2003-01-09 : A History of ME..Part 1
OHHHHH...Where Oh Where..have my little friends gone? Oh WHHERE Oh Where can they be? Tavia? Tracita? They have abandoned their diaries and now their diaries are resembling old Depression-era houses with windows knocked out and banging, peeling shutters. Tisk-Tisk!!

I want to make one of those "100 things about me" lists that I see on other diaries but I'm not sure how to make a list that doesn't turn into a paragraph..please sign in my notes/guestbook and tell me how to create a "list"!! I was on this bus this morning and thought that today I'd write about myself and my childhood. So, this will be either a brief account or a long account depending on how detailed I decide to be (feel free to stop reading here if you find biographies boring!)

I was born to Paul and Fran on Sept. 2, 1969 in Oak Park, IL (home of Frank Lloyd Wright, I"ll have you know!) and my mother used to like to tell me that not ONLY was she IN labor with me on LABOR DAY but that the birth was easy and I literally just kind of "popped" out. I like that image of me popping out like a baby in a jack-in-the-box.

There are pictures from my toddler-hood, Xmas pictures of me sucking on a lolly pop wearing Mickey Mouse Sunglasses. Pictures of me daintily searching through a stuffed stocking. Me wearing a mustard-colored tiny parka in a park (parka in a park..ha ha ha). There are very few pictures of my father, and what pictures there used to be have been ripped in half (by my mother when he left her for another woman when I was about 4). Thankfully, I have not inherited this "ripping and burning" of pictures as the ultimate revenge on lost loves, divorces, break-ups, etc. I can look at all these old pictures of me as a child but I have pretty much NO memories to go along w/the pictures. In fact, I really can't remember much before age 10. I think I've done some SERIOUS blocking, huh?

Anyways, I digress...my sister, Sarah, comes along in 1971 and my parent's divorce a year or so later. My mom has always told me that she wasn't even really that "in" to my dad and that she had planned on breaking up with him, but when she found herself pregnant with me, they got MARRIED instead. How fucked is that? So, for the first 3-4 years of my life I lived in the Chicago suburbs and then when my dad left my mom moved us back to Central Illinois and we lived with my grandparents temporarily. There is another picture I remember from "living with the grandparents" era that is of my birthday party (4th?) and the theme of my cake and all the decorations was Raggedy Ann and Andy, and that obviously had a lasting impression on my little mind because I've been obsessively collecting Raggedy Ann/Andy stuff for many years now. In fact, it is the ONLY thing that I really collect (well, there were those Nazi artifacts that I collected with my husband for awhile (purely for historical interest of course!) but that is another story, entirely. I shall one day talk about the gorgeous set of Hitler Youth glass badges we owned (that he still has) but that will be when I'm more comfortable with talking about that sort of thing (I'm afraid people will assume I'm a Nazi sympathizer, an anti-semite..I'm not..in the slightest)..anyways, I digress again.....(cursed ....) I can't stop.....

I think I"ll start another page of this stuff. Part II to follow.