"WHIP-POOR-WILL" ... CHAPTER 10

   A bridge underpass just outside of town.......  winter 2012......  Poconos.....


 The young woman who had died of an overdose under a bridge below a highway under-pass,  was not the wandering homeless vagrant that her finders thought her to be.  She was in reality the married mother of three and had lived in a nice home only ten miles from this lonely stretch of highway where she was discovered by passing motorists on a cold January day.  She was also a girl that I was in love with as a teenager back in rural Pennsylvania.  Målin was a blue jeans and t-shirt kind of upstate girl, with deep brown impish eyes and shoulder length auburn hair that was the same color as sugar maple leaves in Autumn.  She was an inscrutable girl who loved to collect small antique glass bottles and vintage cups and plates.  She projected a very flea market-down on the farm-upstate aura, but also had a very, very dark side.  I was deeply saddened, but not shocked upon hearing of her tragic end.

  Summer late 1980s ...... another rural area close by ......

   "Oh Fritz,  you're calling so late!",  we're all asleep here,  just go to bed,  Ill see you tomorrow".  Målin then hung up the phone on me.  I was standing in the dark dumbfounded,  still holding onto the now dead reciever for a good long five minutes after she hung up on me.  I stood staring outside and I could see fireflies through the kitchen window sparkling on and off in the moonlit night.  I was preoccupied however with her surprising abruptness on the telephone and I felt like she didn't want to talk to me because I had interrupted something that she didnt want me to know about.  My heart started racing and my head spinning...  I could sense that something was wrong but I just couldn't put my finger on it.  I heard several screech owl's ghostly calls coming from the deep forest across the street as I dashed out into the starry night, hopped on my five-speed bicycle and sped off to Målins home,  about one mile away.  The sky overhead was unbelievably beautiful and clear,  I could see the entire Milky way and every constellation possible including the North star and Ursa Major.  The entire heavens above were illuminated and glowing so brightly as to actually cast soft shadows on the trees and objects below.  Those shadows were very dark though and made it hard to see any distance away,  as this was rural America and so there were no street lights on the country road as I peddled through the eerie blackness.  I lost all light as I passed the power lines and sped through Brendon Park, which was really just a desolate area of dense forest broken with small openings due to the power lines.  The trees grew thicker and thicker and soon draped over the road and blocked all of the sky above.  I could hear a Whip-poor-will  calling louder and louder as I flew through the darkest and scariest area of my ride.  I still did not know why I was driven to go to her house...  they were all asleep,  what was I expecting to find?   I realize now that I was following my inner voice and that inner voice, that intuition,  is never wrong.
   My heart was beating faster and I was sweating as the Whip-poor-wills lonely call echoed more and more incessantly.  I got to the top of the hill and an escape from the pitch black forest,  as I was now in the silver light of the moon and the stars again.  I saw a huge meteor streak across the horizon and disappear as I stopped to walk my bike by the long stretch of hay fields just before Målin's home.  I could smell the sweet golden hay and could also see dozens of fireflies blinking in the small veil of mist that hung over the meadow like a blanket of low clouds.  All of a sudden the Whip-poor-will stopped...  and I heard the whispers of a young girl and boy talking softly and giggling.  They were also smoking weed and in each others arms in a flattened area of hay by an apple tree.  The Whip-poor-will started again, louder and louder, as I shouted out "Målin!".
  I was devastated, she had lied to me and was cheating on me with some dirty, long-haired, drugged out hippie that hung out in the dive bars on the wrong side of the tracks of town.  Målin chased after me and tried to calm me down,  but I was done with her.  We had been dating for over a year and I always knew somehow that she had been leading secret lives and loves behind my back,  I just didn't want to see it at the time.
  She ruined so much for me.  My former love of the whip-poor-wills call would only remind me of that night of betrayal and the loss of a large part of my innocence and my youthful wonder of nature.  I walked my bike back home crying,  I was seventeen.

A few years later......  the same old town......

