When I was home for my brother's funeral, spending a few days at each of my remaining brothers' homes, there were discussions of all manner of scandals having to do with our family, yet I was wholly unaware of all of it. My memories of my family were ones of what could reasonably be considered wholesomeness.
There was nothing horribly scandalous, but just stuff that I had somehow managed to to be oblivious of.
We didn't have a lot of money, and hunting regulations were not rigidly obeyed, but I didn't - and don't - think that this was anything out of the ordinary in our rural area. But there were other things that I was entirely oblivious to.
Then I remember that I grew up on a working farm that had dozens of chickens running around, yet I had never seen or even suspected anything having to do with a chicken being murdered, and I believed that the pig ran away; I was in my 30s before I thought back and realized that probably hadn't happened.
Each year since I was about ten, we would save up money from deposit bottles and odd jobs in order to buy lumber and materials to build a new shack in the summer, and we always had just enough to buy what we needed. Around the same time that I realized that the pig probably hadn't crossed the border into Canada, I realized that the owner of the lumber yard was giving the stuff to us for whatever we had.
I thought I remembered a stuffed owl flying.
As an adult, even in Southern California and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, minutes from the Mexican border, I have usually left my keys in my car and been away from my house for days without locking my doors. Yet, the only time I've had a car stolen, it was in a locked garage, and didn't run anyhow; the police found it a couple of blocks away in the alley, where whoever stole it realized that if I couldn't start it with a key, they couldn't get it started without one.
The only time my house was burglarized was by a former friend of my son's, who mostly stole my son's stuff.
I'm 74 now, six months away from being 75, and have had a pretty good life, one that is unlikely to have been improved by a large dose of awareness, distrust, and paranoia. My thoughts, while talking with my brothers, were that I didn't really need to know that stuff; my life was better the way I had made it up. My stories were better.
There was nothing horribly scandalous, but just stuff that I had somehow managed to to be oblivious of.
We didn't have a lot of money, and hunting regulations were not rigidly obeyed, but I didn't - and don't - think that this was anything out of the ordinary in our rural area. But there were other things that I was entirely oblivious to.
Then I remember that I grew up on a working farm that had dozens of chickens running around, yet I had never seen or even suspected anything having to do with a chicken being murdered, and I believed that the pig ran away; I was in my 30s before I thought back and realized that probably hadn't happened.
Each year since I was about ten, we would save up money from deposit bottles and odd jobs in order to buy lumber and materials to build a new shack in the summer, and we always had just enough to buy what we needed. Around the same time that I realized that the pig probably hadn't crossed the border into Canada, I realized that the owner of the lumber yard was giving the stuff to us for whatever we had.
I thought I remembered a stuffed owl flying.
As an adult, even in Southern California and the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, minutes from the Mexican border, I have usually left my keys in my car and been away from my house for days without locking my doors. Yet, the only time I've had a car stolen, it was in a locked garage, and didn't run anyhow; the police found it a couple of blocks away in the alley, where whoever stole it realized that if I couldn't start it with a key, they couldn't get it started without one.
The only time my house was burglarized was by a former friend of my son's, who mostly stole my son's stuff.
I'm 74 now, six months away from being 75, and have had a pretty good life, one that is unlikely to have been improved by a large dose of awareness, distrust, and paranoia. My thoughts, while talking with my brothers, were that I didn't really need to know that stuff; my life was better the way I had made it up. My stories were better.
Last edited:
