Today is Saturday, 16 November 2018, and I started the morning off with some cartoons Bela wanted to watch (“Camp Lakebottom” and “Rabbids”), followed by some reading from “James Island, Stories From Slave Descendants” by Eugene Frazier Sr. (Charleston, SC, History Press: 2006), some writing, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, and black coffee with sugar. I started watching a good old 1970s horror movie from Dario Argento, “Deep Red” (translated from Italian, 1975).
Soon Bela and I are off on another adventure to continue celebrating life. I’ve reached another birthday anniversary, my 46th year! Happy Birthday to me!
My parents had both just reached their 46th year twenty-six years ago, when I reached the age of twenty. My father reached 46 first on 14 September 1992. My mother reached 46 in 15 October 1992. I reached 20 on 15 November 1992.
My father, Jim, and his second wife Georgia had been married for ten years. They were raising two daughters, Carol Strietman (Rivers) Lattouf (1987, 5) and Sarah Seal (Rivers) Smith (1989, 3) in Leland, Michigan, Leelanau County, near Traverse City. They had left their home of Marblehead, Massachusetts two years before, where Jim had been working for maybe two or three years as Vice-President of an investment management firm called Prospect, in Boston. Before taking the job at Prospect Jim worked for Putnam (Boston) for almost twenty-five years.
My mother and I lived in a house near Charlottesville, Virginia, in Albemarle County, over by the Rivanna Reservoir. I had been back from my year at music school in Hollywood, California for a little over a year. I worked in the Fashion Square Mall in a retail music store called Sam Goody, part of a chain of stores owned by the Musicland Group. I taught private guitar lessons to a few students. I had taken a few courses at Piedmont Virginia Community College. I was dating a girl named Misty Childers. In four months I would make my move to Columbus, Ohio.
And so it was about 26 years ago, when I was 20 years old, when I made my home in Columbus. That’s more than half of my life so far.
