Always my doting
                                                                    big sister~




                       Give Sorrow Words, A Memoir
                       

                                            by


                                 Your Little Sister

                                           ~

                                  A Mixed Year


  The year 2004 was a mixed year. In the year 2004 the Red Sox won the pennant for the first time in an eighty six year long dry spell, the New England Patriots won the super bowl for the second season in a row and my beloved big sister Janice killed herself.


                                    Richard Cory


          Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
          We people on the pavement looked at him.
          He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
          Clean favored, and imperially slim.
                        
          And he was always quietly arrayed,
          And he was always human when he talked;
          But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
          "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

          And he was rich, much richer than a king-
          And admirably schooled in every grace:
          In fine, We thought that he was everything
          To make us wish that we were in his place.

          So on we worked and waited for the light,
          And went without the meat and ate the bread;
          And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
          Went home and put a bullet through his head.

                   - Edwin Arlington Robinson, 1897


    I first became aware of this poem not long after Janice died. Janice, like Richard Cory was a person who radiated star quality and attracted admirers throughout her lifetime. She truly "glittered when she walked." 
                                                                                                
                                         The Lineup

     Daddy ordered us kids into the lineup, " Line up in front of the stove!" he ordered. Scared and trembling we lined up in order of our ages. Garry first, then came Janice, Mem and me. I began to cry when it came my turn to be grilled as to did I or didn't I stir his nails around in his toolbox. 

    "Shut up and stop sniviling or I'll give you something to cry about!" he shouted, shaking his fist in front of my face. Later on when I was old enough to know about the holocaust and find out about how the detainees were treated I thought of my father. He didn't kill us but I always feared he would. I compared him in a poem I wrote years later to a rooster pecking at the hens and little chicks to show them who was boss.

     The above memory was of an incident that took place in our kitchen  on Texas Street in Westminster, California.  My first memories begin there.  The stove in question, a white one with black trim, was one of those long legged little ones, popular in the twenties and thirties, with a high back and a shelf above the four gas grills. The oven was next to the cooking surface on the right.  l bought a miniature replica of in when l built a dollhouse replica of that house in 1993.

     I was about to turn four when we moved to our little four room house in Orange County from Lynn, Massachusetts. Too many of my early memories are of my father brutalizing my mother, my siblings and me. Many years later I wrote a poem titled, After The Rooster Was Gone  that expressed how I felt after my parents separated the year after that incident.

    A bit of my poem was printed in my sister Janice's and Michael Newton's book titled,  Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer, ( Simon & Schuster, 1995 ).   I wrote about how estactic wekids felt after the rooster - our dad - was gone, how we played in the now empty chicken coop, made noise, made miniature car tracks in the back yard with our brother Garry's little matchbox size cars, ( a memory of Daddy stopping us from doing so because it messed up the neatly raked dirt ), laughed out loud and  picked peaches off the peach tree without fear of being hit, ( a memory of being told to pick a peach and being yelled at for taking a bite out of it because I hadn't heard him say it was for after supper ).


                    After The Rooster was Gone (circa, 1947)


                                     We played
                                     In the henhouse
                                     After the rooster
                                     Was gone.
                                     
                                     The dogs
                                     No longer whimpered
                                     After the rooster
                                     Was gone.

                                     We became rowdy
                                     In our ecstasy.

                                     We blew tin horns
                                     And beat 
                                     On pots
                                     And pans,
                                     After the rooster
                                     Was gone.

                                     We wept
                                     In relief.
                                     
                                     We rode on tricycles
                                     To the farthest stretches
                                     Our imaginations
                                     Could reach,

                                     After the rooster
                                     Was gone.


   When I was seven or eight Janice went to live with Daddy and our stepmother. She and Mama had a big row because Janice wanted to live with them and Mama eventually gave in. I wish I'd been old enough to understand what was happening and why and intervened. I didn't know until many years later that Janice left because she thought our mother didn't love her. Janice from then on, bounced back and forth between our father and our paternal grandparents homes but refused to come back to live with us.


                           Postscript (Circa, 1958-1959)


                                      I had 
                                      My childhood.
                                      Where was Jan?
                                      After the rooster
                                      Was gone.



                                    Family Composition
  

 Knowlton parents;

 First marriage, George and Marjorie Knowlton, 1933 - 1947

 Second marriage, George and Kathleen Knowlton, 1951 - 1962


 Knowlton children and birth dates in order;

  Garry, March 1935

     Janice, January 1937

  * Madelyn, September 1939

     Beverly, May 1941

     Marjorie Jr. September 1943 - died May 1946 pneumonia

     Sandra, September 1945 - died May 1946 pneumonia


 Stepchildren and children of George by second marriage


   *Dianna Finn, stepchild born 1939 (lived with grandmother)

   *JoHanna Conlon, stepchild born May 1941

   *Melanie Knowlton, born November 1952

     Kevin Knowlton, born January 1959 - died October 1962

     (car accident but very ill with leukemia at time of death)

* fictituous names

     My big sister's name was Janice Knowlton. She lived in Anaheim, California. She was a singer, artist, poet, writer and publicist, but for the last few months of her life she was fighting a battle with clinical depression and panic disorder. Janice died on March 5, 2004 and the coroner's office declared her death a suicide. No one close to her believed it, not even her psychiatrist. Janice had always been a fighter and had been through many bouts with depression before. In 1990 Janice claimed to have remembered seeing our father murder Elizabeth Short in our garage in Westminster, California and she wrote a book about it. Fourteen years later Janice died still believing that Daddy was the Black Dahlia killer.

     I believe my father was indeed capable of murder and in fact he did murder or kill "in self defense" one if not two men. My grandfather George Franklyn Knowlton told Janice in January 1971 right after our grandmother's death about a time when my father killed another man. The sheriff in the town where it happened contacted my grandfather and told him my father, a teenager at the time, had killed another young man in self defense. I don't know where this happened or anything about it that was told to me at the time except that the sheriff didn't charge my father and my grandfather drove to where it was and brought my father home. This incident happened during a period of time when my father was hitchhiking around the country working here and there in the depression years.

    Years later my stepmother told of a time when our father got into a fight at work and killed another man with a pickaxe. I don't know if this was the same incident my grandfather spoke of or another one entirely but I believe that what Janice said was told to her by my grandfather was something he really told her since January of 1971 was more than fifteen years before Jan began telling of her recovering memories and l had reason to doubt many of her recovered memories.

     Jan remembered when she found some old letters in our grandparents attic, written by my father to them in those years that my grandmother made her promise not to ever tell anyone about them. She said no one must know any of the places where my father went in those years.

                             Surrounded by orange groves

   We moved to Westminster a dozen years before it would be incorporated as a city in 1957. It was a sleepy little town then surrounded by orange groves. Nearby was another, much
smaller unincorporated few square blocks called Midway City. Westminster Memorial Park where our baby sisters were buried after they died in 1946 is partially located inside of Midway City. When Westminster decided to incorporate the inhabitants of Midway City refused to join and it continues on as an unincorporated area still taking up only a precious few blocks.

