Personal Part One

Thirty years ago our country was celebrating it's bicentenial. Love was free and drugs were cheap. My parents were married only a short time before they got their boy in blue. My sister would come along a year later. The marriage bliss ended way before the divorce came eight short years later. I don't remember going to church except for weddings and an occasional VBS, when I was little. The churches I remember where old and the cookies were the ones you can get in Vanilla or chocolate with creme in the middle. I remember the smell of taverns more than I do the smell of pews ( mostly because after my parents split we lived above one that my grand parents owned). I don't think I thought that it was a bad thing then. It was just our reality.

When mom got sick, dad was eager to take us. It's debatable (not worth any time but...) that it was either because he loved us or that he didn't want the child support to go to his parents. Church life there was up and down. There were remnants of a Hungarian catholicism from step-side of the family. With mini-peta statues, ceramic Mary's and crosses all over. We went to Lutheran church, and somehow ended up in a United Methodist church. My step mom chose it because it was pretty and quaint. Ohltown United Methodist in Mineral Ridge, OH. It sat near the reservoir. We mowed the grass and kept up the landscape for the church so my sister and I could go to summer camp at Camp Asbury near Hiram. My dad worked a deal with the church so that my sister and I could get half off of camp. I think that the church made off better than we did. I remember listening to Eazy-E and N.W.A. and other "Gangsta" rap on my tape player as I push mowed. Not the Wal-Mart clean versions either. Nope, Donnie Marabi, my boot-leggin' jewish friend (he had a bar mitzvah, I wasn't allowed to attend because my Dad thought it was weird), gave me a copied tape of N.W.A. and Eazy-Does It. I felt guilty mouthing along about b's and hoes as I mowed around the church - kinda. I think that listening to these men rap about women in a graphically pornographic nature perpetuated my increased desire to have impure motives with myself and with ladies in my life. I was feeding the dragon and I didn't even know it.

My relationship with my dad was minimal. He worked a great deal and played bluegrass/country music when he wasn't working. My step mom's brother lived in the house we lived in (it was his). We were out of place and really more of a nuisance. Soon we would have a new baby brother and then a baby sister. My dad's new family was growing.