Prologue: Life in the late '80's

My brother and I were raised by my grandparents from when I was four and my brother John was two. Actually, we were mostly raised by my grandmother who taught us her moral and ethical code as a foundation for a way of life. That doesn’t mean she was ultra religious. Yes, we went to church on Sunday with Grampa and my brother and me, but she didn’t preach the bible at home. She followed the Ten Commandments as a way of life and so I followed in her footsteps. Well ... as best I could.

My brother John was a special kid. Later, they would diagnose him as partially autistic or more likely having Asperger Syndrome, but back in the mid 1980’s he was just “special.” He was very smart and he could certainly talk, but he lived mostly inside himself, and until he got older it was darn hard to dig out what was going on in there most of the time. Needless to say, he didn’t have a lot of friends. However, the infinite patience of my grandparents helped both me and John get on with life.

I never really knew my parents. I was just four when they were killed. I was home with John and a babysitter when they went out to a New Year’s party. Back in the early ‘80’s there wasn’t quite the same enforcement toward drinking and driving in our little town. As my Grampa told me some years later, both my mom and dad got pretty drunk and when they drove toward home early New Year’s morning, Dad fell asleep at the wheel and went head-on into an overpass abutment. Neither of them was wearing a seat belt, and both died at the scene.

I only knew they had died in a car accident and I felt very sorry for them for a long while. But Gramma seemed to be determined that I wouldn’t suffer from a lack of parental love, and she and Grampa assumed the role of my parents. Grampa worked every day but Sunday since he owned and operated the local hardware store, so until I started school a couple of years later, Gramma was the main person in my life. There were some kids in the neighborhood so I wasn’t without friends, but I really relied on my grandparents for my everyday existence.

My name is Nicholas Minter, and my grandparents were Phillip and Muriel Eller. They were my late mother’s parents. My father’s parents, Margaret and Matthew Minter, really didn’t want anything to do with raising us, so I saw them only once in a while on summer vacation or at Christmas when they would stop in to visit and leave a couple of presents. In other words, they couldn’t be bothered. Later, I was pretty sure they didn’t want the problem of dealing with John. They lived in Florida, while my guardians, brother, and I were living in Northern California. When I look back on it, I had a pretty good childhood. In time, I didn’t miss my parents ... I really didn’t know them all that well.

My upbringing was within a loving family and I didn’t feel like I was deprived of any of the essentials of life as I grew up. I had my friends over regularly and they were treated well by Gramma and Gramps. They liked visiting my place because Gramma always had some fresh baked goodies available after school. She made the world’s best chocolate chip cookies. I know that for a fact and I could get at least twenty kids who would swear it was so. To my friends, I was known as Nick, but to my grandparents I was almost always called Nicholas. Later on, I did pick up a nickname when I started playing high school baseball: “Mint.”

Along the way, my Gramma decided that I should learn a few of the social graces. First, she wanted me to play a musical instrument. I started out with piano lessons when I was ten, and continued on with them for four years. I like the piano, but I was never going to be concert pianist. At the least I could play a tune fairly well ... not to mention read music charts. But as I reached my teenage years, I thought it would be cool to learn to play the guitar. So, I saved my paper route money and bought a cheap six string acoustical guitar and began to teach myself. That didn’t go well. I’m left handed, and I was trying to learn to play left handed.

I suppose my Gramma decided that if I was truly interested in adding another instrument to my repertoire, she felt obligated to provide some proper lessons. The teacher immediately told me to learn to play right handed. He said some very famous guitarists were left handed but played right handed. He named some of them and I took it as gospel that he knew what he was doing. I’m glad I did now.

I didn’t drop the piano, simply added lessons with the guitar. I’m sure my piano lessons helped me since I could read music and understood how to use both hands independently. It turned out that I had found the magic potion for attracting girls. Oh, and Gramma also taught me to dance properly. What I didn’t owe that woman.

When I wasn’t in school, I was playing baseball in the spring and summer, and football in the fall. As I grew up, my Gramma said I was going to be a big boy, just like my father was. She was right. By the time I was sixteen, I was six feet tall and still growing. I was pretty skinny at first, but pretty soon, with lots of exercise and three meals a day, I started to fill out. When I stopped growing, I was six-foot two inches and one hundred and eighty-five pounds. No one was going to bully me.

John was different in build altogether. He was shorter at five-nine, and tended to be overweight until he reached his late teens. He was a good looking kid, but unfortunately, in the ignorance of the times, he was considered the “school retard” by the other kids. The fact that he attended classes, passed all his exams, and even skipped a grade didn’t seem to make any difference to his detractors. But John never seemed to notice the way he was treated. He certainly didn’t react negatively, despite some of the blatant insults he faced. It was up to me to protect him from bullying, and I did so without a second thought.

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