                                     The Fourth Child

   I was born at Claremont General Hospital in New Hampshire on Thursday,  May 8, 1941 at 7:55 P. M. according to the information on my original birth certificate.  I was my parents fourth child and third daughter. My brother told me I was born when our family lived on 40-A River Street but said that was only one of three addresses  we lived at in the year and a half we were there. The Sugar River ran behind out house.  There was a road behind our house that ran down to a lower level by the river's edge.  I used to have a recurring dream of living by the water and the water flooding the area up to our back porch. A second variation of the dream had us living in a house on the beach that was up on stilts.  we had to rush to safety because water was flooding in and over the beach and we were afraid it would rise high enough to enter our  house.  we were hurrying to escape.  Later my big sister Janice found out that once while we were living there Sugar River overflowed and  the water did come up to our back door after flooding the road and homes below us.   

                    Saying goodbye to Garry

     The beginning of this was written before we rushed to North Carolina to visit my brother Garry before he died. Interestingly enough we stayed in a rented townhouse condominium on Topsail Island called The Summerwinds.  It was beachfront property and was up on stilts as were all of the other dwellings on that very long island made up of three small cities. The one we stayed in was called Surf City. This setting too resembled my dreams. Perhaps, after all, one was an unrecalled memory of the past and the other a premonition?

      About a year later I looked up Surf City and discovered that the city seal has two dolphins on it. The day before we drove to North Carolina to visit my brother for the last time I found a dolphin on an elastic band in my parking lot and used it as a page holder for a book I was reading. The condominium we stayed in at Surf City had a bedroom with twin beds that my sister Marilyn and I used. It was decorated in dolphins - dolphin lamps, bedding, curtains, pictures and knickknacks.  Later on sometime after Garry died I told my brother's wife Erika about the dolphins and she told me Garry had liked to sit on the beach and watch them in the surf. It was one of the last things he was able to do before he was finally housebound.  

     We were living at Claremont when my big brother Garry started first grade.  He told me we moved from Claremont to 20 Tremont Street, Massachusetts near Mack Park sometime in 1942. That was another address I may have remembered in a dream years later. I sketched the cellar in my dream and found out from a woman living next to where our home had been before it burned down that the cellar had been exactly as in my dream. By this time the house had been gone for many years but the woman, who owned the house directly behind it was still there to describe the place. She pointed to her flower garden in the center of her big front lawn and told me the back door of our house had been right there.

     I looked up all the addresses our mother and father had  lived at during their fourteen year marriage.  There were fourteen and they only owned the last residence we lived in.  It was a four room house on  Texas Street in Westminster, California but the house number is unknown to me.  We got our mail at post office box number 243 at a post office on 7322 First Street not far from Westminster Memorial Park where our two little sisters were buried.  

    Our parents were born and raised in Beverly, Massachusetts and married on September 24, 1933 in Plaistow N.H.  They kept their marriage a secret for six months because they couldn't afford to rent an apartment.  That, according to my mother. A few years ago I was told by my aunt Betty that my father's mother never wanted my parents to marry. My grandmother was very fond of my mother and warned her not to marry my father because of his bad temper.

   I found out years later from an article in the newly revived Beverly Citizen newspaper that my father and four friends were arrested in 1934 for housebreaks, automobile break ins and face to face armed robberies.  I remembered that my aunt Norma, my father's sister, had once mentioned something about my father and some of his friends having been  caught stealing, but I had never realized the seriousness of what they had done.
 
    These were crimes which covered several months.  I wondered if that had been my father's way of trying to raise money to begin  a home for himself and for my mother.  I don't even know whether or not my mother ever found out.  If she did I believe my father would have lied and made it all sound more innocent than it was throwing the blame on his friends and making it look as if he had innocently been present along with the guilty parties when they were caught. My mother was in love and would have believed him.

    The movie Bambi  came out just before or after I was born and I ended up with the nickname Bambi.  This was either because of my big eyes and skinny legs or because I was NOT a little dear depending on who you believed my father or my mother.  Bambi  remained my nickname until I was about six and a half and a big girl at the Ryal Side School ( later renamed the winifred p. upton School after the ancient lady who had first become principal of the school at only twenty two when the school first opened in the 1920's)  teased me about my nickname at recess.  I demanded of my family that NO ONE ever call me by that nickname again.
                                                 
     l think Garry attended second grade in Salem, Massachusetts while we were living at 20 Tremont st. I don't know which school he went to. He probably attended with Janice who would have been starting first grade the year after him. She just made it into school the year after Garry who was almost two years older because the cut off date happened to be on her birthday which fell on January eighth. In the 1990's this would be changed so that children would have to be of age by September first.  

    By 1943 we were living on 49 Butler street.  My sisters Janice and Marilyn remembered sliding in the winter on this street which is on Gallows Hill, the area where thirteen women were hanged for witchcraft.

    Mama and Daddy's first apartment was on Cabot street  Beverly at number rear 156 1/2. It was behind a shoe store where Marilyn and I in later years would look at our skeletal feet through a foot xray machine before these were outlawed. We must have xrayed our feet hundreds of times while stopping in on the way back and forth between our maternal grandparents home on 30 Bartlett street and ours. Janice was born nearly two years after Garry and after they'd  moved to 20  Blaine Avenue.

    Garry was born at Salem Hospital and Janice was born at Beverly Hospital. Marilyn and Midgie were born at Salem Hospital. No one ever explained to me why these four who were born in the same state and general area along with Janice, were born at Salem Hospital by the same doctor but Janice wasn't born there as well. Why I've wondered were only the first, third and fifth born in the same hospital. I was born out of state due to necessity as was Sandra but Janice wasn't. Maybe my mother went into labor too quickly and too late to make the trip to Salem Hospital in time for Doctor Cunney to deliver Janice.

     My father was working  at Ripley Brass Company in New Hampshire when I was born.  He was a moulder in several factories that made cast iron items but also worked as a milkman in Lynn and in California. I first found that out from reading a newspaper article about our old house in Lynn Highlands in 1992.  Janice believed she had recovered childhood memories of our father running a man over with his car one winter day when we were living there and burying him in the cellar. Hence, the Lynn Item article many decades later. However, years later in 1991 or 1992 the police there didn't take her seriously and the owner, the niece of the original owner refused to have the cellar dug up on the basis of a recovered memory. The cellar, according to Janice had been composed of dirt when we lived there between 1943 and 1945 but had since been cemented over.

    Many or most of my parents chosen apartments over the years of their marriage were on the second floor. Because I'm imaginative, I can't help thinking that this was appropriate for my Dad who had once been arrested  for being a second story or B & E man. I think it would be closer to the truth  to assume that most landlords in those days owned the homes that they rented apartments out of and most of them preferred to keep the first floor apartments for themselves and for their own families.

