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Hiding information / fudging the truth ~
From my Journal ~
Janice asked Joan 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 we were emailing about a photo of the cat. Unknown to Joan, Janice emailed two friends who lived far away about her cat that had to be euthanizrd for chronic kidney infections. Joan never heard Janice mentionanything about the cat having kidney infections although she and Janice saw each other almost daily and phoned each other several times daily nearly always.
This new information enforces my sickening conviction that Janice was planning suicide because apparently Janice wanted her other two friends that she was emailing, to think that the cat was in ill health when it was not. Joan was so sure that Janice's death was an accidental overdose but that was what Janice wanted close friends who lived near her to think. Joan and two others offered their homes to Jan so that she could stay with them until she was feeling better. She refused. I think Janice was telling her email friends in a roundabout way that she was going to kill herself or at least that she was frightened that she may.
To Janice's close - and living close in proximity to her - friends Janice said she was having difficulty remembering whether or not she had taken her antidepressants and antianxiety medicine. I think this sounds like she was prepping them to believe that her death was accidental should she go ahead with it. That would relieve them of guilt. One email pal was her long time confidant slash mother confessor. The other was her former mental facility pal who had suffered along with her from the same malady, bipolar disorder.
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Janice Never Seemed real
From My Journal ~
I never felt that Janice was like a real person. She always seemed like a movie star or some other type of famous celebrity. She dressed up almost always. I read in her writings that she felt this celebrity worship coming from everyone in our extended family. It made her uncomfortable because she felt that pressure was being put upon her to become famous. It was a shock when she left her opera training and ran away to California.
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I miss you Janice.
From My Journal ~
What happened to you Janice? Why were you taking all those pills for depression. Before we stopped communicating at the end of the summer of 2001, you'd never taken anything except for imipramine and not for a long time. Did you sit on the side of your bed with your pills layed out methodically on the bedside table because this time, you meant it?
Were you planning to lay down on your bed and "go" quietly before you were hit with a wave of nausea? Did you really die without your eyebrow pencil on to cover your missing outer halves of your brows? you who were always so meticulous about looking good to others when you went anywhere.
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I must have blocked it out ~
Janice Must Have Told Me ~
Janice must have told me by April of 1988, that she remembered our father had molested her as a child, that the memory had come to her in a dream, but I always thought that she never mentioned it until somewhere around November when she came for one last long visit before our mother died.
I later found a letter she'd sent to me in April of that year. I guess we Forget what we find too painful to hear. I believe that this was about the time she had been reading the book titled, My Father's House, by Sylvia Fraser PHd an author who wrote about her own repressed memories of sexual abuse perpetrated upon her by her father. When I read this book after Janice had told me that she'd read it I then realized that she'd incorporated many of the author's memories even down to names of characters into her own repertoire of recovered memories
Some time after that Jan said she remembered that she had been sexually abused by a friend of our father's named Buck. This was no one we knew as small children when our parents were still together or that she knew later when living with our father and stepmother. She had read about a man by that name in a true crime book called,; And The Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi. Buck was an actual person who killed a man and wife for their boat. Scenes from the made - for -television move mimicked some of Janices murder memories as told by her to me, as did names and scenes.
My Father's House, When Rabbit Howls and , And The Sea Will Tell were only three of a number of books Janice mentioned. Buck was a character in the last one, and other events she said she remembered were from that one as well as the others. She mentioned those and other books, movies and articles. when Eileen Franklin's information came out in the press about a crime she said she remembered her father committing.J anice copied from Eileen's book about the crime as well. I was up and down with my feelings because I was thinking that Janice was making things up to write a book. She once became angry with me telling me that she didn't plan to keep all of any money she might earn from a book just for herself. I was stunned to hear her say a thing like that. I don't know if she even knew how bad that sounded. Nevertheless by 1999 I was convinced finally that Janice believed these things.
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My aunt Norma died ~
From my Journal on May 26, 2007~
My aunt Norma was 92 when she died. The last time I saw her she gave me what she believed was a photo of my younger sister, Midgie on a pony. I knew this wasn't Midgie but took the photo home. Later I realized it looked like my big sister Janice Knowlton's baby pictures. Then I realized this was a photo that Aunty had taken of Janice when she was about a year and a half or so old in the photo. What a happy surprise. I'd never seen the photo before and I don't believe anyone else had. Norma was still single when Janice and my brother Garry were little and loved being an aunt. She loved telling the story of the little outfit that she'd put on layaway at WT Grant's in Beverly, Mass. and made payments on once a week to have it in time for Christmas. It was a wonderful gift to me that my aunt gave me this photo before she died.