  I found out later that Målin had been seeing several paramours behind my back and that she was also heavily into weed, speed, coke and anything else that she and her close friend Ni-ni could get their hands on.  I felt like a fool and that everything between us had been a lie.  I  was shocked and completely turned off by all of this discovery as I never touched any drugs and did not even drink alcohol.  I also found out later that she and all of her siblings were addicted to heroin and were all then on methadone programs.  It was in that moment of "seeing the light" and real clarity that I no longer felt foolish or jealous at all,  just very relieved that nothing had worked out between us.  What a tragedy that would have been...  I was spared the black hole of addiction.
     I felt such deep empathy for her parents who were wonderful to me and I was shocked at all of this outcome,  because they also did not smoke or drink  and kept a beautiful, loving home.
    Målin had all of the things that I didn't have and wanted so badly...  but she threw it all away.
   The brutal truth came out later, when Målins mother told me many sad and insightful stories about the family.  It seems that both of her parents and her brother had all been raging alcoholics and had abused Målins mother terribly, even beating her  physically and emotionally.  Målins father also grew up in a similar scenario over a tavern, with alcoholic parents who ran it... and  he never wanted to return to that nest of addiction either.   He didn't have to though,  sadly both of his parents died in their forties from cirrhosis of the liver.
   Only now today,  can I understand what happened with compassion and sympathy.  The addictive pattern had skipped a generation,  but was reborn with Målin and her siblings.  I can still remember to this day how she would love to wear my flannel shirts or big sweaters just like my sister would.  I can recall building bluebird houses to put on the old fenceposts that surrounded the horse pasture and sitting in the swinging chair under a quince tree, with a beautiful view of the hills beyond their small farm.  It was a stunning panorama of rural America...  golden hay fields divided by old stone fences, apple orchards and a background of endless forests of pine, oak, hemlock and birch trees.  It all seems like a time and place that never really happened now.
    I felt great sorrow for her parents, especially her mother who is still alive today and living in another state,  alone.

Copyright @ 2015 All Rights Reserved
Written by Fritz Von Ludwigslust
Photo by Fritz V.L.

"ELEVEN SPIRITS IN THE ROSE GARDEN'' Chapter 9

             
                    By: Fritz Von Ludwigslust



Summer 2000   just  across the mighty Hudson ......


