A Light in the Distance… My Candle in the Window….

November 5th, 2017 will live in the hearts and minds of many in Sutherland Springs, Texas… 26 innocents would die at the hands of a airman and the Air Force would have to pay the survivors for their mistakes…

Justice is hollow when you want the souls instead of the millions…

2 days later, on Hawaii island in a little house in Paradise park, I am doing my chores and Homer is all into his local newspaper…

The news was on CNN and they talk of those murders on that fateful day, November 5th and I turned the volume down, walked to Homer and said, “I have a memory to talk about”…

This wasn’t a new thing, Homer knew I was missing memory and I was fighting for my own mental health by this stage of my journey…

I had a dish towel in my hands, apron on and I pace back and forth wringing that towel as If I was strangling life out of it and started to speak….

“It was late 1967, the baby by another father had been born… The house was full of kids… My half brother Larry, who was 3 yrs my senior, me a skinny 13 yr old and my brother’s and sister and the new baby born…

Don had been called back from Vietnam and Freda was several months pregnant with her lovers child and we were stationed at Webb AFB, Big Springs, Texas… Don was a TSgt…

Because of so many mouths to feed, Don always worked a 2nd job outside his military job and one night, not long after that baby had been born, he came in the door dragging, exhausted and Freda starts in…

Us kids, all in bed and this goes down around 11PM… we are living in a brick craftsman style home and my sister and I share a room and the boys are all in another room across the hall and the baby is in the parents room…

I wake to the arguing and lay their waiting, will it stop and they go to bed or will the fists fly???

They chose to let the fists fly….

I come out of my room and across the hall is my big brother and we look at each other and both have that look, not again… and we stand their, then Freda strikes out at Don and Don returns the favor…

They both got a couple blows in before Larry and I jumped into the fray…

Larry is about 6 ft tall and skinny as a rail and me, I’m a 5’7″ 100 pound kid and we both jump in the middle trying to stop the fight before it got real ugly… It didn’t go well…

Don turned his wrath on us kids and Freda is swinging for all she is worth trying to get blows in on Don, she was a little woman…

Don has Larry down pounding him, I get Freda out of the way and Don turns his wrath on me… a 6′ 4″ 280 pound man mind you… and the next thing I know I am flying through the air, a fist to my gut and Freda at the front door screaming for help…

The next thing I remember, my brother is down and I am being treated by somebody doing what I have no clue, I don’t make memories again until June 1968, when Freda’s mother died, that is when my brain started waking up again”…..

The above clip of that night isn’t in detail, but it gives you and idea of what a 13 year old kid went through and what a 14 year old would endure, when they shipped us off to Japan to cover up the scandal in Big Springs, Texas….

Sutherland Springs, Texas and Airman were my memory triggers… Telling Homer about what happened that night, sent me on a journey, you are reading about today…

It has been 9 years since my memory trigger and my health mentally and physically have improved, with the knowledge from a brain that slept for decades and I wonder, will that IQ test prove it’s self to be accurate???

This was a long write for me and for me to stay focused and not lose my train of thought, is huge in my recovery… More memories are coming back, not the ones I am hunting for, but a lot of gaps I once had in my memory system, are no longer vacant…

Have a wonderful day, thank your for reading ….

I remember…