Have you ever been eating a meal that had food that you wanted to eat and food that you didn’t want to eat yet you had to eat the food that you didn’t want just so you could get to the good stuff? Or have you ever been eating a something like a dry biscuit and as you chew it begins to dry out your mouth so you have to take a drink just to get it down? Well that that is how I see the stories of my youth. The stories about my parents’ divorce, the trauma that is caused my sister and I, the long arduous path towards family redemption and healing. These stories were about some of the darkest times of my life and how those times shaped me into who I am today. I have more or less been putting pen to paper and finger to key to make the healing that God was performing in my life seem somehow tangible. Something I could look at. I wrote about some of the dark and sometimes evil sides of my family, exposing my own fears, insecurities, and dark nature. I know that the person looking at my family, particularly my mom and dad, through the perspective of my writing alone would only be seeing the less than flattering side of my folks. I wrote without them having prior knowledge of my intent and they have both been put under the microscope of my scrutiny. They both have been supportive and understanding of my accounts and I hope they have gained new insights into who I am, what I felt then, and the way I see now.
To put the dark side of my family’s darker nature into perspective I look at what I am surrounded by everyday. I am surrounded by the inmates that are housed at one of Florida’s largest maximum-security prisons. I spend more time with convicted felons then I do my own wife and children. My hours are spent in the presence of some who were just reckless drunks who made that fatal error of getting behind the wheel and inadvertently killed someone in a collision. Men who have ingested, in every form, dealt, manufactured, and delivered every type of drug imaginable. I work with a guy who killed his girlfriend and then took a cigarette and burned the clitoris of his 6-month-old daughter. Rapist, murderers, gang bangers, felons, convicts, inmates, crooks, wards of the state, are who I see all day everyday until I get home and get a few minutes an afternoon with my crew. Let me paint an even more sinister and convoluted picture of the dark side of human nature. This past Tuesday, June 25, 2008, Officer Donna Fitzgerald, of Tomoka C.I. (near Daytona Beach) was raped and murdered by an inmate serving 2 life sentences. This part of the story is not about his dark side but my own. When we heard the news of an Officer Down in the line of duty it brought a hard realization of the dangers of what we do for a living, but it also brings to me a cold, evil, rage that makes my eyes narrow and my heart harden. I imagine that inmate. I see him in the cell at FSP (Florida State Prison – deathrow where Ted Bundy fried.) I have seen the very cell he is in now. I now where he sleeps, where he shits, what he eats. I know that I could take his life from him and regret not being able to take more. I could stomp the living from him and despise him more for getting my new Bates tactical boots bloody. I could do it and I could feel like I avenged the death of an innocent but then I would have made that choice to make myself as evil as him. Don’t get me wrong he deserves to die a slow painful death. He deserves to be publicly humiliated. Defecated on by the masses. But I cannot make that decision and I can’t think about it, I can’t become like him – the wolf. I am not a sheep, I am not a wolf, I am sheepdog. I am the one who protects the sheep from the wolf. I am the one who fights the wolf. I am the one that reminds the sheep when there are no wolves around that there are always wolves out there. I am compared to the wolf because I am strong, I am mean, and I have sharp teeth. As a sheepdog I see the wolves and I see the sheep. I walk alone on the edge of darkness, never treading the actual path of darkness, but never enjoying the ignorant slumber of the mindless sheep either. I realize that I stepped too far into darkness when I fantasized about killing Enoch Hall. I pulled up his rap sheet and reviewed everything I could about him. I even wrote the paperwork in my head covering my ass making everything right within state guidelines. I had form numbers and state statutes covering my “use of lethal force.” That’s the moment that I realized that I was reacting emotionally and that I would never premeditate a murder no matter how justified it seemed. That’s the moment I decided that the stories I wrote detailing my perceptions of my family’s divorce were, in perspective, closing the chapters of darkness from my youth. I’ve sucked the venom out, applied the medicine and bandages, ripped out the sutures and can now see that the wound is healed and no longer needs medical attention. It is now just a mark that I can look at and remember a story in its’ entirety. In contrast the darkest of dark side of my family is nothing in comparison the real evil in this world. So now I get to make some choices. I get to choose how to remember my childhood and youth. You want to know what picture I see? I see my sister and me playing the pool, I see my dad grilling steaks on his Brinkman, I see mom slicing tomatoes from the garden. We eat and laugh, we watch America’s Funniest Home videos, enjoy company, play baseball, listen to music, tell funny stories about each other, or work on a building project.
“Oshean, Haven, you see that? That is Monticello.” I point to the TV as we are watching the History channel special about the America Revolution.
“There’s the Yorktown battle field where Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington. That’s the home of James Madison. It’s called Montpelier. That’s Mount Vernon. It’s the house of George and Martha Washington. That’s Washington D.C…there’s the Capitol… there’s the Lincoln Memorial…the Jefferson Memorial…the National Monument…the reflecting pool…the mall…”
“Dad HOW do you know about all these things that the TV is going to say before it says it?” Haven asks.