  "Everything in my family is a dead end"!  "This is just too much to take in this (can not print here) family of mine"!  I just sat dumbfounded and stunned as my friend Ludroig spat out these words in disgust and disappointment.  "What happened, what do you mean"?  was all that I could reply.  Ludroig just shook his head and then sunk into his seat at the coffee shop that we had been sitting in by the river.  I already knew a lot about his family history which was very similar to mine and ours had been lives trying to keep our heads above the water, or should I say above the liquor or alcohol.  The scale in families of addictions like ours were only comparable to a graph in which the line only goes down, or stays static for short periods.... before nose diving again.  Like typical children of families wracked with addiction we unknowingly accepted all of these unjust, unfair and unacceptable situations and circumstances as the norm that most people would find unbelievable and inconceivable.  This is a sad and tragic pattern of thought in those who grew up in the degradation of addiction.  Ludroig was tall with floppy copper colored hair that was swept to the side of his angular, Germanic face.  He was a very talented landscape designer who also loved to go to the revival theaters to watch classic films with us.  He was always in an easy going, agreeable mood which helped him in his "family" situation.
   I knew that Ludroig had just come off of two tragic deaths in his family within two days time, and he was facing the responsibility of paying for his Mothers final costs on his own.  
It was all too familiar with me also coming from a family with extreme cases of denial, abandonment and addiction.
   We sat in silence for a few long minutes. This explosion came after Ludroig had just gotten off his phone with a distant cousin in West Virginia, that he had actually never met.  He had believed that she may know of some family information that he needed to find a final resting place for his Mothers urn.  His Mother had left no insurance money or means for a proper funeral or burial.  I now understand how incredibly hard it must have been for him to grieve over his Mother, a woman who he had very mixed emotions about.  The cousin informed him that she had no idea where his Grandfather and the rest of the Von Losch family were buried.  Ludroig knew that this was not true as this cousin had been the executor of many of their wills of that family as they had passed away over the years.  Ludroig had never actually met any of them except one Great-Aunt and the one cousin.  Ludroig told me repeatedly that he knew that his cousin was not telling the truth and that she was always very vague and confusing on the phone with every conversation that they had had.  In other words, she was lying and hiding something that she did not want him to know, but Ludroig was onto her from day one.
   I tried to lighten up the conversation after just having seen "Sylvie et la Fantome" in a revival theater nearby, but it didn't work.  It was like going from a fantasy film to a film of harsh realities.  The conversation went back to the denial, lies and secrets in dysfunctional families of addiction.  I agreed that it was very true, that there were many dead ends in this type of family due to the lack of responsible behavior by those acting out addicts within each family system.  There was no taking care of things properly or even just the normal, simple procedure of keeping records, papers, documents and personal things in order.  I should know, this was typical of my immediate family as well.  If the family records had been kept Ludroig would have had no problem finding his Grandfathers grave or mausoleum where he wanted to put his Mothers urn.  His Grandfathers urn had supposedly been kept in the home on 111 Lac street  where the family built a home in 1880 when they came from Germany and Hungary.  The house had been in a shambles for many years and most of the family would not visit it because it was in the same state as the house in the cult film "Grey Gardens".  His cousin had been living a hermit's life of a different type of addiction.  Ludroig was one of the very few that did visit his cousin despite the hoarding mess and mentioned to me that it was very odd that his cousin claimed that she could not find his Grandfathers urn amongst the huge mazes and passage ways of junk in the house.  Ludroig  told me that his own Mother had told him that Berta his cousin also had the urns of several other family members there.  It seemed eccentric and cheap as the cousin was quite wealthy and could have interned the urns anywhere at any given time.  That is not what Berta had done at all despite the fact that she had collected substantial life insurance policies on all the members of the two family house, inherited the house after her own mother died and even inherited a huge amount of stocks and bonds from her Uncle who had died of cirrhosis of the liver as a young bachelor.  Berta was never made to work and so she just hoarded massive amounts of junk and traveled the world in between, while the urns of all the family members that she profited from sat forgotten in the attic.  That is until she devised another plan as how to "bury" them on her own, cash free and in secrecy.
   Time went by, Ludroig got on with his life and assumed that the urns had all since gone into a family mausoleum since they were staunch church members at a Lutheran congregation close by.  The subject never came up again until present day of this story in 1999 after the tragic deaths of his Mother and cousin just days apart.
    Ludroig kept his Mothers urn by his fireplace mantel and started his intense search to find her Fathers resting place.  She had been her Fathers favorite and so it seemed very fitting to have them together.  His Grandfather had died young at 39 years old when his Mother was only 14.  He had been long forgotten by the family, I believe due to the fact that his urn disappeared and so did his memory with it.  Denial, secrets and "I didn't know", all  typical in a family of addiction.
   It was two months later that Ludroig got desperate and very aggressive to find out the truth about the lie that his relative down south seemed to be hiding.  Ludroig worked in a law firm with many powerful legal connections and I told him to finally use them to end this mystery.  He had a lawyer contact his cousin in West Virginia to claim that there was a major investigation in this families case, about the where-abouts of many of its members resting places and final details.  The cousin broke in all of two minutes and asked the lawyer to have Ludroig contact her again.... but she would say nothing to the lawyer over the phone.

