For years I was the brunt of a family joke. The Easter Day before my 2nd birthday I was on my Grandma James’s porch playing with my older cousins who decided to go to the store. I got up to follow them and they started running and I tried to run too, except I fell because my panties fell down and I tripped over them. I just laid on the ground face down sobbing hard less about the fall and more about them leaving me. I was broken-hearted. My Aunt Jeanne (sigh) kept a home movie of that moment for years until it disintegrated and every time the family got together we’d watch it. In the movie, I eventually stand up but couldn’t get those lace covered draws up for the life of me. My mother pulls them up and picks me up and carries me to the porch and you could see all of the old folks laughing at me.
My mother’s brother Alan is only 14 years older than me, so when I was born he loved me but I got on his nerves. I was a tattletail who told everything he did. Everything. And I was a pest who got in his face while he was trying to do his homework to make him kiss me or hold me or I was always tagging along by executive order (my grandmother). One day I followed Alan and one of his friends up the street to the bridge and I guess I’d ticked him off pretty bad because he lifted me up and held me over the side of the bridge and dangled me over the railroad tracks. When he finally brought me over the safe side I ran all the way home, distraught and crying uncontrollably. Grandma put me on the couch with a cold cloth to my forehead and laid there heaving and sighing and milking the moment b/c I got a lot of attention then. When Alan walked into the house my grandmother, Irene, lit into him about “scaring that baby” and I didn’t make matters any better b/c when he tried to come over to me I screamed and cried harder. He didn’t do that again.
This is the man who tried to kill me -- Uncle Alan.
