Signal Transmitted, Message Received...

Things that are weird:
 --Meeting the first man you called "dad" for the first time in 44 years.

--Learning that your mother up and fucked off to Palm Beach with her boyfriend in 1972, taking the kids and whatever she could carry, while that man--her husband--was attending training in Georgia for Church's Chicken.
...and 2 weeks to the day after the divorce was final, she married Boyfriend.

--learning that she screwed him out of $10,000 by typing her own name into a deed for 40 acres of land deeded by his parents to him.

--learning that you've got a plot of several relatives in the cemetery down the street. One of them is his grandmother. I have a picture of her and my mother, with an infant me in mom's lap. She died the year after I was born.

Turns out my mother was a conniving bitch who sanitized everything pre-1972 out of our lives and cut my adoptive father's parents off.

This isn't really a surprise--well, the conniving part wasn't. She had a hell of a reputation in local Creek Indian  circles. Maybe I'll try to find someone willing to talk dirt up in Atmore. Bad blood with the Poarch Creek folks, something about her and some legal paperwork she did for them.


==

So. Yeah. He came over from Crestview yesterday and we sat and talked for a couple of hours or so. I showed him pictures and gave him a couple of me around the age he last saw me. I learned that he was a cop from the late 50s till 1995 (aside from those 2 years with Church's Chicken). Drove community transportation for another 21 years.

We have a lot of catching up to do.

CPAP Elephant.

I've been using one of these for the past 3 weeks. Not nearly as fun as this guy makes it look.

I got saddled with the CPAP thing after a couple of sleep studies showed me having a high rate of anomalies.

I got saddled with the sleep studies because I've been feeling exhausted. My main doc figured I wasn't sleeping enough, or not sleeping right, or whatever. He prescribed Ambien and referred me for the studies.

Screw the Ambien. I'm not having TROUBLE sleeping so much as having trouble maintaining it. Ever since Aorta Day 7 years ago, I sleep at most 3 hours at a time. Maybe I'll go back to sleep in a few hours, maybe in 12 or more. I never know, but once I'm awake I'm wired awake. I went from doing 8-9 hours overnight to "who the hell knows when?"

So. This CPAP thing is supposed to help me sleep better--hold my soft palate open in back.

So far, all it's doing is waking me up after an hour or so feeling like I'm suffocating.

"That's normal," the discussion groups all seem to say. "Stick with it."

"That's normal," the medical company's 'coach' tells me during his weekly call. "Stick with it."

"That's normal," the medical company's respiratory expert told me. "Stick with it."

When I've had all I can take and make it stop breathing at me, the little bastard machine at the other end of that elephant nozzle shows me how long it was forcing air up my snout, then shows me how this session rated against yesterday's. I've got to do a minimum 4 hours in every 24.

There's no slacking or cheating, either. It listens to my every breath and snort, writes everything down, then calls the medical company each day to tell them about it. The medical company makes up a report and sends it to Medicaid.

Nobody likes a tattletale.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

I was calling this thing the "Snortmaster 3000"...now I'm leaning toward "Puffaluffagus." Or "Huffaluffagus." One of them was funny 10 minutes ago.

Message in a Bottle...

Mailed off a card to my...father.

Man, that sounds weird. I've spent most of the last 44 years with an entirely different man in that role. I considered the Old Man my step-father, especially during the times I was on the outs with him over his bigotry.

BUT...I never really thought of Mr. Emery as my real father, either, probably because I barely remembered him. I couldn't tell you what he looked like back in the early 70s.

One of my earliest memories is sitting on his lap and watching "Felix the Cat" on TV.

Him giving me a sip of his beer. I seem to remember puking it back on him.

Toys. There was one day--birthday? Christmas?--when I was sitting on the floor playing with one of the big G.I. Joe guys...I remember SSP/SST racers and a boxed Cox P-40 Warhawk. I don't know if these were gifts or maybe attempted bribes from one angry parent trying to lure my affections away from the other.
My mother married and divorced this guy twice.

Two weeks to the day after the second divorce, she married the Old Man. Husband number four. She was with him longer than the previous three together, so there's that.

I remember crouching in the bushes at the front of that one house, though, holding onto that toy plane still in its box. There was a small white car, I think a 60s BMW with small round taillights.

Couldn't say when that was, other than more than 44 years ago.


Kept the note plain, simple, enough to fill one leaf of a blank greeting card and part of the next. Contact info. The rest is up to him: I don't have a map for the rest of this hike.

[photo by Liana Joseph]