Day of Reckoning  Autumn of 2000

    I was home anticipating the outcome of Ludroig's long awaited D-Day conversation with West Virginia.  The news was shocking and almost comical in a very, very dark way.  Ludroig came over to make the same exclamation as he did in the coffee shop many months before.  "Everything in my family is a dead end"!  "I just can not believe this s**t"! Ludroig paced back and forth nervously and proceeded to imitate his cousins confession word for word in a slightly hillbilly drawl.
    "Well I don't know how to tell you this, so I'm just gonna say it straight Ludroig",  "they're all in the backyard",  pause ...... several moments of dead silence ..... "yea you heard right, they're all in the back of the house in the rose garden by the fence".  She then went on to tell him that over the years Berta had slowly emptied all of the ash urns into the soil around the old fashioned roses that grew up the fence in the backyard.  His cousin said that she herself could not believe it either and that Berta had only confessed this to her the previous summer and was shocked to discover that there were at least eleven loved ones deposited in the garden.  Surprisingly and suspiciously Berta herself requested that her own ashes be spread on the Long Island sound and not in the rose garden with her own Mother, father and Grandparents as well as her Uncle, Ludroigs Grandfather.  It was the bitter Icing on the sour cake of his family and he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
    I'll never forget that eerie night that I accompanied Ludroig to 111 Lac street after that devastating conversation with his cousin in West Virginia.  We were both quiet and I was very nervous on the path train that very late night that he decided to investigate his family's property, before the new owners took over the home.  The walk from the Path station to Lac street seemed to take forever although in reality it was no more than seven or eight blocks away.  The streets were empty as we approached the old, silent house and it was very dark as there were no street lamps close to the vacant house.  We had to climb over a high steel fence equipped with pocket flashlights, because the box-like structure was situated with only a tiny front yard and no access to the back from the street, except for extremely narrow paths on the sides of the building to the backyard.  The home had those old fashioned gritty roof like tiles as siding and it hurt to brush against them as we struggled to get to the infamous backyard.  I had never been there before so I had no idea where I was or which way to go.  We finally squeezed our way to the back area and could relax for a minute although I was extremely nervous about being there at 2 o clock in the morning, looking like suspicious shadows sneaking around.  The night air was still and I felt an unnerving silence, as we waited for our eyes to adjust to the pitch black darkness behind the light less empty home.  There were enormous Norway Maples that draped over the rear of the house and yard blocking the night sky, but we could still make out the back fence and the roses there as they were in the open just out of reach of the shade trees monstrous branches.  I could see the large white roses glowing in the night like balls of snow and they smelled of cloves.  The ground beneath seemed like very damp, heavy soil with only small patches of weeds here and there.  I tried not to think about me possibly standing or walking on all of those souls who were literally dumped in this rose garden.  I still don't know what Ludroig expected to find there that night.  I mused that maybe it was just his way of saying goodbye to the Grandfather and older family members that he had never met.  It was so tragic and sad as we stood there in silence for over an hour.
  We did not say a word as we squeezed back through the side of the house and over the fence to freedom or on the walk back to the station and I was relieved to be back on the path to Manhattan.  Ludroig thanked me profusely on the return ride to the city, but I did not really hear anything he said on that ride as I was numb, shell shocked and shook up by all of this.  I did not sleep well that night, or for several weeks after that.

Next summer, 111 Lac street ......

  Unknowing to the new buyers and owners of the house and property the site was sold quickly, despite the unusual garden in the backyard.  The house was torn down and a new but not very attractive brick building went up immediately.  Ludroig often walks by the former home of his family acknowledging and trying to show some kind of respect to the eleven spirits in the rose garden.
  In reality it is a family cemetery in someone else's backyard.


Copyright @  2015  by Fritz Von Ludwigslust.  All Rights Reserved.

"A STOLEN LIFE" ...... CHAPTER 4

NEW YORK CITY ......   AUTUMN EARLY 1990's ......