“Well I’ve been to all of those places. I’ve been to most of them more than one time, some of them a whole bunch of times.”
“WELL HOW did you get there? I mean, dad, that is a lot of places.” He states in his very matter of fact manner. That’s when I think about some of things that I forgot made me happy, and define who I am, and what my mother gave to me…to all of us. She took us to some of the most important and historic landmarks in America’s history. Appomattox, Bacon’s Castle, Yorktown, Jamestown, Civil War museum, Revolution Museum, Monitor and Merrimac reenactments, Chincoteague Island, Saint Charles Lighthouse, Williamsburg and its many treasures, the beaches, the parks, the picnics, all the things that I look back on and realize that I was privileged to see and experience. My experiences were not confined to the prepackaged controlled environment of a theme park. They were real tangible experiences. I could smell the smells that a slave in a Williamsburg cotton field smelt. I could walk on the bricks that George Washington walked on leading to his house. I could see the chair that my relative Ulysses Simpson Grant sat in when Robert E. Lee surrendered to him and ended the Civil War.
From the day Jessica was born mom spent every day and night working on solutions for making Jess comfortable. She spent countless hours talking to doctors, preachers, anyone who might have information or advise that could help Jess in any way. She never missed a baseball game, basketball game, and came to most tennis matches. She poured herself into organizing the rat nest that my school called a library and of course and of course we never missed church. She was more dedicated to health food and herbal nutrition than I thought was possible. We ate wheat germ pancakes with karo syrup and to this day she starts the day with a barley green extract drink.
Trying to explain my mom is like trying to dig a well with a plastic spork. When I look at my mom I see someone who has tried her whole life to leave the small town little girl of her youth behind. She was too big for a little town and even now I see that little girl trying to be something different – forcing herself to grow into something else. I see her searching for something that will heal some wounds that no one can see. Looking for a philosophy that makes her whole. Trying to find that perfect the alignment of spiritual logic. She shops for jobs like she does cars and clothes – it has to be perfect. One thing that I respect about her that I don’t see in others is that she is always looking and though she tries many things she is just not willing to compromise. She does what she needs to do to make ends meet but she is always looking for the perfect arrangement. May be that’s something I will do once my kids are grown and gone for as long as Jess and I were at home she worked at the Stonebridge library. She was a model of consistency in that sense.
“Dad I think you are doing it wrong.” Haven informs me.
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
“I don’t know but your pie crust does not look good AT ALL!”
“Yeah dad Grandma Lainey’s pies actual look good and taste good.” Oshean says rubbing it in that my pie didn’t look good and probably wouldn’t taste good either. For at least the past 5 years mom has taken up baking pies with the boys every time she visits. It’s what they remember most about her. Taking time, teaching them something, giving them a unique memory that they will carry with them forever.
Mom and dad share some things in common and they are both probably too proud to admit it, but they are alone. They are living their lives in near solitude and they both seem to be running from something. I don’t know what. Don’t get me wrong I’m not working on a parent trap reunion reality show or anything but it seems that they share more in common now than ever.
So here I am trying to show my readers that my family was not and is not the screwed up broken unit from the early 90s as described in my early stories. I’ve grown and I have had to write this to sum up all of my stories. I am ready now. I’ve gotten this summary of perspective out of me and now I have an outline for a book that I have wanted to write for a long time. I finally feel that freedom to write. To write the fictional fantasies based on my life, really historical fiction. I have so many stories to tell. Some happened and some should have happened. I am inspired. So like that dry biscuit I have cleansed my mouth and I am ready for the next portion of the meal.
I should mention that I am really proud of my family. When I was a teen I didn’t pray that my parents would get back together, it would have felt easier, been romantic, but I’ve learned that life’s best rewards seldom have anything to do with easiness. I prayed that we would eventually get along and that we would eventually heal. I think we have, at least the family relations. There are parts of me, parts of all of us that should always be growing and healing. It seems that mom and dad both have some wounds that are not healed. I wish that my mom would look at herself and see the beautiful energetic person that Yahweh created, and even though we should always be growing as people she should know that she is a mom to be proud of, a woman that He is proud of, and a person that she should love and nurture and not be ashamed of. I don’t see big problems that need to be fixed but it always seems that she is trying to fix them.
“Who is that?” Oshean asks as we thumb through some old pictures. My God that’s second ex-wife the barfly whore…
“That’s P-paw’ second wife.” I inform him. I watch him mull it over.
“So are P-paw and Grandma Lainey married?”
“No, but there were for years and years."
“Well if they are not married how come she is always here at P-paw’s house.?” We visit every three years and when we do mom usually stays with dad so we can maximize our visit time.
“Granny Laine likes to spend lots of time with you and Haven and the best way to do that is to stay at the same place as us.”
“well shouldn’t they get married again?” He poses the impossible question.
“I don’t think so buddy. They used to be married and they were not very happy then.”
“Well they are happy now!”
I hope so…I think so.
Life is beautiful…
