| ... by Heroes from the Attic: A Gripping True Story of Triumph !!! |
"I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell."
Harry S. Truman PREFACE If I tell the truth, will others suffer hell? Although I have overcome many incredible adversities, I never wanted to write this memoir, mainly because I felt that I would not have the emotional stamina to think about our past. I thought I’d short out the keyboard with my tears. But it was not that way because something changed in me. I could do it now because I have learned a lot about other people and myself, have banished most of the ghosts from my soul, and, together with my wife, have built a fantastic life. Inadvertently my friend, my horse, encouraged me to write. His girlfriend was neighing for him from a distant corral, while I stood before him, restraining him with a halter rope. Frustrated, with the saddle hanging under his belly, he reared up, jumped forward and bounced me off his chest, crashing me to the ground. I cannot blame him, because I would have done the same had my wife called me. Then he bucked, kicked and bounced over the top of me lengthwise, yeehaaa, but never touched me. However, my impact with the ground tore loose one of my collarbones. With my right arm tied to my chest, I had a lot of spare time to peck out a short personal history with my left and eventually expanded it into this book. So far I had suppressed many memories of our early years and had to search for them like pieces of a puzzle in one of the holes in my head. The more I searched, the more questions I raised; there were so many riddles to be solved. Because my early experiences had been traumatic, I began to research my family’s enigma only in brief sessions. But as time went by my agony changed to self-respect, and I became obsessed with completing my story as quickly as possible. My brother Siggi and I existed, at times, at a subhuman level for about two decades before we managed to claw ourselves out from under our sweet relatives and to the starting line of life. We kept up the momentum of our rise from the abyss to soar into high orbit. Ironically we are remaining there, while sadly, seemingly ever more people are destroying their own lives and those of others, wittingly or out of ignorance. While reflecting on our existence, I wondered how had we survived? How many people could endure such exciting turmoil for so many years without reacting violently? Why were we not killed? Why did we not kill? Why did we not wither into drunken wastrels? We are the opposite; we’re full of zest and very much alive. I delight in the smallest to the biggest, from the ants and flowers to the sun and stars in the sky. I did not embellish our story, except for balancing the intensity of our drama with satire and corrosive humor. My kind of humor. Embellishment would detract from the experience that had been so unusual and overwhelming by itself. Even though no words can adequately describe it, I did not want to distort the truth because it might trivialize our sufferings. I learned much of our early history from hundreds of letters which our parents had written over the years. Ma had saved them and I had saved the ones she had written to me, some of which I have quoted herein. These also confirmed some of my recollections from early childhood. She was not schooled and wrote in very long sentences, in the “old style,” as she called it, but I edited them to make them easier to read and tried not to change her ideas and feelings. My musings in this memoir, concurrent and belated, are written in italics. Too often I did not have many useful thoughts during my early years because they hid from my consciousness. They vanished like cockroaches when exposed to the bright light of our grim reality, allowing me to be mostly only an elementary creature that did not want to be destroyed or driven insane by people and the ghosts that they had created. If it had not been for some events before Siggi and I were born, our lives might have been quite different. Without them this book might not have been written, because there might not have been much to report. Our grandfather spanked our mother and “bounced her off the furniture when she was a baby.” He dented our mother’s head, literally, but I only learned this in my late fifties. Such experiences may have customized her personality. Her dented personality and the “I need fun immediately” attitude of our father greatly contributed to the protracted destruction of our family. Or did Ma become lazy, domineering and eccentric because so many other people had also mistreated her when she was a child? From personal experiences I know that it is as Pat Conroy wrote in The Prince of Tides, “There is no fixing a damaged childhood. The best you can hope for is to make the sucker float.” Was this true for our mother as it was for my brother and me? Regardless of what might have caused those tribulations, they would not have lasted nearly so long, nor would have been so severe, if our lawyers, judges and others had embraced justice. But because they had not, humans attacked us like jackals, and our parents murdered our family by tearing chunks from our souls. Fortunately, after many years of unrelenting steadfastness, we grew strong enough to gain freedom and independence. We finally triumphed, Siggi and I. We earned our ways through college and traveled the world. Some of my globetrotting adventures with my wife are also recounted herein. | 
