Due to the TBI on my right frontal temporal lobe, I am a typical brain injury patient…

I remember the before, which I just wrote about and I remember the during, which I also just talked about…

Now do I remember the after???

Many months would pass and I would not be aware of any of it…

My older brother gone and with the threat of his father taking our dad, Don out by court martial was very high, but the woman, Freda, oh that silver tongue woman, she knew how to handle people, especially the men she married…

Larry’s dad, backs off and I don’t see Larry again… well that’s way way down the time line, when we meet again…

I started making memories again, when Freda, shortly after “Mother’s Day” in 1968, about 2 or 3 weeks later, she is notified that her mother died and at first, no way and no how was she going to the funeral and then she breaks down and is hysterical and we get dumped with some family, baby goes with them and all I remember….????

I was standing there watching her put on the performance of a life time… her mother’s passing… The same woman who dumped her at a orphanage, along with her 2 brother’s…

Yea, something about maternal doesn’t seem to resonate in our family… But off to Denver to bury her mom she went and when they came back… We had orders…

Now why did they wait so long to get orders???

After the beating of my brother and death of me, they locked up Don for 30 days, and put him through the military form of psych help and frankly, it was Freda that needed the help and us kids…

Because it caused a big scandal in Big Springs, Don lost a stripe and was given orders for Japan and he would leave not long after that funeral… and what lay before us and Freda for those weeks we waited for housing off base at Johnson AFB, Japan, taught me some valuable lessons…

We are in California in some dive hotel with a kitchenet and Don is on Japan, trying to get off base housing… All our shots are done, passports completed and money so tight, we got real hungry…

A lady asked me to babysit, now going on 14 and Freda let me… I took that money and went straight to the grocery store and bought groceries for the first time in my life and all Freda could say, “you should have bought a whole chicken it is cheaper”, yea she was a real peach…

Now we are getting close to the stroke…

So we sit there and wait and I get a note from dad that says, we will celebrate your birthday after you get here and celebrate we did…

We arrive in Japan, off base housing was paper thin walls, hole in floor for toilet and freeze during winter… but that part of my journey is all a haze… because I had a stroke…

That was my birthday present from Freda for telling her something she didn’t want to hear..

Truth…

I remember…

Oh my birthday is in August…

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