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12:12 pm - Tue 6/04/02 Back on New Years Day in 2000, I wrote, as completely as I could, my autobiography (At that point, I'd started doing my journal on computer, but hadn't gone online with it). I've wanted to put it in here for some time now, but something has held me back (Fear of ridicule, fear of boring you to death, I don't know). But I've just read over what I wrote back then, and I figure if you're interested in what I've been writing about myself up till now, you might enjoy hearing how I got here. (It goes on for about ten pages, so I'm going to split it up into a couple of entries.) The 60s I was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia on May 15th, 1961 (At Kings Daughters Hospital, which I think was torn down some years ago). I guess being born would have to qualify as the biggest "event" of the 60's for me. Another "big event", though one I don't remember, is being given up by my biological mother, when I was just shy of a year old. I have to assume that, of all the events in my life, this has to be the one that's had the most impact on me (How much of an impact it has or hasn't had continues to be a question in my mind). The biggest good fortune of my early life has to be that I ended up with my first foster mother, Lydia DeHaven. It's no longer really clear in my mind who she was, or for that matter, who I was while I was with her, but I've always had the memory of her being very loving, very forgiving, and I've always felt like I owed more to her than any other person on Earth. The most important person in my life, the only "Mother" I've ever had, and probably the reason I'm still here. So it follows that the most traumatic event after that (And really, still rating as the worst thing that's ever happened to me that I actually remember) was when I was taken away from Mrs DeHaven, under the pretext of going "on vacation" (I'm not really sure of the timeline here, but it was still the sixties. I'm guessing '67 or '68). It was devestating, and to this day, I don't know exactly what happened or why (Was I given up by Mrs DeHaven, or taken away by the Welfare Department?). I just remember it as the first time I cried till I couldn't cry anymore. (Recently, it struck me that, as near as I can recall, no one ever talked to me about what had happened. No one counseled me through my grief. Basically, I was on my own there.) When I think of things that mattered to me back then, I think, of course, of toys--GI Joes, a "Matchbox City" (A briefcase that opened up into pop-up building and roads you could drive your Matchbox cars around on), Rock'em, Sock'em Robots, and a battery operated dinosaur (I can't remember, of me and my older foster brother David, who had the triceratops and who had the tyrannosaurus)--and I think of comic books. (A story I've often told about summer camp was the time when a camp counselor threw my comic books in the campfire. Now that I think about it, that was probably the start of my indifference/antipathy to "nature".) I don't think it's too hard to understand why I found Batman and Superman so compelling; Both orphans, both powerful, like I wished I could be. I had lots of comics--before the tragic "summer camp episode" anyway--and when I got my tonsils taken out, I remember getting a Halloween-style "Batman" costume for a present (Along with two "Batman" rings, those kind of kids rings where the picture changes when you move them around). I remember having a "life sized" picture of Bela Lugosi as "Dracula" on my bedroom door as a child. The eyes glowed in the dark, and sometimes scared the crap out of me! In a letter Sallye Heffle wrote to me as an adult, she said that one of her memories of David and me was how much we loved to play "Monsters". That, and her description of me as being "able to smile one minute, then burn a hole through someone with your eyes the next", was particularly interesting to me; All children like to playact, I imagine, but the combination of imagination and intensity makes it sound like the actor in me was in evidence at a very early age. (Next time--The 70's)
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