With the New Year, I begin my autobiography in first draft form. There will probably be mistakes in grammar and spelling. Please feel free to point them out. There will also be chapters of little interest to you. Let me know why. If they don't interest you, they probably won't interest others. Hopefully, there will be incidents that help you remember your own special moments or that touch you in some way. Let me know that too. Thank you for your participation in making my coming book worthwhile.
Chapter 1 – Battle
Born (Opening paragraphs only)
A river runs through my birth
place. The river has “rills,” and not just any rills, but “silvery rills”
according to “Home Means Nevada,” our state song. This is my hallowed ground,
my sacred space, Reno, Nevada, whose history of divorce and
gambling might lead you to believe it is anything but holy. Not so! Love covers
a multitude of sins, and it was love that birthed me in this place…actually two
kinds of love…the Creative Love of a power greater than myself, and a more
convoluted, earthier kind of love, my parents’ love, complicated by conflicting
desires and self-motivations, and yet it was still love.
*****
Trying to re-orient myself and find
out “who I am now,” no career to define me, no children to raise, no one’s time
clock to meet except my own, I spent the morning with my sister,
Susan, going through newspaper clippings and hand scrawled notes about our
family and its roots. We kept thrusting what we found under each other’s noses,
“Look at this! Can you believe that?!”
Gradually, little by little, but
steadily, a new and stunning truth began to grip me. It was like walking
through a tunnel and coming out the other side to see the glory of the ocean. A
whole lot of people had to be born, fall in love or be thrust together, and
have children over hundreds of years, had to pick up their lives
and possessions and move thousands of miles (some even had to die) in order
for me to be born in Reno, Nevada.
Surprisingly, this knowledge boosts my morale and helps counter those
“Sweeties” I get at the grocery store from the checker who sees the gray hair
and the wrinkles I’ve accumulated over the years in this dry, high-desert climate.
The five
major family lines, with stories, that have come down to me are woven into my ancestry—the
Palmers, Stanleys, Munks, Watsons and Fishers. The Palmer line has a certain
distinguishing feature that didn’t get promoted by the time it got to me. No one ever bragged about this fact, but with
my Ultimate End approaching all too rapidly, it gives me something of interest to pull
about me like a cloak, kind of providing a buffer between me and the Deep
Sleep—the remarkable truth that my roots go back to the Mayflower! I know this from a scrap of paper my sister and
I ran across the day we dug through our archives.
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