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Remembering my Two grandmothers~
From My Journal ~
I remember them most more so than my two grandfathers because they were the ones who interacted with us, their grandchildren, while the grandfathers stood on the sidelines, mostly just sitting in front of the then, black and white television sets watching baseball, the Red Sox to be specific. Even those baseball memories are precious though. To this day I still feel nostalgic hearing baseball on TV even when I'm not watching it.
I killed My Poor Cat Blackie ~
Today is Friday, May 25th 2007 and I've not written since last year before college classes started in the fall, because l get so carried away trying to remember everything about my life and writing it down that l neglect my studies. There is one exception, and that is the sad news that my two old cats have died before they could enjoy another spring and possible summer. The younger one Shilah was always cold so l think it was the cancer that came back someplace where we were unable to detect it. Blackie, the twenty year old had failing kidneys, heart and liver but l killed him when l brought a Lilly plant into the house and didn't know they are deadly poison. He had been ill but this was something that caused him a cruel death and l will always feel very badly about it. So l did write briefly that our two elderly kitties died in April. They are buried together in the Pet Memorial Park in Foxboro, Massachusetts. I miss them both terribly and their deaths were the continuation of the sadness of losing my aunt, my uncle, my brother and my friend Ernest Dempsey who was like an uncle to my youngest son Chris. All of these deaths, including the cats happened over a twelve month period, from April 2006 to April 2007~
I had intended to post here about my two grandmothers and so l will continue~
My two grandmothers came to mind for two reasons; One, l was looking at a photo of the loft in Grandma Glady's summer camp in Amesbury Mass, where all the beds were lined up in a row. The other reason was that l bought wooden clothespins and was hanging laundry when l remembered that Gladys used the one piece wooden pins that could be turned into dolls. She had two or three long wooden poles with a notched end in each that were used to prop the lines in her big back yard up to keep the blankets and sheets from dragging on the ground. They had old fashioned metal lawn furniture and a stone fireplace, built by my grandfather, my father and my uncles. Every summer they held cookouts in the big back yard where they had one or two very long family style wooden picnic tables with the attached benches. My grandmother always used whiite linen tablecloths on them.
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In memory of our pets~
From My Journal ~
Our two elderly cats, Shilah and Blackie died in April 2007. It always hurts when pets die. We will miss them very much ~
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My Best Friend Or Not ?
From My Journal ~
Dinsi always called me her best friend. I never felt that I really was because she treated me bad in so many ways over so many years. I didn't cry when she died and it wasn't until nine years after her death that I finally was able to feel her love for me and to be ably to cry over losing her and that was because of her son Peter who told me how much she had loved me.
I wrote something similar to this and labeled the same way early on in my special memories section on my website. I had changed Dinsi's name to Mitzi for her children's sake but then decided to change it back since Peter was responsible for making it possible to resolve my hangup about his mother and my best friend. I am grateful to Peter for giving me back my best friend.
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The Man In The Cage ~
This must have been the time my father ran away with Kay on the anniversary of all the deaths of Uncle Clifton, Midgie and Sandra. My mother started out to walk to the Westminster Police Station with the four of us kids. I had a stomachache so she had me climb into the no longer used big grey baby carriage. This was one she must have used for all of us and still had after the babies died the year before.
When we got to the police station, which I imagine was for Mama to report my Daddy missing in order to be eligible for temporary welfare benefits, I was startled by seeing a man standing inside of a human sized cage. It was of course a holding cell but I'd never seen one and was at an impressionable age.
Later I was to see men in a chain gang coming down a staircase in some courthouse in Salem, Massachusetts. I think this had to be a time when my mother had to go to court to ask for the judge to order my father to pay child support. I believe we were coming up the stairs when the men were coming down. Things like that make an impression on a child.
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Stirring Up Nails ~
My mother told me my father used to put on a pair of white gloves and check for dust above the doorways. This from someone who'd never been in the armed forces. This particular day, I was about five years old and my father was in a bad mood. He was finished with treating me nicely because I hadn't died like the babies and I was big enough that he could abuse me right along with my bigger siblings.
