gloomy situation with Mom showing now and then signs of getting ill and depressed and Dad’s company sliding toward poverty made me feel mildly insane. I could see a pretty pile of unpaid bills accumulating on the plastic table. Dad was zigzagging between paying utility bills and buying food. It was really bad.

One day we went to town to buy food with my piggy bank pennies. We didn’t have enough for whatever was needed to buy a breakfast. The cashier was outraged by our intention to pay the stuff with pennies.

“You must be kidding!” she said.

The manager told her to accept the pennies. The only trouble was that I felt so embarrassed by the scene that I almost began to cry. Dad wasn’t embarrassed. He’d smile: “It is real money, isn’t it? It isn’t just copper”.

We bought two boxes of hard candies, a box of cereal, and ten cans of coca cola. Mom was so happy when she saw the coca cola. “You’re so sweet” she said. The same day we received a five hundred dollar check as payment for a tax return package Dad prepared for Mr. Billow. We went back to the store. The cashier saw us and made some kind of a sick gesture asking dad: “I wonder how many pennies you brought now…” The manager allowed Dad to use the check as a payment. Then that whole financial drama vanished overnight. Dad got a position as a financial consultant for a fat client.

Last time when I visited our pigsty the pigs were quiet as if listening to the incoming rain that was announced on the weather channel.

“My, my, get into the house!” Mom took me by the arm. “A yard of rain is going to fall before it is over”.

Whenever rain falls around our farm it is not odorless like it is elsewhere. I never understood where that sweet fragrance came from when the rain began to fall. My grandma used to say that rain was given to us to wash our sins. “Sins have that heady scent that we call living”. Freud would have liked that…

I heard mom talking about Uncle’s sin when he described his nonsensical idea about death: “I’m telling you, that’s my daring project. If I die I’d like to die in a funny way, touching a beautiful woman moving her tail around and contemplating the sundown in the distance. I don’t want to go without feeling a woman’s ass and the sunset; or a woman’s vagina and the drizzle falling over my orchard. There are so many little things that we forget, we go down and we forget about them, at the stroke of midnight I always remember them, because I know that my mind belongs to an eternal body and I realize that life is like living long enough to understand that life is short and wonderful…”

 Uncle Bill was funny. He inherited by birth very long toes. That’s why he was never in a hurry when he walked. He told us one day that those toes might help him climb bare-foot a mountain. Very soon after those times he married a beautiful actress “Aunt Marlene”, Uncle’s squeeze for less than eight days; she happened to like his honesty (she called it honey-sty, a good name for a beekeeper) and his straightforwardness.

As soon as they got married Aunt Marlene tried to convince him to get a job in town as any other real gentleman around the little farm lands did and to exhibit his art work in a prestigious gallery – like Kim Guttenberg – in the city.

Uncle Bill hated the idea of getting an income from a real job. Gradually he put together a venture on his own design: he called it Project Everest. Nothing was exceptional or even noticeable or out of the ordinary in our family life until Uncle Bill came to see us and announced “officially” that he was going to train himself for one year in order to be able to climb alone Mount Everest – the highest mountain in the universe.  That day he brought us out of banality. Mom immediately objected to Uncle’s project.

Uncle and Mom used to clash all the time. Dad kept quiet and to himself. When Mom created any argument Uncle would go and sit in Grandpa’s “sledge chair” and keep rocking there for a while. If he stopped rocking that was the sign that he was not resisting Mom’s talk anymore.

 

Forward assessment: Our Kentucky farm; raising pigs and riding thoroughbred ponies

 

Soon after we moved to our Kentucky farm, Mom began complaining about her lack of friends. She asked Dad to buy her a female dog - a boxer she mentioned - that a pet shop in town was selling for about fifty dollars. Dad said that he’d buy the dog if I promise that I’ll take care of her. Eventually Dad bought a female-boxer puppy that we named Fouchon.

Just by looking at the puppy licking Mom’s lips made me sick. She’d go around her bed; jump on it, yelping and trying with her claws Mom’s legs then clinging with her teeth to mum’s arm and gently chewing on it. Mom was laughing like nuts pulling her arm away.

I remember the ducks waking to the pond followed by the puppy. But what I remember clearly about that time in my life was that we went through hell so many times that eventually I got used to it.

Fouchon was the only fun around. Every time Dad came home, Fouchon would rush to the door ready to get a treat. She seemed satisfied with a candy biscuit. Then Dad would stop by Mom’s bed, give her a little flower and bend over her mouth to get a kiss. I rarely got something if anything.

After that he’d take off his jacket and give Mom a feet-rub. Dad thought that

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 26.11.2011
ISBN: 978-3-7309-2021-3

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