     My sister Marilyn would have started first grade at the Highlands School in September of 1945 if we hadn't  moved to Westminster, California that spring. She started at the 17th and Hoover Streets  Elementary School. It was the same school that in 1947 became famous for becoming integrated due to a Latino family suing the city so their little girl could attend with white children. In every article I've ever read about Mendez vs Westminster out school has been described as the whites - only school but in one article I read that our's was actually the non - white school. Whichever it was I attended with children with both Spanish and non Spanish surnames and didn't notice what strange things were going on in the world of adults. I only found out about this landmark case in 2006.  This happened eight years before Brown vs The Board of Education, a much more famous case. A postage stamp honoring the Westminster event was issued in 2007.

    The Westminster address is the first home I remember.  Marilyn, a year and a half older than me  remembers this as her first home as well.  she explained that she'd believed that all of her memories from Lynn Highlands and Salem were events that took place in Westminster.

    My sister Marjorie Jr. nicknamed Midgie was born at Salem Hospital soon after we moved to lynn. She was only about a year and a half old when we made the cross country trip by car to California. My mother was halfway through her pregnancy with sandra.
                                           
                                         A Failure To Bond

    My mother sadly, never bonded as closely to Janice as she had to Garry. This is born out by early photos that picture Daddy always holding Janice and Mama always holding Garry. Janice eventually asked Daddy why Mama didn't love her on her last visit with him before he died in a car accident. His answer to her was that Mama did love her but that Mama had been in the hospital far longer after giving birth to her than with the rest of us and Janice had bonded to Daddy because Janice came home a lot sooner than Mama did. I'm afraid though in my experience with Mama that she always did have her favorites among the children and grandchildren and would at times be downright mean to her non favorites while coddling her favorites. That's sad but true. 

    I always thought Mama was perfect because she said so and others did too. It came as a shock to me to finally recognize that she was not and that to me was the same thing as desecrating a sacred cow. It still hurts. I'm afraid I was NOT one of her  favorites and neither were any of my children. I know that if she could come back and do it all over again she'd do it right next time though. She never meant it to be the way it was. That's what I believe.

    Our sister Sandra was born at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange California on September 6, 1945 and she weighed six pounds and two ounces.  Fifty eight years later to the day I would become the grandmother of Hailie and she would weigh six pounds and two ounces. 
 
    Little Sandra only got to live a little over eight months before she died the following may. I remember very little about her. I remember that my mother had us kids with her downtown in Westminster one day whrn she was shopping. My mother paused to gaze into a store window. It was a second hand store. There was a realistic size rubber doll in the window. I've never seen a rubber baby doll that size from that era other than that one. The drink and wet dolls we had were little ones.  I think my mother's Sandra doll was already a collectible item when she bought it in 1945. The doll was made of real rubber not vinyl. It had molded hair. My mother gazed at it with a sad look of longing.  She asked us didn't we agree that the doll looked just like Sandra. We agreed.  We didn't care whether the doll looked like Sandra or not.  We just wanted our mother to be happy and if buying that doll would bring her a little bit of happiness then we wanted that for her. Even now after all these years I wish I could hug my mother and tell her it's allright. Maybe it is. They're together now aren't they?

    I was the only one to go to kindergarten because the public schools in New England didn't have kindergarten classes before the 1960's.  My mother told me that she and my father felt that sending me to kindergarten would help me to overcome my shyness. It didn't.  I believe this was an all day kindergarten class because my sisters and I began and ended school together at the same times every day. I don't remember my brother walking back and forth to school with us in all the time we went there.  He was most likely embarrassed at the idea of  walking to school with three little sisters  tagging after him or he just liked to walk to school with his friends.  I think our school went up as high as eighth grade. We lived too close to the school to need to take the school bus but once I jumped onto a school bus to go home  when I didn't see my sisters right away.  Fortunately for me and probably for the bus driver as well, my sisters peeked into the bus when they couldn't find me and there I was right in the front seat.  I had assumed that the bus driver would know where I lived even though I didn't even know the name of our street.

    I remember being so shy in kindergarten that when I colored a mimeographed picture of an apple a dark red and the teacher said to color it over to make it lighter I didn't know what she meant.  I couldn't see how coloring the same picture I'd already colored could make it lighter but was afraid to ask.  Even at that young age I was afraid to question any adult for fear of being yelled at and hit.  My Dad taught me well not to question adults. I figured out as I grew older and thought back on it that she must have meant that I should take a new  paper with the mimeographed apple print on it and color the new one  lighter.  Because another teacher had come in to talk to her right after she'd spoken to me she never noticed that I carried the same paper back to my seat without taking a new sheet to work on. I thought mine looked best the way I'd done it anyway because I'd colored it a deep red to resemble a red delicious apple. 

    There was only one time when I misbehaved in Kindergarten and this was when Mem said I could spend the day in her class with her. I always believed everything that bigger kids and adults told me so I kicked up a fuss when her teacher disallowed me from going into her classroom.  I was already of the mindset to spend the whole day with my sister and I refused to go back to my class and put up a fuss. I was dragged kicking and screaming back to my own. That was a humiliating experience that stung for a long time.  I wish one of the teachers or the principal had been diplomatic enough to escort me and my sister to my class and then had sent my sister back to her class instead of arguing with a five year old who just didn't understand.  

    I have a crazy memory of us kids snake dancing our way around the flagpole in the schoolyard of that school. We were singing "Oh the monkey wrapped his tail around the flagpole to see his ..........!" the dirty version. I wasn't allowed to use bad language though so I substituted the word dagpole for the other word. 

                                         The sixth child

    My littlest sister Sandra was born four months after we moved to California at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. I remember the day Mama and the baby came home. My father was sitting in a chair next to his and my mother's bed where she was lying with the baby. My father invited us to approach the bed to see our new baby sister up close. My siblings did but I stayed in the living room by the couch on the far wall. The living room and my parents room were next to each other with a double doorway in between. Their bedroom furniture was squeezed into a dining alcove off of the living room. I was already -  by the age of four and a half - wary of my father's quick temper. I knew he could give permission for something but then change his mind and hit us for doing the very thing he'd just given us permission to do. I wasn't going to take the chance that if I approached the bed, as I longed to do, that he would lash out and slap me.

                                      Dying Too Soon

     I have no memory of the six of us kids coming down with first measles then pneumonia.  My memories were sparse at that age anyway and maybe I was too sick through all of it to remember.  I don't remember being sick at all but only remember that Reverend W. A Havermale came to our house and baptized me. His hand written signature on my baptizm record and my two little sister's death records is scribbled, so I don't know what his first name really was.   

     I slept in a crib until I was six and a half years old, because there just no more room in that tiny girls room to squeeze in another bed.  I shared the room with my bigger sisters Marilyn  and Janice who shared a double bed.  I remember standing up in the foot of the crib where I had a clear view of Reverand Havermale  walking from me to the front window of the kitchen mumbling a bunch of  what sounded to me like mumbo jumbo.  I didn't know how to react so I squeezed out a laugh and was immediately shushed up by my mother.  By this time, our two little sisters were already dead.  Midgie died at home but  I don't know which one of my parents discovered she had died or whether both parents sat up with her and witnessed her death.  I don't  know why she wasn't in a hospital. 

