Sidetracked Charley

I wouldn't be twelve until June. But the Ruskin Heights tornado and all which followed that week made me grow up fast. Mother was focused on Dad and his grief and loss. And I was left in charge of my five month old sister and my not quite ten year old brother with Aunt Amy. I had not a clue about baby schedules and what Aunt Amy once knew she seemed to have forgotten. Mother's schedule with funeral directors, etc. caused Debbie to be weened fast. Aunt Amy and I puzzled over how to mix formula. She was the mother of my two high school aged cousins. Debbie showed an instant distaste for Gerber. Aunt Amy and I resorted to blenders. Amazing what you can blend up. To this day I can recall infinite detail about Aunt Amy and Uncle Bill's kitchen. It had windows all along one wall. I was happy in that kitchen mixing up baby food for my sister with my Aunt Amy while the other adults seemed to have vanished. Uncle Bill, my mother's brother, and Amy's husband was a pol...

Vietnam Veterans Memorial Chapel I was one of the generation which found the rituals of our parents no longer valid. We are the Vietnam Generation. How sad our lives should be defined by a war. Some of us went to war and some of us went to war against war. A lot of us in our way questioned the older generation and its wars and rituals. And now we are that older generation. Many of those who fought in Vietnam and survived their tours of duty are now dying because of exposure to Agent Orange. It is bringing us all to places we thought in our youth we would never be. Friends and clouds gathering We celebrated the life of Steven Ryan Oliver on what would have been his birthday. Steve would have been the first to tell you he did not want a funeral. He was a Buddhist and a Vietnam Veteran. No doubt he faced the possibility of a death in a nameless jungle in a country we all did not know existed until our friends started vanishing into it. Just another missing in action. But he ret...