On 01.02.02, I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Too late for surgery, I had chemotherapy, which failed. In May the chemotherapy was changed and I was soon in remission which was celebrated and welcome and lasted nine years - until October 2011. There was progression in 2011 so more treatment was indicated and I am now back in partial remission. But I'm not only a cancer patient - I also enjoy my family, walk my dogs and am learning to draw and paint. Life is good!

Monday, September 13, 2010

Searching for roots

When I was four years old our family moved from Texas to Carbondale, Illinois and stayed there until we moved again when I was nine. I remember so much from those five years. I remember box turtles struggling through the grass, the tree swing, the birth of my sister, the day I set the trash on fire spreading flames across the back yard, elementary school and my first Halloween. The official address was 608 West Pecan Street, but as you can see, the house is no longer there and the neighborhood is a bit down at the mouth.

Springer Street, on the left, was a busy thoroughfare in my mind and one memory particularly stands out. I was standing at the side of the house when a funeral procession drove slowly by. My mother looked up and made the comment, "A colored person died." (Today she would say an African-American died, but this was back in the 1940s.) I was shocked. How did she know? How did my mother know the race of the person encased in the coffin in the hearse? "All the people in the other cars are colored," she explained. Ohhhh! It was my first experience of deductive reasoning, that a person could size up a situation and deduce additional, unnamed information just by figuring it out.

My world has never been the same!

4 comments:

  1. I'm not sure when I first noticed I could reason. Interesting story.

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  2. Thank you, Timaree!

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  3. You've done what I've been thinking of doing - visiting my childhood home. It, too, has been removed, but I want to park my car there and walk to school like I did K thru 3. You've encouraged me to do it.

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  4. John -- That sidewalk there is the very same one I walked to school on for 1st, 2nd & 3rd grades-- at the end of the same block. The old school is now a senior center -- if I'd stayed I could have hit both ends of life! Can you see me skipping along?

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