| The photos above represent the halcyon days for me. I was born from the heart of the rose into the arms of parents who loved one another and who loved and wanted me. I was pampered and adored, the first grandchild from among Mother's sibling brood. My maternal grandmother, Beth Creel, took care of me a lot in my very early childhood. I was born with badly bowed legs. Grandmother went to work on them daily when I was with her, massaging them for hours with olive oil, pulling and bending until my soft baby bones gradually straightened out. Mother did radio shows while pregnant with me and went back to the stage soon after I was born. I was in a basket backstage when she did a play with a star named Don Ameche, who was inclined to drink too much even when on stage. He was so schnockered one evening by the second imtermission that he couldn't go on for the last act. Mother took me from my basket and placed me in his arms. She walked him around the block three times with admonitions not to drop me. He didn't and then marched on stage sober enough to finish the show. Mother was kind and loving to everyone. She never dreamed that her generous nature would conjure up a monster in my father's soul. |
| He looks so happy, the little boy above, doesn't he? He most often was, but he had already been thrown across a room by his father in a jealous rage, the target being his mother. He became a bed-wetter and a fingernail-chewer, terrified of the dark, flinching when a door slammed and his father's shouts were heard - a smiling child who already knew the meaning of terror. |
| Perhaps it was partly the syndrome of the "lonely, only child" and partly the overwhelming trauma of the loss of my mother after so much violence against her and against me during my early childhood, not to mention the horror of the first kidnapping, that led me early in life to populate my inner world with characters of my mind's creation, characters like cartoon-strip Calvin's Hobbes, that couldn't hurt me. This is me at the time of the second, and final, kidnapping. My Hobbes and I have the same fIerce scowl. It says: "Enough! No more! Don't tread on me!" |
©2000 Brockman Morris