Chapter 8

North Tonawanda, New York

Do you remember? I love that song as sung by Phil Collins.

There's a video on youtube that I found the other day. A little boy, probably about 10, riding his bicycle as he delivers his paper route. He meets, and starts to spend time with, a little girl in his class. It is all innocent and fun and free. And it was another of my triggers for remembering my darkest incident of my life.

I can feel the tears start to form. Here I am. A man of 53 years. Brought to tears by a simple song.

There were many tears in our lives that year.

Sure, I can write about the neighborhood. The boys and girls running around and playing until dark was coming. Carefree and no worries about strangers lurking in the shadows. They were there. They just hadn't visited our lives yet.

No, I will write about the night my mom was done. She packed all of us kids up. Put us into the car. We were leaving. The sins of the father had pushed her to her breaking point. She was leaving him there in that big, 4 bedroom house, and taking us to go live with her parents.

My sister has the clearest memories of this. I do not remember it at all. I know later, once school was done, we would move down to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to live with mom's sister and her husband and family. My aunt and uncle and their 4 kids. That period of time I have clear, distinct memories.

Leaving. And then returning in the middle of the night. My dad mopping the kitchen floor in his underwear. He had dropped/broken/spilled something and was cleaning it up. I have no recall on this at all. This is all my sister.

She explained that mom told her years later: "I was not going to take you kids out of school yet again. You were going to finish the school year and then we would leave."

This had to happen somewhere around my darkness episode. This is swallowed up into the black hole and I must have been in auto pilot mode at the time. There is nothing I can find that comes close to any of this having happened.

Maybe I realized that no one could see into my mind. No one could know the horrors that had invaded my life and left me feeling somewhat as nothing. It is hard to explain and put into the right words right now. Maybe it will come to me. I hope so. It will help me to clean out the cobwebs of uncertainty.

I do know that the good little boy started doing bad little things. Climbing trees that were off limits. Trespassing on the farmers land to go watch the fish in his pond.

I'm going to rest a little but I will continue on with that story. It should provide a chuckle or two outside of my own.