    My mother said later that the hospitals were overcrowded because of  the measles epidemic being  so virulent that year.  My mother said it was because of the servicemen still coming back from the war zones and bringing it home with them. Years later my sister Janice found out from a relative that Sandra who died nine days after Midgie and in a hospital had experienced a seizure before she died.  When as an adult I later asked my mother about the little ones deaths  I was told that Sandra's veins had collapsed making it  impossible to ger an IV into her.  My mother also told me that when we school age children first began coming down with measles my parents were told to bring  all  of us who hadn't yet become ill to the clinic for gamma globulin shots to lighten the measles when the rest of us came down with them. 

    My father didn't want to spend any of the money he was saving towards his annual deer hunting trip on on shots so we never got them. Midgie was born a blue baby so having any illness was especially dangerous for her.  Recently I found out that blue baby research was originally done at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where my granddaughter Dot is now a law student.  My sister Marilyn has always had a couple of unhappy memories connected with this time.  One is that she awoke the morning of Midgie's death sensed something not right about Midgie and asked our father if Midgie was sleeping.  Our father yelled at her and made her go outdoors. The other is that our father used to tell a story about how whenever any childhood illness came by Marilyn would be the first one to get it and pass it on to the others. 

    Marilyn had been first to come down with measles.  Therefore after she always blamed herself for the deaths of our two little sisters. The death of Midgie came on the day after the first year anniversary of my father's youngest brother Clifton in World War Two.  I was to discover that fact decades later when helping Janice do research for her book. 

                                        Call me Cliff

    Our father's youngest brother who we knew as uncle Babe died in Okinawa on May 14, 1945 after a sniper shot him between the eyes.  His two buddies came to see my grandparents later, to tell them that Cliff had been assisting an injured serviceman at the time it happened.  Clifton Knowlton was a pharmacists Mate in the Navy, which means he was a medic.  I never remembered him.  He was a five by seven inch black and white high school photograph perched on top of our bookcase in the living room.  It was  He was on a basketball team in his home town called the Cardinals and he had planned to study medicine under the G.I. bill when he finished his time in the Navy.  He died on May 14, 1945 but his parents weren't notified until his mother's birthday on June second. I don't know if servicemen came to the house or if it was a telegram delivery. When I was looking for our family history in voting records and old high school yearbook in the late eighties or early nineties.  I saw the words, "call me Cliff" beside our uncle's photo in his 1939 high school yearbook. I've called him that and thought him by that ever since.

    Years later I would discover that my sister Midgie died at home from pneumonia nearly a year to the day later on May 16, 1946, with Sandra dying nine days later . Then,  the following year, my father ran away with my future stepmother  Kay, on May 15, 1947. These were things I discovered when I looked up our family history in 1989 or 1990 for Janice. These were things the grownups in our family never talked about. When you're a little kid and even when you're grown it is a long time before you realize that your parents were not just your parents.  They were frail human beings with a life outside of just being your parents.  They had their own hopes and dreams, joys and disappointments and tragedies too.

   Janice was born in January 1937 while our parents were living on 20 Blaine Avenue in beverly.  Garry was born while they were living at 156 1/2 Cabot street Beverly in a house behind the satellite post office. It was reached from a side street around the corner.  A shoe store next to it on the Cabot Street side had an x ray machine customer's used to see the bones of their feet. These were eventually outlawed but my sister Mem and I used to go in there every time we passed by and we x rayed our our feet again and again. Marilyn was born when when our family lived on 38 Bartlett Street a few doors down from my mother's parents, the Hatches. 

    I think the reason we moved to  New Hampshire and I was born there was because someone got our father a job at Ripley Brass Company there.  Sometime before or after we lived in New Hampshire he worked at another cast iron company on a little dead end street named, Tulip Street off of Canal Street in Salem. The building is still there and even though another type of business was in thereby the time I knew about it the old name was still on the building when I found it in 1992. It was painted over some year after that. It is a cement block - like building next to a swamp that surrounds a pond.  It, now that I think of it, reminds me of something I saw in a dream in the early 90's when I was trying to rememember my early past because of Janice's so called emerging repressed memories. I saw a similar building near a swamp about ten years later in Swampscott. Both buildings and grassy field like areas they were built on resemble the photographs of the area where the body of Elizabeth Short was found.

     The place I saw in Swampscott, Massachusetts that looked like the place in my dream was a city garage next to a playground. The place is partly up on posts with no cellar, and when it is rainy it has water under it because of a swampy pond area out there.  I had dreamed our Dad had the family living in  a place that looked just that city barn  so I was impressed and curious when my daughter Baby Lynn ( Little Bev ) and I were there with her little brother Chris, and with her little sons, Petey and Brad in the early and middle 90's. I walked all around it and told her about my dream. Now, I'm thinking about it, the Leonard Iron Foundry was next to a large building like Swampscott's city barn as well. For years up until the year 2000 or after, weekend flea markets were held inside of it. 

                                 Don't tell them it was us

     My mother told me our family lived in Hamilton, Masschusetts  before Marilyn and I were born.  This very well may have been South Hamilton, because my father's younger cousin Buzzy, in his early 70's still lives there with his wife Sandra.  I think he's my grandmother Glady's Barton Knowlton's  brother's son's son, or her younger brother's son.  I get confused because her father was married twice and had kids her kids ages.  Her mom Ida Mae died the year before my grandma was married.  She Gladys, was only seventeen years old when she married and Grandpa was twenty one.  Anyway, my mother told me not to tell anyone in Hamilton - where my friend Dinsi's family moved when we were teenagers -  that we were the same family. She felt disgraced because one day my father's hound dogs got loose and ran in front of a steam roller barking. She had to run out and drag them back into the yard with God and everyone looking on and laughing. To make matters even more humiliating for my mother, these dogs didn't even run in front of the steam roller in a regular normal way, they ran backwards facing it and the driver and barking furiously all the while.

                                           Forgetting

    My mother had cloudy memories about her years with my father.  Sometimes though, she would remember things that happened as with the memory about the hounds chasing the steamroller.  My mother had a chronic problem with iron deficiency anemia almost all of her life.  This contributes to memory loss and confusion, because it custs down on the amount of oxygen circulating in the blood. She remembered little things here and there. She didn't remember any of our birth weights or times of day we were born, but she remembered that I'd had my legs run over by a car in Lynn Highlands before we moved to California. She just couldn't remember when it happened, so that given that we lived there from the time I was two and a half, to just under four, it could have been at any of those ages or any age in between.  I think it was just before we moved to California, because in the winter the ground was usually hard and there was usually ice and snow.  

    My legs were apparently run over at the back of the knees, or they would have broken. The ground had to have been soft in our yard where a neighbor was backing up his car when I fell or maybe threw myself down in a tantrum as my sister Marilyn has said she remembers.  If the ground had been hard my legs wouldn;'thave sunk into the mud as I've been told they probably did. Also, I probably wouldn't have been allowed outside to play at a younger age.

