I thought I was done with the revelation of secrets, but just this morning my subconscious revealed yet another secret.
After Mom and Jerry divorced, he got summer custody. The second summer, 1970, did not end well for Jerry.
Dave and I were supposed to have been back in St. Louis by my birthday, August 10th. That day Jerry explained that Mom didn't want us anymore, so instead of driving back to Saint Louis, we were going to move from Houston to Galveston.
It was fun in the rental apartment in Galveston, like camping. So much like camping that Jerry roasted sausages on a fork over the burner of the gas stove. The ensuing grease fire was fun-sized, small enough that no one called the fire department.
It was also fun on the beach when Jerry put me in a little life jacket, plopped me in an inner tube in the shallow water, and ignored me for hours. I was relaxed. My butt was in the Gulf of Mexico and my arms and legs were dangling over the tube. I couldn't turn my head because of the life jacket, so I just looked up at the clouds. And floated. Out to sea.
It was lovely, all peaceful and quiet until a boat pulled up next to me and some nice young men hoisted me on board.
Now that I was out of the tube I could see the beach very far away, past the buoys. Jerry, to his credit, was trying to swim after me. He would have made better time if he hadn't been yelling at me. I knew I was in trouble and started to cry, and the nice men asked me my name, and my father's name, and where we lived.
A few days after that, Jerry packed us up, gave a very dramatic I-will-never-see-you-again speech, and we found ourselves on a plane back to Saint Louis, where it appeared Mom had indeed missed us and was very glad to see us.
Later, when I was seventeen, I found the letter Mom sent the private investigator when we weren't back on my birthday and no one answered the phone in Houston. She had never talked about it. It never occurred to me to ask her how we were discovered. I just assumed the PI used common sense. Where else would a divorced dad take the kids but the beach? Just knock on every door in Galveston.
It was just this morning when I realized the nice young men were most likely the Coast Guard. I imagine they asked questions and filed a report when they saw Jerry did not have enough sense to plant a stake in the sand so his child did not float off.
... that is AMAZING. I am glad you did not have to freak out while drifting out to sea, although I guess if you had, you might have yelled and been retrieved sooner.
And also, yes, a Coast Guard report, including your name, makes sense.
Also I do not know how Jerry managed to rack up as many Extraordinarily Poor Life Decisions as he did. The mind boggles at so many things even just in this story...
Posted by: KC | January 26, 2024 at 11:20 AM
Again, I echo a comment I made once before that I would like you to write your own book either instead of, or once you're finished with, the manuscript.
Posted by: AH | January 26, 2024 at 12:27 PM
KC - No one would have ever heard me. I was way, way out there. And that was not the only fire he accidentally set. I know he was sane when they married, but he must have just belly flopped into mania and alcohol at 35. I am lucky we never saw him again.
AH - I woke up in the middle of the night last week because I realized a flaw in the logic of the book, so the desire to finish the book is bubbling up again, after a year of dormancy. But that is nice of you to say.
Posted by: theQueen | January 26, 2024 at 04:46 PM
(I am in *exceedingly vigorous agreement* with AH, just to note, on the writing thing, although I admit that sometimes different skills and different levels of enjoyment are found for different people in short form vs. long form and fiction vs. biography vs. essay, but also I'd 100% buy a "Short Stories From My Life" book from you even if it was not strongly connected.)
Posted by: KC | January 27, 2024 at 01:20 PM
KC - but what would there be to read? You have already read all the stories. (However, I was surprised to search the exported blog and find I had never told the floating out to sea story before.)
Posted by: theQueen | January 27, 2024 at 04:35 PM
I can basically guarantee that you have not written all the stories, and also I bet each time you write them, they get refined.
(... okay, also 1. there is a blog gap I have not yet caught up on; when I found your blog, I read the most recent entries and then started in the beginning and I haven't gotten back to where I started yet largely because that tab got sort of lost in an island of things-I-should-read-sometime and the things-I-should-read-sometime are hiding the things-I-actually-want-to-read-sometime, and 2. ... I forget things. So. Some of them would be legitimately new to me, others would be funny again because it has been a while.)(that does remind me that there is a trove of your writing to fish out of my bucket of tabs, though... you can probably expect to see some weird activity on your blog tomorrow, unless my javascript blocker messes with stat recording as well [I have a javascript blocker because I get sick very very fast when I see video motion, like panning/zooming camera, even if it's just 3*2 inches, and the web is *full* of random ambushing video motion, but most of the movement requires javascript, so! there we go, Slightly broken web 2.0, but significantly less motion sickness.])
(anyway! yay! I get to read more of your book tomorrow!)(Tonight I should go to sleeeeep.)