  The telephone rang at 4 o'clock in the morning, ripping through the apartment like an air-raid alarm.  He was almost knocked out of his bed by the shrill ringing.  It was his sister on the other line sounding very shook up.  "Are you alone?",  Are you sitting down?",  "Its Johny ......"  she whispered on the phone.  She had called to tell him that their brother had died alone in his rented bungalow the day before.  He had been found passed away in his bed at only 30 years old  from cirrhosis of the liver, just as his own father had died of the disease at 49 years of age.  He stood there in the dark of the apartment, shocked and in disbelief.  He could not express any emotion but a stoic silence.  He knew that he that would had to leave in the morning to meet one of his sisters to go to their Mothers home, and try to come together to deal with this new tragedy in a family of addiction.  The Mother however was living a full-tilt life style of alcohol addiction with her much younger out of control  alcoholic partner, who the siblings detested for many, many well founded reasons.  This made coming together and grieving almost impossible for them.

SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND ...... ALSO AUTUMN EARLY 1990's ......

    The young man that they found deceased in a rented bungalow off a small country road in a small charming New England town, was totally unrecognizable from the very handsome, tall and athletically built young man from just 10 years before.  He had been a high school athlete and good student in his early years, and had been very popular with the girls.  He had turned in to a bearded, wild, straggly, long haired and extremely overweight recluse, a hermit who looked decades older than he really was.  He even appeared to be a homeless derelict when locals saw him on his frequent trips to the liquor store.  Johny had intense bouts with agoraphobia, and became a virtual shut-in avoiding all outside people and even his long-tme friends from the past.  He also refused to speak with anyone on the telephone except his brother and Mother.  It was impossible for anybody to conceive or believe how this could happen to him.  It would be very easy for anybody to believe, if they only knew his families true history and the degradation that he and his siblings experienced in their stolen youths, due to their alcoholic Father's selfish, abusive and neglectful character.

TRI-STATE AREA ...... DECADES EARLIER ......

    True to life (the addicts life),  he had grown up in an unfunctional home with a dysfunctional family.  Nothing in the house was ever fixed and the Father was never home.  There was no hot water heater that was functioning or any heating oil most of the very cold winter ( I am not repeating myself in my story's, I am merely telling how the circumstances are within all of these families of addiction and so these are all common place effects with all of these families).  He had adored his Father despite all of these hard facts, who was his hero and a World War two hero as well.  The Father however, could never bring himself to do the right thing by his own family and the children lived in disgrace.  Their Grandmother (the Mother of their Father), still pampered and babied her son with large amounts of cash each week and waited on him hand and foot whenever he visited her.  He always took the cash with a million promises to buy a hot water heater,  to buy heating oil, and to fix the house, but he never did.  The cash always remained in his pocket and the family suffered and continued to live in shame.  The Mother, also a drinker and smoker truly suffered as she worked full time and actually had to pay for most of the house bills out of her own salary.   This seemed to go on forever, and nothing was ever addressed or resolved or repaired as the Father slipped deeper and deeper into addiction.  He died of cirrhosis of the liver on a bleak, winter day, leaving the family literally to the wolves. The Fathers family in turn practically abandoned them the day that he was buried.
    The day that the bottom fell out for Johny, was right after the family received all of their Fathers personal belongings from the hospital including his wallet that he always kept hidden for some strange reason.  One of his sisters was going through the wallet when she pulled out a huge, thick white paper wrapped wad from a hidden fold in the wallet.  She opened it, and found over two thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills neatly and tightly folded and hidden within the white envelope.  At first they were over joyed at the discovery as they had very little money at that time, but then the cruel reality of the hidden money set in.
    It was a statement made by one of his sisters best friends that sent Johny over the edge forever.  She looked at cash and said ...... "I don't believe this,  your Father could have bought a new hot water heater, and a full tank of furnace oil, and still had thousands left to himself".  Johny was destroyed, and his Fathers heroic image died right there that day.  Johny realized that his sand-castle hero was never going to buy a hot water heater, or furnace oil, or fix the dilapidated house.  He was going to keep them living there like that forever and never do the right thing by his own children.
   Johny soon went out of control after that suffering psychological and emotional problems and started smoking, drinking alcohol and experimenting with other things.  He was soon on the same road to addiction as his Father.  The Mother who suffered so much during this marriage also went off the deep end after her husbands death, when so many stark, harsh truths and realities set in.  It also set her off on a one way path of even worse co-dependent relationships with other selfish, immature alcoholic "men", like her daughters would also then do.  Everything after that, was even more wrong than before leading up to Johny's sad final years, and early death at only 30 years old.


