I have very few pictures left from my family or my childhood at all. But there are some images that are indelibly etched in my memory. One of these is a picture of me, taken when I was about a year old, standing under the Christmas tree. I was a year, or two at the most. I think I must have been two. I remember pictures of me when I was a year old. At that time I still had dark hair. Strangely I was born with black hair. Thick black hair. But by the time I was two I was a full tow-head, as blondes were once called. 

In this picture there is such a look on my face. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I don't want to spend more than twenty words on that picture right now. I am just going to say, there was probably something very wrong in my family. That is not the look you expect to see on a two year old child. If you see the eyes you know that the child is quite stressed. Something is just not right. But my parents never fought. My sister, #2, told me years later that my mother used to beat me black and blue. I have no memory of it. What I did remember much later in life, I don't really want to talk much about here. Let's just say, it's not something a two year old child should be able to remember. A two year old should not be able to recall that type of picture.  And I didn't until I was about thirty years old. The human ability to forget and to remember things is quite remarkable. 

I remember also having memorized a very long poem, "The Night Before Christmas". That was when I was just four years old. My parents wanted to show me off and boast to their friends. At a Christmas dinner at a clubhouse in a nearby park our church was celebrating. My father gave me a little push and stood me up in front of all the adults and told me to declaim the poem. I only got as far as the first line and fell completely silent, stage struck. Thankfully, that never repeated itself. I was never asked to recite a poem again. 

These are just little things, memory is strange, as I have been saying. 

There are a couple of things that happened in my early years that did have a great deal of influence on my young life. One thing that happened was so tragic and so strange at the same time. I never really knew what to make of it. My sister lost her husband, the one with the movie star looks. He had been quite tall, 6'5". We young children, myself and my brother and my nephew and two nieces (who were my age, the children of my oldest sister who is 21 years my senior), we all used to play with him when my sister was in town with her new little family. I remember the last time. We were running around the dining room table and he was reaching out with his long arms and catching us. We were all giggling. I was five that time. Well, he died. My sister was 23 at the time. Her children were 3, 2, and six months old. Two boys and the baby a girl. I am not sure I want to go into it here. The way he died was so strange. I have never heard anything like it before or since. He was a military man. Independently of me, my next older sister and I both decided that he had been assassinated. By our government. We both held that belief. We never spoke about it. Years later she said off-handedly in a conversation, that she had received confirmation about her suspicions from someone she had met, who told her he had been living on the military base at the time the so-called "accident" had taken place. And that it had not been an accident. 

I always thought about him. For years and years I had conversations with him in my head. I always imagined that he was not dead, that I was talking with him or that I was seeing him walking through the doorway into the room. His death made a great impression on us. And even as children we were not ready to accept "the narrative". 

The other thing that happened, that was also quite formative. My brain was fried and I lost half my thymus gland, when I was eight. I was given 14 vaccines in the space of 14 days. It changed me, to say the least. Later I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. I always wondered what the heck had happened. I changed. My light temperament turned quite dark. After that I struggled with depression, frustration, anger. Well, who knows? I just always thought that this changed me. I did end up in hospital with lumps all over my arms. Apparently the immune system was fighting with something. But they never associated it with the shots I had gotten. Thank god they didn't cut me open as they had threatened to. Later I learned to stay away from doctors and to try to stay out of hospitals. The lumps eventually settled down. I remember the two weeks spent in hospital. It was one of the most hideous things I have ever gone through in my life. 

Later on, again, I heard that the US Army had flown over my home town and disbursed some type of disease in the air over us with some type of particles that could be traced. That was in 1963, right around the same time my brother in law had died. They were collecting data on how many people got sick and how far the fluorescent particles had traveled. Dirty government tricks were an early part of my life. So, from the beginning I was sensitized in a particular way. I was always a bit skeptical of what was really going on. It was never a stretch for me if someone told me that our government was not to be trusted. And now people want to call someone like me a conspiracy theorist. Well, that's just fine. Anyway, it should be quite easy to dismiss all of this as a deranged type of fiction if you read the first installment, right? I'm crazy, right? Let's just hope that I am then. 

One family joke I could always remember but I never "got" it until much later. My brothers and older sister used to stand me up at parties and gatherings in front of guests and say, Ok, spell "independence" and I would stand there and spell it out and everyone would laugh. I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-C-E I would say and then they would laugh and I would go away to play again. I was three. It only became clear to me later. I was so independent. I never wanted anyone to touch me. I would bathe myself, dress myself. No wonder then. If it's true that happened, what I think happened, between me and my older brother. He had had polio. And I am assuming he had gotten plenty of shots. He was never right in the head after that either. My oldest brother said he was never right in the head. But I don't know. And the fact that there was abuse and plenty of fear and plenty of fights and ugliness? That didn't stop me from loving him or being so confused when he went into the mental hospital when I was thirteen. They gave him heavy drugs, like thorazine. I remember that he tried lots of different drugs, but they all had really bad side effects. The only thing I remember that helped him was the vitamin therapy. But by then he didn't want to take pills. No wonder he didn't want pills. I can't imagine what it was like to live in mental institutions. We only have "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" to tell us anything about that life. I went to see him several times, but never could connect to him, when he was incarcerated. 

In any case, it's no wonder I learned a sharp distrust of doctors and our government at an early age. And now, what do you know? Here we are. And I'm a conspiracy theorist. For me, everything is backwards, upside down and inside out. You know? That was just my conditioning. And now, at the end of a long and tortured life, he was the first of the nine kids to die... they say he died of covid. I don't know whether to believe it. 

Dear Reader,

I’m going to attempt to tell another joke.

This is one that originally was told to me in German at the end of the period of time when Berlin and Germany were split into two.

It has nothing to do with the above post, but it’s the only joke I know to tell right now… Oh, no, let me tell another joke. This was in a book called “Totally Tasteless Joke Book”. It’s full of dead baby jokes. I never liked those, but, at the time, this one amused me a great deal. Now, I don’t know if I would still find it as silly as I once did.
I was once bitten in the face by a big black German shepherd dog. I never liked dogs after that. I was four at the time.

So, this joke used to just kill me.
What do you do with a dog with no legs?

Take it for a drag. (with apologies to dog lovers, I love dogs now, too.)