                                         A miniature Adult

   Our mother was a child raised as a miniature adult in her family. She was the oldest sister in a family of parents and four girls. Her mother, although she would live into her late eighties, was timid and , presumably sickly. My mother looked after her little sisters and her mother.She was the one to take her mother's place when her father went to his childhood town many miles away to visit sick and dying older reaatives. She was the one who attended funerals. She was raised in the victorian style to be stolid and polite. she never felt free to show her emotions as her younger sisters did. From the time she was a little girl in school she behaved like a little grown up. Her teacher asked the students as a group what they wpold do if they were given money to go to the store for their mother. My mother said she would keep checking her little purdse to be sure that the money was still there. The teacher said wryly; " I know you would Margie." I remember my mother always being like that, always too serious, always worried.

                                         A fun loving Rascal

   My father was a fun - loving rascal.  He wanted a virtuous girl for a wife and my mother was attracted to his free and fun loving ways. He was the person she wanted to be. The joy wouldn't last long. When it turned out that she was ill with nausea throughout her first pregnancy with my brother Garry he said words to the effect that he was unlucky to have married a woman who was always sick. He showed no sympathy but only disgust. My mother told me this hurt her so much that the made herself cold and unfeeling to avoid being hurt by him again. She told me she was a person whose feelings ran deep and so she could be deeply hurt. I remember that she could only display affection towards infants and pets. I, like Janice, missed our mother's affection but it was even harder on Janice than on the rest of us. I never knew just how hard until I read her heartbreaking letter to our mother written when she was  a young adult in her early twenties. Janice believed that our mother didn't love her at all. I can't quote it here because it was so painful to read that I threw it away.

                                      The First Title Chosen

   The first title I chose for this book was,  Busted, A Wound In The Heart,  because after my sister died some of her belongings were sent home to Massachusetts from California by freight. They were packed into cardboard boxes. A little teapot I'd bought her for the Christmas of 1988 was "busted." Another reason I chose the title was because I had made myself believe that Janice died from a heart attack. It was to be many weeks before we found out the actual cause because it took almost two months for the coroner's toxicology report to come back to them and  then to be forwarded to us care of our step sister in California. Our step sister was away from her home a lot working so only checked in for her mail about every week or so. I was in deep denial because the coroner had already told us that she had found no illness or foul play but said we would have to wait for her final report.

                                             Busted

   I painted a series of water- color paintings of the teapot to record my feelings about my sister's death after her belongings came by UPS, and before we were sent the coroner's report. The report arrived before Mother's Day at my niece Julies address near Mothers' Day. 

   My niece waited until she could tell her mother the results in person, but before that would happen, one of my sister's son't phoned my sister and blurted out that the coroder's decision was, suicide. It happened to be Mothers'Day when he phoned her.

    My niece and I went up to New Hampshire in her car to see my sister. As soon as we arrived my sister asked her,  "Did you tell her?" Julieie said  she hadn't she'd waited so that her mother could tell me. I was dumbfounded and as soon as my sister told me, I said I didn't believe it. It was so unlike Janice to just give up.

   The little desk shaped, broken teapot became a metaphor for me. On each painting I added a broken heart and the woed, "busted" representing Janice's imagined death from heart disease and my broken heart. Later, of course, it would come to represent my broken heart only.

   One of my paintings was of the police tape across the doorway of Jan's apartment. Another was of her and her cat Suki returning to gaze at the facade of their apartment building, but  they are ghosts. Suki doesn't seem to be aware of this as she stares longingly into the lobby at the elevator doors that lead upstairs to their apartment. Janice gently chides her that they no longer live there.

cont. from  lady makes lawn ornaments page ....


   Janice's mini recorder held some bits of "junk" that had fallen into it. A tiny heart shaped sticker and a tiny safety pin were among these.
                                           

                                         Busted

                            My sister's heart was busted.
                            I found the evidence inside her
                            Mini cassette recorder,
                            One pink heart sticker,
                            One mini size safety pin with
                            The tip broken off 
                                                         And
                                                              Busted.

                            Beverly Knowlton Fournier
                                           4-26-04


As soon as I saw the coroner's report I went to the library at Salem State College where I was to have become a student that coming fall. With the help of a librarian named Leslie, looked up the medications that Janice took before she died. The medical names were long and hard to pronounce. They were listed in large tomes that weighed considerably in more ways than one.

                                    Grieving through art

   I worked through my grief by finding out as much as I could about Janice's sudden death from the coroner and the police, her most recent emails stored in her computer and through  painting, writing and drawing.               

                                    Excerpts From My Journal

   Jan 10, 2005, 4:43 PM, Re; Alma D., Janice's close friend. The journal articles are to be read as they stand because they were not written formally.

   I got a note from Alma w/2 articles w/photos in them of Jan from the LA Times & I wrote a note w/out indicating I'd cotten the articles & note & I said I & C.J. had been sick & were better & I said was mailing the singing video & I included 2 8'' x 11'' photo copies of two of her cute publicity photos & said would find & mail poems & photos later. *She...

* I apparently was interrupted before finishing the thought.

   My brother Garry died from pulmonary fibrosis in the night between July six and seven 2006.

   Today is July 9th and is the 17th anniversary of our mother's death.  I sent a prayer to the wall in Jerusalem VIA email on the night of July 6th and lit a candle online at the Church of the Nativity on line in Bethlehem. I prayed for a reprieve so Garry could live longer.  A tremendous feeling of peace came over me, and I now believe that was when he passed. Funny but I also heard something lightweight and metallic fall in that timeframe somewhere and if Garry knocked something over I have yet to find out what it was.  Maybe he was saying "Fool, you are praying for the impossible-It's just my time on earth has come to a close."  [ ALA UNO HOO ]                                         
                                        
   Today is July 31, 2005. It is the last day of the last month my brother lived on earth.

    Today is August 1, 2006. Sometime within the past week I became aware that my washer was no longer jumping or " walking " out of place when it spun. I hadn't noticed that it was now level even though to the best of my knowledge no one had leveled it ( I even asked ) The reason turned out to be why I heard something lightweight and metallic hit the floor somewhere in the house the night  my brother died. There are metal cookie cutters hanging from clips on a plastic chain on my window curtains. Somehow-some way, one fell from the opposite side of the washer and landed under the back corner of the washer. It leveled the washer~

                           ~ From Garry's New Website ~

    Welcome to Garry Knowlton's site.  Life is a wonderful gift, full of precious memories that should never be forgotten.  Now these memories can be shared so that you too can enjoy them forever.  I started to put up this site late yesterday afternoon, but someone needed to go on line, so I waited.  I wanted to put up a website about my big brother before  he died because I didn't want to wait till he died and then put up a memorial.. Garry died last night and I decided to go ahead and put up this celebration of his life.  I love you bro.