DECADES LATER ...... SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND ...... AUTUMN EARLY 1990's ......

    He never enjoyed the last ten years of his life spent like a hermit all alone,  drinking and trying to medicate himself out of the pain and trauma of his younger years and family, especially so the memory and reality of his fallen hero his Father.  He slowly lost everything ... his youth, his looks, his hopes, his dreams, and ultimately even his life.  It was truly one that had held great promise and potential at one time but was not fulfilled due to the ravages of addiction in the family.  It was a stolen life.

"BLINDED BY THE LIGHT"...... CHAPTER 2

 

   I recently had a disturbing flashback (or I thought I did), to a long forgotten memory of a tragic and enigmatic incident told to me by my late Uncle.  It was the tale of a teenage boy who disappeared while hitchhiking at night on a remote country road, only to turn up dead (after several days of being missing),  just a few yards off that road in a wooded area,  under very mysterious circumstances.  In fact the memory was so foggy and I wasn't sure if it really happened or if I imagined it, as I was probably only six or seven years old when it occurred.
   I went to the local library looking through dusty, old newspapers until I found what I was searching for and indeed my memory was correct.  I discovered a brief story there about the strange and unsolved occurrence.   I even found the name of the newspaper's reporter and called him on the telephone and yes he did remember the article that he had written many years before as well as the shock and disbelief of the victims family.
   It was the mysterious death of a young man who was found dead of exposure just yards off a country turnpike, after having disappeared two nights before.  It was a sad and unanswerable tale of a lethal combination of alcohol abuse and youthful impulsiveness, or was it ? ...

Somewhere in rural Pennsylvania.... dead of winter.... sometime in the late 1970's

  The mystical and reverbing intro to "Blinded by the Light" came on just as the gorgeous symphonic chorus of "Dancing Queen" faded out.  The pony tailed, nineteen year old at the dumpy, roadside bar had just finished his third bottle of beer and was about to head home and out on foot into the chilly winter night.  "Denny-Yves"  had to walk the five miles plus home though, as he had lost his drivers license after acquiring several tickets for driving under the influence.  Patrons at the bar said that he seemed to be fine when he left the tavern, but he was never seen alive again... until he was found dead, face down in a half frozen forest stream just within view of the country road that he was walking on.
  There were many strange questions to his death and why he was found where he was. He was discovered in an area that made no sense to hike through as it was a very swampy and overgrown part of the forest with painful thickets of green-briar, pricker bushes and impenetrable thorny vines.  Why would he try to enter the woods there with all of those obstacles?  It would only be heading in the wrong direction to deeper forest and not to any road or path home.  It turns out that there were an abandoned small group of bungalows half a mile into that area, that many young people went to drink alcohol, smoke and do whatever else.  Was he going there to meet someone, or maybe just to rest?  But why there, after being in the bar all night?  Nothing made sense and still doesn't make sense today, all these decades later.  He was found with bruises on his shins and a bruise on the side of his face where he fell (supposedly fell).  It seems to be that after all of these years since this mysterious death that no one knows what really happened to D-Yves but he himself, or they're not talking, and it could just be that it comes down to alcohol impairing better judgement with deadly consequences.
   He was buried on Valentines Day at nineteen years old.  He was a slim but very fit youth of French Canadian descent and so everyone found it shocking and unbelievable, that he could just fall in the woods and die of exposure in the manner that he was reported to have died.   It was said that he would often hitch hike to get around and knew short cuts through the power lines and deep forests of the area.  So why did he end up in this swampy area that lead to nowhere?  His parents were clueless and had no knowledge of the life that he had been living under their roof.  He was leading a secret orbital existence of abusing alcohol and other substances every day,  all fueling an uncontrollable drive to be out on the road with or without a car, constantly .
   The case of D-Yves came and went like a brief cold wind and no findings of his mysterious death were ever released.  Strangely, know one ever discussed it again and forgot about him and his tragic ending almost immediately.  It was possibly that toxic combination of alcohol and the irrational behavior that comes with it that ended a life at only nineteen years old.  Years later,  the patch of swampy, roadside forest where he was found is now an asphalt-paved over area of small stores and no one in that town even remembers the name of the hitch hiking boy who died there mysteriously.