Posted by: KC | January 28, 2024 at 12:08 AM
KC - Did you hit 2016-2017, the fallow years, when I posted about four times a month? You may have less than you think.
Posted by: theQueen | January 28, 2024 at 05:37 AM
... correction. I did *not* start at the beginning like a sensible person would have done, but apparently was working backwards *AND* because I do not know where I started nor where "page 8" backwards from there would have been, I have no idea now where I was. So. *Now* I'll start at the beginning and presumably stop when things start getting oddly familiar...
Posted by: KC | January 28, 2024 at 12:09 PM
KC - I cannot imagine anything more tiresome. I think my affected writer voice would be really annoying all delivered in one big dose.
Posted by: TheQueen | January 28, 2024 at 02:55 PM
Well, when I was reading backwards I was enjoying a fairly large chunk per day, so... probably not, but we'll see. :-)
(I do have to limit P.G. Wodehouse intake to some degree; I enjoy the style up until I have just had Too Much of it, but usually that is 3-4 books before I need a break, so... I'm optimistic.)
Posted by: KC | January 28, 2024 at 03:19 PM
Well this makes me feel like a creep, but I went through the archives to try and check and I think I have been reading you on and off since 2007?! I started before your mom passed away. Your blog was the first place I learned about post-polio syndrome (my Dad also had polio as a child). Not sure why I wanted to fess up on my internet stalking, but just to say, I've read it (almost) all and I'd still read a book!
Posted by: AH | January 29, 2024 at 12:32 PM
KC - you arrived on Nov 2018, looking for Toto toilets, and supplanted the previous KC, Kim, who had last visited a week earlier.
AH -Wow! You lurked for years! That delights me.Totally what I would do. Not stalker-y at all.
Posted by: theQueen | January 29, 2024 at 08:51 PM
Sorry to scare off Kim. We never did get a Toto - we did, however, *finally* get a Caroma in November. (upside: it does not plug [has not plugged once so far!], it uses very little water per flush [it has a dual flush]; downside: you aren't supposed to use toilet tank tablets in it because the valves are more expensive and our tap water has pink mold in it so it requires bleaching more frequently)
I guess I could page back 8 pages from 2018 (... wow that tab is old, then), but I have started from the beginning and am being highly entertained, so there is that.
(incidentally, I had a colonoscopy that cleared up my IBS for about a month over a decade ago; the gastroenterologist I saw at the time said she'd never heard of that before, but since then I've learned that's actually theorized to be the average period of time for your previous gut flora to grow back from your appendix after a bulk clean-out/die-off, so I have suspicions in that direction, although presumably the time varies somewhat. Also, guts are responsible for a surprisingly large amount of some of your neurotransmitters; I did not notice anything that direction during my month basically off from IBS, but your... interesting... times might possibly have been related to a slightly-too-good clean-out plus MS plus your body just trying to cope with everything possibly including Versed... maybe. The poor fax machine...)
Posted by: KC | January 30, 2024 at 12:12 AM
KC - I saw an interesting documentary that said your gut is your second brain. And ... fax machine?
Posted by: theQueen | January 30, 2024 at 06:33 AM
The GI system is way more weird and wild than is generally known, including by local gastroenterologists, sigh. (one of whom said diet doesn't affect IBS; sir, I recognize that 30+ years in your field *is* a lot of experience, but you should consider reading some GI research paper every once in a while and also possibly listening to patients sometimes...) Unfortunately it's a great ground for quacks because of the limits of what's understood (note: do *not* buy probiotics "made by a rocket scientist") and really amazingly effective research results... using things the general public does not yet have access to, some of which are just very specific bacteria. Anyway. *Some* control functions similar to the brain, but I don't want my gut trying to speak any time soon...
You noted that one signal of depression was that you cried at one work location because the fax machine didn't have a table and had to sit on a chair, all lonely, which is honestly just amazing. :-) (as was the percent ratio method for problematic thoughts! Because yes, you can have a small part of your brain telling you to anthropomorphize the fax machine and weep over it, but then you recognize "oh, hi hormones" (or whatever) "shut up now, the fax machine is fine," but if it's 99%, then... there is not much You Brain left to recognize aberrations and fight them.)
Posted by: KC | January 30, 2024 at 11:07 AM
KC - I had completely forgotten about the fax machine! Poor little fax!
Posted by: theQueen | January 30, 2024 at 09:08 PM
KC - Ah yes! The lonely fax machine! I had forgotten him, which is a sad thing to say about a fax machine I connected with.
Posted by: theQueen | February 01, 2024 at 09:16 PM