Place: Canton, OH

Date: March, 1972

Time: Very early morning on a school day.  Still dark outside.

Event: In all the parallel universes in all creation, Death has to walk into mine...

Part I: The Post Court Years.

 I don't really recall too much about those early years.  I remember the beautiful people.  My paternal grandmother, Violet.  Our neighbor, Nora Wanner, who always had toys in her closet and the bushes out back that Dale and I would pull the berries off and throw around.  I remember the Davises.  Angie was my age.  I was very shy around her.  There is a picture of her sitting between my twin, Dale, and myself.  It is obvious that we were painfully shy.  Angie's mother worked at the Kresgie's downtown at the food counter.  Yeah, that counter. I loved that.  Canton doesn't have the stores downtown anymore.  There was Angie's dad, I think.  A quiet, bitter man with one arm.  All I recall of him was that he just sat around all the time looking like nothing in life mattered to him anymore.  When we visited the Davises, we would watch their television. 

I think I had a decent time of it before I was five years old.  The Balls lived down the street.  Naturally, there was a nice one and a mean one.  Always are in families, I guess.  The neighborhood was an intersection of two alleyways actually.  Just up the road was a cemetery.  Relatives lived nearby, but the memory of who there were has long evaporated.  I recall that when we moved, the Davises moved into our old house.  After we moved, we only would see Nora a couple more times.

And there was Aunt Aggie.  She was a Jacobsen.  The Jacobsens were my mother's mother's family.  The only one I really remember is Uncle Earl.  I know there was an Alfred who had kids from hell.  Once I told my parents I didn't like to go there because the kids were terrible.  Uncle Earl was a tall, thin man.  I always think of him with his glasses and short, crew-cut white hair.  He would drive us around in his big car.  Later, mom said he didn't like my brother and me in the car because we always farted.  I don't recall that.  I do remember him hitting a dog.  We saw it struggling in the road, but he kept driving.

I absolutely loved Aunt Aggie.  She was very kind.  My mother once said that her mother hated kids.  I never knew here.  On the other hand, her twin sister liked kids.  In the overall family lineage, I cannot say where Aggie and Earl fit in exactly.  But I had the impression that overall, mom's family was a good one.