                        "HIGH-BY-NOON"

                          BY: FRITZ VON LUDWIGSLUST



"A TRILOGY OF MEMORIES"            CHAPTER 1




  ... Sometime in the mid-seventies New York state ...

   The old tarnished ashtray was a mountain of crumpled dead Viceroy cigarette butts by nine o'clock in the morning.  No one cigarette ever went out without lighting the next one from its glowing, embered tip. She probably reasoned that she was chain smoking to save on matches. The viceroys were all washed down with a whole pot of coffee, (black, strong, no sugar) and a half eaten poached egg on a single piece of kosher rye toast. The first can of beer was cracked open by ten-thirty, (not first thing in the morning, she told herself, that would be too much). Then came the second and the third can of hops and alcohol just before twelve, and she would be ...  "High-By-Noon".
  After that she would scour the volcanic ash tray and trash bin for any butts.that were still long enough to be smoked when she ran out of cigarettes.  It had been Pall Mall filter less and Rheingold with her mother and then it was passed down to her daughter, with Salem lights and champagne hidden in the vegetable crisper or under frozen food cartons in the back of the freezer.  This bizarre behaviour pattern seemed to be handed down from one generation to the next and I said to myself... "How could she not see what she was doing to herself?"  No one ever discussed it as if it was perfectly normal daily behaviour and so it went on and on as it had throughout the years, with these otherwise beautiful, hard working and loving women.  Women who always chose the wrong men in their lives though, wrong in every possible way.  Men who were not real men, but alcoholic, physically and verbally abusive narcissistic ''boys'', who made their wives and children live in squalor and poverty.
    I often wondered how and when did it all start and with whom in the family as the cycle of addiction, abuse, denial, degradation, and co-dependency was reborn and flourished with each new generation.  I remember she told me that her grandmother banned any tobacco or alcohol from her home, even cooking sherry proclaiming that it was the Devils water and evil. What would cause such a reaction like this?  Was it possibly a result of previous family members with the same addictive behaviour and destructive traits? One can only imagine what this woman experienced to be so against any alcohol of any kind.
  Time went by and yet she still started every day with the same ritual of coffee, tobacco and alcohol  and all in excess, possibly to fill the void that can not be filled with these vices. This continued throughout all of these women's lives as did similar patterns of living in dilapidated houses, left stranded in a crumbling shack without a car to escape this prison.  They were made to live without a working hot water heater and without heating oil for the ice, cold furnace. There was always unfinished paint and repair work that never got done and no feeling of safety in the house with out-side lights that did not work, doors that did not lock properly and a man who was never really home, not even when he was there in person.



Personal thoughts ......

... "I'm going back, back in time, I keep flashing back to those memories of them now, for the first time in my life, so why now?"

  Goethe said ... "It is only in our later years, that we truly understand what we went through in our youth". Many psychologists confirm, that people frequently begin to ponder and question their youth, and what happened to them then, between the ages of 38 to 42, so why should I be any different?




...... Winter early-eighties Tri-state-area ......