  From My Journal ~

   July 12, 2006;  I missed Garry's wake and funeral.  My cat Shilah had to have emergency surgery for a burst tumor.  Then, the vet found her blood count too low, at 13, when it should be about 24, so surgery was delayed from the 10th to the 11th, to give shilah a blood transfusion because she had injested a metal object that was putting too much zinc into her system.  The object turned out to be the back of my watch that my husband bought for me in 1963.  A dainty watch with two diamond chips.  The watch was in a junk drawer in the kitchen that was over stuffed.  Awhile back I had sometimes set one of the three cat food dishes under that drawer area.  The time that the vet called yesterday to tell me that both surgeries went well, we were in the middle of a gigantic thunderstorm.  The thunderstorm left us with water up to our front porch steps and filling the college lot behind our house and part of our back yard.  So that was what was happening here on the day of Garry's funeral in North Carolina.
 

   From My Journal ~


     I will lose the Garry site before I can pay.

     Later: A wonderful person sponsored my  brother Garry's site. God 
bless her.

    (My friend Jan Colvin surprised me by sponsoring the site)


                                     Finding Family Records 


   My late sister Janice asked me if I would help her out by looking up old family records  dating back through the years of our parent's marriage.  In 1987 Janice believed that she was beginning to recover traumatic, repressed childhood memories. This was a side effect of her surgery in late 1986 for a total hysterectomy.  Her hormone replacement medication was switched from a regular to a generic brand.  This, added to her chronic bipolar condition caused Janice untold grief for the remainder of her life. She had periods of high  manic activity followed by periods  of deep depression causing her to be unable to do much more than drag herself around her apartment.  These were accompanied by by severe panic attacks.  Jan had always experienced these symptoms, years before they were correctly diagnosed, but they became much more pronounced and debilitating after her surgery.  She tried several therapists and psychiatrists, seeking help before she settled with a therapist she finally felt comfortable with.  This was Jim Frey, who would remain her therapist for the remaining thirteen years of her life.


                                 A Poem that Resonates

                                         I died a death

                            I died a death but stayed alive
                           In phantom's likeness I survive
                             Alive, yet dead, I walk alone
                        In rooms with walls as cold as stone

                          I lived a life and dreamed a dream
                         And loved the life you lived with me
                            Then in the whisper of a breath
                           you left, and then I died a death

                           Though dead I live, I cannot part
                         From love that lives within my heart
                            Within my heart I still must strive
                           To keep my hope and faith alive

                           For all the love that I would give
                              I surely would prefer to live
                             To be content, not to survive
                              But feel my spirit come alive

                          You slowly took your final breath
                       'Twas me, my dear, who died a death.             
                            
                                     -  Elizabeth Santos 


                        A sad and Lonely year
                              For My parents                            
                                                   
    My mother and father lived a secret life that I never knew about after my two little sisters died and that I only found out about in bits and pieces well after I had grown up.  I never saw either one of my parents weep over the losses of their two babies.  My mother would go out in the yard alone sometimes during the day to hang laundry  and cry. My father worked in the vegetable garden and flower beds under a spotlight into the wee hours of the morning, presumably to cry as well.  Maybe the ghost I saw in the bedroom I shared with my sisters was my mother watching my father out of the window as she crept silently around our darkened house when she too was unable to sleep. 

                                           Running Away

    My parent's marriage - already on shaky ground - didn't survive the trauma.   My father ran away on May 15, 1947.  My future stepmother went with him.  They were gone for about six weeks.  One time when they were still away my future stepmother's husband Pete came beating on our kitchen door.  My mother rounded us kids up and herded us into the bathroom in the back of the house.  The bathroom had a high window rihht over the bathtub - too high for anyone to see in.  She climbed into the bathtub, herding us along with her and waited until Pete finished rounding the house knocking on doors and peeking in windows before we came out.  Pete was drunk and he was crying.  

                              Welfare and The Police Station

    At some point during this period we ran out of food from the garden and we owed the milkman.  My mother presumably must have had to have  ashamedly gone to the welfare for help and  been told by welfare that she had to report my father missing to the police before they would help because I remember a day when my mother had to walk to the police station with us in tow.  I wasn't feeling well that day so I rode in the baby buggy.  The reason I remember this day is because when we got there I saw a man in a cage.  To a little kid seeing something like that leaves an impression.  I'd seen animals in cages at the zoo sometime or another but not a man. Never a man.

   After my mother died I found her personal and legal papers from that era in two old purses.  I saw the list of creditors she paid after my father sold the house to her for a dollar in 1947.  She paid off; the welfare, the funeral director, the price of the memorial stones, the milkman, the divorce lawyer and the salesman who came around the neighborhood and sold her two pairs of overalls for Mem and me that cost a dollar and a half each.

    My parents were divorced at the old Orange County courthouse that is occassionally seen in movies made for the big screen and for television today.  My mother got an interlocutory decree for cruelty and irreconcilable differences orone of those.  Interlocutary meant that my parents could reconcile any time before the year was up and have the divorce called off.  Before 1947 was over my mother was to reconcile with my father for what I believe was only about three weeks, and only out of desperation to keep all four of us, her remaining kids together with her.  It was a rough and sometimes violent three weeks.

    Before my parents were to reconcile though, my father drove us all back to Massachusetts.  My future stepmother drove one packed car pulling a trailer and my father drove another.  My mother couldn't drive.  My mother had been almost a full five months pregnant and holding her two year old on her lap when we drove out to California in late April 1946.  Now, she was leaving her babies behind. 

    If we stopped by Westminster Memorial Park to say goodbye to the babies I don't remember it.  I only remember stopping by the La Brea Tar Pits and my father allowing us kids to stand repeatedly on a small tar pit that looked solid and was in the shape od a medium sized puddle. It would slowly sink lower and lower, when we would scream and jump off.  The tar pits of today look nothing like that. Now they're all fenced in and there are no small ones.  When I looked online to try to find out if there were any photographs of the way they looked in 1947 all I could find was a black and white photograph taken decades before that. It does look like what I remember though.  I'm the only one of my siblings to remember that.  After Janice had her terror memories decades later she speculated that maybe Daddy was in a frame of mind  to hope we kids would "accidentally" sink to our deaths.

                             Broke and in a Broken family

   We, my mother, my siblings and I, were broke and in a broken family. We were "different" and by that I mean that  For the era we were living in we were considered different from the norm in our community.  In our parents small, straight - laced home town on the coastline of Massachusetts  most families were intact - which meant at that time that a family unit consisted of a father, a mother and one or more children - and starting to prosper financially after World War Two.

  In California before we moved east we kids had been blissfully ignorant of our poverty which was now compounded by the divorce and everyone we'd known out there had been in the same financial boat.  Indeed, after our father left it was a happier boat to be in.  My mother had received many letters from her mother begging her to return to the east coast to live.  She said we could stay with her and our grandfather until my mother got back on her feet.  My grandmother made promises she must have meant at the time. My little grandma, Annie, said in her letters that she and my grandfather would welcome my mother and all of us kids into their home and help us out until my mother could find work and a place to live.

      My mother must have been homesick in California because she ignored the tiny little voice that must have been running through her head telling her that her mother was not dependable. Once we got to Massachusetts my mother was only allowed to bring Marilyn and me, the two youngest, to live with her at her parents home. Garry and Janice had to stay with our aunt Norma and our uncle Neil.