  The oven was on full blast, on a frigid winter night in December. Thank God they had an electric stove, which could be left on for hours without danger (excluding the danger of having no electric). There were huge old pots of water on each burner steaming in the still chilly kitchen, as she was preparing to carry them upstairs to the bathtub to fill it up so a bath could be taken, as the hot water heater in the basement was not working again and the father was still no closer to having it fixed than he was when his mother gave him the money to repair it countless times, countless Winters ago.  It was a time consuming and humiliating task and was just one of many degrading effects of the father's selfish and almost single, bachelor like life-style.  The thermostat was also down to the lowest it could possibly go, as he wouldn't pay for a full tank of heating oil either and so this is how their lives went on with this degradation never being addressed or spoken about.  It was almost as if he was saying this is what you deserve, this is how it is, no questions asked... but he always had cigarettes, beer and Four roses Irish whiskey in the otherwise empty cabinets and money for the dive tavern that he went to every night to drink away their money and to play the numbers. The bread basket drawer had one rumpled bag of wonder bread in it, with two stale pieces inside as well as an empty opened box of English muffins, but there were always two full cartons of cigarettes, Viceroy and Marlboro. The cabinets were also mostly empty, with scattered near empty boxes of cereal and a few useless canned goods, but there were always several quart bottles of Seagram's 7 and Irish whiskey.  It was very evident what the priorities in this household were, tobacco and liquor, everything else came second or not at all.
   If this was happening today in 2014, any children in this shambles of a house would have been removed from it, until counseling, treatment and drastic repairs and changes were taken and made.  It was however a very different time then and the children suffered immensely, in terms of lack of self-esteem, direction, nurturing and a feeling of safety, leaving them to continue this vicious cycle, as lives of under-earners, victims, co-dependents and possible addicts themselves.







...Sometime in 1904, Lewis county, New York ...

  "The Mystery of Margaret"

  Daddy Jim as they called him, was raised by Florence and her husband Vern, in a village in upstate New York. They were not really Daddy Jim's parents, you see, Florence was really his Aunt, the sister of his late tragic unwed Mother Margaret. The story of Margaret was a dark secret in the family, and never, ever discussed. Margaret had been one of seven sisters born to long-time Adirondackers of solid Scottish, French and Scandinavian stock . They all knew how to fish, farm, garden, knit, can food and how to literally make something out of nothing, when needed. Margaret had been the youngest of the girls, and was a quiet and shy soul, who loved sitting alone and reading, as well as making quilts together with her older sisters.  She went hiking up in the woods often,  berry-picking and writing in her diary, sitting on the island like out crops of giant rocks  by the lake, where the family had a cottage.
  In a strange turn of events all six girls got married, (except Margaret), but only one of the girls, Lilly, actually had children, (except Margaret). The tale went, that Margaret fell in love with an American Indian-french Canadian boy, and was with child, unmarried at the age of 16. Terrified in a time where this was shocking and grounds to be thrown out of the church, Margaret took to drinking, all day everyday, in secrecy. This was an era when we did not know the real health hazards of alcohol and tobacco, and so Margaret really can not be blamed for her behavior. She must have been so scared and fearful of her unwed pregnancy, and probably went off into her own little world to escape the reality of what lay ahead. The boy disappeared on Margaret, yet she still went ahead and carried his baby for the nine months, until her son was born. Margaret died of alcohol consumption and a broken heart, shortly after Jim was born, and her sister Florence took Jim in as her own.
      Daddy Jim grew up, had a big farm outside of Gouvernour,  got married, and had two daughters of his own.  Daddy Jim was a wonderful, loving father and family member, but unfortunately, the alcohol addiction was then (unknowingly), passed down to who would have been Margaret's grand daughter, ironically also named Margaret, (who went on to run a tavern-bar in the Syracuse area, until her early death of cirrhosis of the liver like her long lost mother that she never met), and then it was passed down on to her great grandson.
      Years later, Margaret's last remaining sister Lilly lay in her bed near death, nearly sixty years after Margaret herself had died. Her niece who stayed by her side those last days, said that Lilly looked up to the ceiling, and whispered "Oh Margaret",  just as she passed away. You see, Lilly was the grandmother from my first story, who had banned all alcohol a nd tobacco from her home, even cooking wine or liquor flavored confections, and it was her own beloved sister Margaret who had perished at a young age from alcohol poisoning just a short time after the birth of her son Daddy Jim.


Copyright @  October 13 2014  AllRights Reserved.
All storys written by Fritz Von Ludwigslust.