     We only lived divided up in this way for six weeks before my mother, in desperation, went back with my father after my grandfather suggested  placing us children in foster care. After that we moved with our parents toNorth Charlestown, New Hampshire.  We went to the oldest school there. this school has two rooms and still exists as an historical landmark. I thought it was strange to have to walk down the road with snow ploughed to the side of the road that was much higher than even my big brother who was then going on thirteen.  Not many weeks before we had been living in sunny southern California. I didn't remember snow even though I must have played in it before turning four when we were uprooted from Lynn to California.

     My mother and father didn't get along any better in North Charlestown than they had in California. I think my mother, having tasted freedom for a time, was more willing to fight back when my father mistreated any of us or her and I remember a big physical fight with pots and pans and other objects flying through the air in the kitchen. After that my we packed up and my father deposited my mother and all of us kids on his parents doorstep back in Beverly.

     I remember our family packing up and moving to our paternal grandparents hose from Charlestown, NH sometime just before or just after the Christmas of 1947.  Our grandparents had bought new doll carriages for Marilyn and me. They resembled the rall ones of the dat with grey painted wooden bodies and gray canvas-like sun bonnets and '''boots'' for the feet of the doll to fit into w2hen the carriages were arranged into a position for the dolls to sit.  Not long before we left Charlestown, Janice and I had had a screaming and yelling argument because, Janice, knowing that our grandparents had bought the doll carriages, asked me to give my, new-to-me, second hand tin doll stroller to a neighbor girl without telling me why. I refused and only gave in after I couldn't take hearing  her yell any more.

     We used two bedrooms in the finished section of our grandparents attic. Our brother had the front bedroom with the dormer window all to himself while we three girls and our mother had to share the other.

     Our uncle and his wife and baby girl were at that time, living in our grandparents second floor apartment and at some point they moved into a new home our uncle had bought or built in the neighborhood. Then, we moved into the apartment and I didn't know this until many decades later, but my sister Marilyn and I shared our father's childhood bedroom.  My sister by my father's second marriage told me that she slept in that room following our grandmothers deat in 1971 and that she's seen the ghosts of our father and our baby brother Kevin in the doorway.

     Garry had a room to himself and Janice and our mother shared a room. I remember that our uncle and his family's apartment  had a different layout than ours and that was because while  we were sleeping in the attic, our grandparents were in the process of adding a new kitchen on inside of a storage room at the back of the house. They did the same with the upstairs apartment so that when the apartment became ours, we lost one front room and gained a new kitchen. In fact, I think while it was being finished we still used the old kitchen as both a living room and kitchen combined because I remember the breakfast table being in that room st first. Later, I have a memory of eating meals in the new kitchen and a day when I leaned my forearm on a bee or wasp that had sneaked in through a hole in the screen.

     I started first grade - again for the fourth time that school year- at the original Ryal Side School in January and was hopelessly behind. Everything the teacher talked about flew over my head. I may as well have been attending school in a foreign country where everyone spoke a different language. My sister Marilyn must have been experiencing the same thing because she too, was kept back a year. Garry and Janice just about squeaked through by the skin of their teeth with low but passing grades.

     We walked back and forth the seven or eight blocks to school four times a day because in those days kids went home for lunch during an hour and fifteen minute break in elementary school, or, grade school as we called it then. Garry wasn't with us. He was already in junior high. It was just us three girls and our cousins, Brenda amd Neil. Neil always made remarks like; "Detour dog manure." and Brenda acted like a miniature Aunt Norma, her mom, by lecturing the rest of us on our apparrel, was it neat, did we have our mittens on and what have you. My favorite fantasy was that a manhole cover would be left off and she would fall through to China and never come back.

     One morning, when we were still eating breakfast in the living room slash dining room, my sister Marilyn had unbeknownst to us, mixed salt with the sugar in the sugar bowl to get back at Janice for some bad behavior on her part. Janice insisted that the salt taste was caused by morning mouth after just having awakened. Depite Janice's lofty protests I dumped my cereal  out and dumped out the sugar bowl and refilled it to prove to Janice and our mom that real sugar didn't taste like salt in the morning.

     Shortly after we moved in with our grandparents my sister Marilyn and I met a girl her age named Rusty. I don't remember how we met but was told years later when I asked Rusty -  who by that time had changed her nickname to Tini - that my sister Marilyn was bullying me in the front yard so Rusty jumped over the hedge and demanded that Marilyn leave me alone. they argued and then became friends. After that, Rusty began coming oc=ver to our house. I remember her coming over to our upstairs apartment so we must have moved there from the attic sometime between January and when school got out in June.

     My grandparents and my mother didn't approve ou us hanging out with Rusty. Rusty liked to get into trouble and her mother was a pretty and sexy looking woman who didn't dress like my mother, my grandmother or any of my aunts. She dressed like a teenager in shorts or jeans and wore her long hair down on her shoulders. She was said to be a little wild when her husband was at sea with the Merchant marines, which was most of the time. I thought she was exotic and beautiful though.

     Rusty and I played odd make believe things like making mermaids out of our small plastic dolls using socks for the fish part of the mermaid. We'd go from yard to yard in the neighborhood, wherever the tenants owned a birdbath and that would be our mermaids swimming hole. We'd move on to the next yard as soon as we were discovered and got yelled at.

     I think it must have been when we were living in Ryal Side that we began going to the movies downtown once in a while with Garry and Janice looking after Marilyn and me. I think the second movie I ever saw -  besides Fantasia when we were still in California - was The Prince and the Pauper when I was probably seven. It didn't make any sense to me. i was too young yet to follow the story line. I guess I was probably about eight when we saw The Boy With the Green Hair a story about a boy whose hair is turned green by the ghosts of children who have been killed in a war. The green hair was a reminder that war is bad for children. I still wasn't old enough to really understand it, but I liked it anyway because of the fascination of seeing a boy with green hair. Those are the only three movies I remember seeing before Janice left home and we moved to the basement apartment on Elliott Street just before I turned nine.


     There was a big girl in my grandparents neighborhood, in her teens who was wearing crutches and using braces because she'd had polio. Polio was something everyone feared and going to beaches, movies or anywhere else people congregated was considered dangerous. There was a woman namet Gert who, for decades, sat in a wheelchair on the corner of Knowlton and Danes streets and greeted everyone walking by. She died around 1995 but was a young woman when Marilyn and I and our friends passed by enroute to Dane Street beach in the summertime. We never knew why she was in a wheelchair, just that she was friendly and we always looked forward to seeing her. At some point after she died in the eighties or nineties someone put up a sign that read "Gert's corner" and eventually it disappeared.

     On those treks to the beach we often took a shortcut through Central Cemetary where Lucy Larcom, the poet and many of our other ancestors are buried. We liked to read the names on the funny old skinny stones and imagine that zombies were coming out of the big family vaults to chase us. Then we'd veer back onto Dane Street and always pop the light purple not - ready - to - bloom - yet flowers in front of a certain house, until the woman who lived there would come out onto the porch to yell at us.

     I remember Janice being there for a period of time when we lived with and then upstairs from our grandparents. There was a lot of conflict when Janice was with us because she tried to play little mother and many fights would break out between us kids because of it. Janice was sometimes sweet and diplomatic when trying to get Marilyn and me to tow the line, but more often she did it in a bossy and angry way. That was the reason for the salt in the sugar bowl incident. Another time while we were still in California, Marilyn broke Janice's balloon with a pin after I begged her not to. My mother would tell Janice to leave us little kids alone but sometimes Janice got unfair treatment as in the balloon incident.

     On the other hand, Janice could be a meanie too. She was the one who tricked me into believing she wouldn't eat my cupcakes after showing me a "safe" place to keep them, then telling me they evaporated, wrapping and all. These were the same brand that are still around today and come by twos in a clear wrapping in yellow of chocolate with a white fluffy filling.

     I thnk the daily bickering among us girls and our mother sticking up for us little kids led to Janice's moving out to our father and stepmother's house.  I wonder about what our collective childhoods would have been like if our mother hadn't given in to Janice's demands and allowed her to move out. I think things would have been less peaceful but I also think that our lives may have been better because I used to listen to Janice and take her advice when she wasn't yelling but was explaining instead. Without Janice, I really didn't have anyone to take an interest in me and guide me and Marilyn didn't either and we made some not - so - good choices  that would affect us for the rest of our lives.

                         Hiding Information -Fudging the truth?

     Janice asked Joan, her best friend, to have her cat, Suki, euthanized for her because, as she told Joan, she thought she would have to be hospitalized for depression. I just found out today, on July 31, 2007, about that when Joan and I were emailing about a photo of the cat.  Unknown to Joan, because I found the emails stored in Jan's computer later, Janice emailed two friends, one who lived in Oregon and another who lived in Orange County, California, about her cat Suki, who Jance said would have to be euthanized for chronic kidney infections.  Janice, however never told Joan about the cat having chronic kidney infections. According to Joan, the only reason Janice had decided to have the cat euthanized was because the cat wouldn't be able to survive, in Janice's opinion if Janice had to be hospitalized for a long time for depression.

     Hearing these differing explanations reinforced my sickening conviction that Janice was planning suicide.

     In a memoir left in her manuscript section in her computer Janice wrote about her little rented house on Tedmar Street in Anaheim where she lived for awhile before moving to the garden apartment on S. West Street. She wrote;

                                   Renaissance House

     '' Why did I name it that?  The white victorian house I was drawn to reside in when I first saw it in June, 1987."  Janice wrote that she felt she was attracted to the house because it resembled homes in New England that she remembered and that our family had lived in. She went on to say that she had a name for the next place she moved to, the garden apartment on S. West Street; " I wake today, January 1, 2000, in a new century, living in Reality Cottage, the apartment I moved to when I had to move out of Renaissance House.  The place I've made my real home, where I have continued to remember and become conscious.  The place I've moved into more and more, driving the ghosts of my abusers out."

     Janice continued on to say that she'd had amnesia about what our father did to her and that this amnesia left her defenseless against any new attacks of violence that her perpetrated against her because she would forget each attack right after it happened.  She wrote that she was having what she hoped were the final memories about being in his home with him alone in or around the first of January 1959, the same month that our half brother Kevin was born. She wrote about believing that our father sexually abused her while the Rose Parade was on television, because she has never been able to watch the parade clear through to the end without blanking out.  She thought she remembered that our stepmother had, around that time, separated from our father and that he wanted Janice to move in and keep house for him.  She wrote more about Reality Cottage; " Now I fell I understand why my precious home, reality cottage, felt so threatened by such a message invading my spiritual, physical, material home. "

     Janice goes on to discuss this subject further...
  

journal ...
     

                                         From My Journal

    Today is October 20, 2009.  Big Paul was crossing in front of a wide alleyway on Derby Street near Congress Street and Hawthorne Blvd last Thursday morning shortly before nine AM when his scooter he was riding (on the sidewalk) was hit by a van coming out. He was just coming onto the open area, just past Brown's Hardware Store when he spotted the van about fifteen feet in and moving towards the street. He thought the van driver saw him on the sidewalk and he continued on his way. The van hit his scooter when it was probably about six feet out from the edge of Brown's. The scooter tipped over throwing him out. There was a crunching noise. Two people and Big Paul pulled the scooter out from under the front of the van. He rode it into Brother's restaurant at the other edge of the gap and then the EMT's and the police came. The EMT woman asked him if his lips are always blue. She noticed his heart was in arrythmia. He had phoned Joey who had a bad cell phone connection, and then Chris and they showed up after the police had left but while the EMT's were still there and Joey told the EMT's to take his father to the hospital. He was in for about two and a half days. His heart is still in arrythmia. He might eventually have a little thing like a pacemaker put in to make his heart beat normally. Right now he is on medicine to get some medical issues stabilized. We're all worried.

    Today is September 13, 2006, a Wednesday, but it feels like a Tuesday because I have no class on Monday but I have one a day from Tuesday to Friday. I just came from Professor Fallon's class in Theater History II. He was talking about the Romantics that were so much like the Hippies of the sixties. He was delighted that I out of all the class, GOT what he was talking about. I think he's probably in his mid forties, and he read about the Romantics of 1870, and compared them to the Hippies.

 From my journal ~

    Just recently between late August and September 10th, two unexpected and sad things happened. Steve Irwin the Crocodile man, age 44 was stabbed in the heart by a stingray and died. Then on my son Joey's 44th birthday, Anna Nicole Smith gave birth to a baby girl, but three days later, she awoke to see her 20 year old son, asleep in a hospital chair in her room. She couldn't wake him up because, unbelievably, he had died. Sad things like this happen to non famous people every day but in most cases we don't know the people involved.

                                            Little Janice

   A few months after Janice died I began sponsoring a little girl in Manilla named Janice through Child Fund International, when it was still titled, Christian Childrens Fund.  

From my journal

Today is August 31, 2009 and my youngest son, chris's 25th birthday.
I  love him dearly.

On Saturday our beloved Senator '' Uncle Teddy'' Kennedy was laid to rest. He was our senator for forty eight years. Ordinary people were standing out on the Rte. 128 highway here in the rain holding flags and umbrellas with tears and raindrops running down their faces watching the funeral procession drive by on the way to the airport to take the senator first to Washington and then on to Arlington Virginia.

Oct. 18, 2009

My husband was hit by a van on his scooter Thursday morning the EMT and Er doctor noticed his heart was in fibrillation, not caused by the accident.  He has cardiovascular trouble and COPD so needs to use a medication like coumedan now to prevent clotting. He has a spot on one lung. cancer? bleeding? He has been losing weight since last year without trying to. The driver who hit his motorized scooter and caused him to fall off of it was driving out of a three  vans -wide space between two buildings and was facing out not backing out. The driver should have seen the scooter with it's orange flag on a five foot high pole. 

Nov. 7, 2009

Joey Jr. my grandson was born last night at 6:53 PM Janice would have loved him. So would Garry.








 MORE TO COME......