This was the day when Daddy, in one of his moods lined all of us kids up in front of the kitchen stove in order of age and size and demanded to know which one of us had stirred up his nails in his toolbox. How many fathers would even notice or care if the nails were stirred up as he put it. Only an idiot or a fanatic would go ballistic over something like that. Only an idiot or a fanatic would even notice of care whether or not his nails had been stirred around. He wasn't an idiot. I rest my case.
After this day I went back to skulking around trying to make myself invisible to my daddy. The honeymoon was over for me.
Why do I call you Daddy ?
I should call you "beast from hell"
I've had to spend my lifetime
living with PTSD and most of that time
not even knowing this mad malady
had a name ~
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Mumps and the immodest Knowlton clan ~
My sister Mem gave me the mumps after coming down with them herself first. I think I was about seven and Mem was eight and a half. Poor Mem, or "Misery Mem" as our mother called her, because Mem ALWAYS came down sick first, before anyone else. I swear, if I had died or gotten bad sick and developed some permanent damage, that Mem would never have forgiven herself. The guilt of having given measles to our younger siblings, Midgie and Sandra, who later died from complications, was almost enough to do her in as it was. Mem was as a child and always has been tremendously generous with gifting friends and family with gifts, money that she doesn't even have enough of for herself, food, clothing or a place to stay. She is like the biblical character Job or the Statue of Liberty's poem. In her mind, she will never be able to assuage the guilt.
We were still living with Grandma and Grandma Knowlton, in their section of their house, I think when we came down sick. This was because we were together in a double bed set up in Grandma Glady's first floor beauty parlor instead of upstairs in our bedroom or in the attic bedroom. I remember being surprised by the lumps coming out on each side of my neck, rather than on my cheeks, as I'd supposed mumps were supposed to be. Man, it HURT ! We had fevers and the runs. Grandma put a rubber sheet on the bed.
It bothered me then and it still bothers me, that Grandma was insensitive in that she wouldn't allow us to wear anything on our bottoms, even though we were covered with a sheet and blanket. This was because we kept messing up everything that we wore on our bottoms. Nevertheless, we felt humiliated, and especially so, because our mother was a very modest person, who raised us to be the same. The Knowlton's were respectable, yet strange in that anyone could walk in on anyone else in the family, while they were underdressed or half dressed, and it was, " Aw, I've seen that before, it's no big deal." or, "Aw, Don't be so modest, you don't have anything that anyone else hasn't got ! "
I hope there is now a shot to prevent mumps. I know there is one to prevent measles which did my first five children no good, because it came out too late for them too. My youngest born many years after the others, had the shot but by then they had stopped the shots to prevent smallpox which makes me uneasy for I know that the smallpox bacteria is still kept on ice in laboratories in several countries. Who's to say it won't get out somehow, by error or by some devilishness on the part of some crazed group of terrorists?
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Grazabel Moey the cat ~
He was the only surviving kitten of Lady Ebony and her litter. Mama had a cat mamed Moey as a child. One of the cats Mem or I dragged home as kids was all black. She had a litter of four kittens and did, probably from some childbirth complication. Mama couldn't afford to pay for animal doctors let alone people docters and anyway the cat seemed fine until after the births. This was the litter we fed with doll bottles. only a grey male survived. Mem called him Grazabel. Mama fell in love with this one remaining kitten. He looked just like her Moey.
I don't remember how long we had him exactly but when he was three or four years old, Moey died after catching a cold. He must have had pneumonia but Mama had no money for a vet and she ordered us not to let him go outside. He was relentless and found a way though. I think he was dying and went to find a place to hide. I don't remember if we found him in the neighbor's woodpile next door in the back of the garden where he loved to hide even when he was healthy.
I don't remember why the window was open. These were little cellar style windows because this was a basement apartment. It must have been because of the heat from the steam pipes on the ceiling making it stifling indoors and we must have thought that if we cracked open the window a little he couldn't get out. What he needed was penicillin but our mother just didn't have the money to pay for the vet.
Mama never forgave herself. I remember I had surgery two years in a row around the time we had him and the medical bills that unpaid until they went into the file of a local attorney. In later years I would find the weekly fifty cent payment receipts that my mother saved all those many years for my hospital and doctor bills for ear and tonsil surgeries. I remember the nagging letters; " Mrs. Knowlton, why haven't you paid on this...?"
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My brother and Marilyn Monroe ~
1953 was a landmark year in the magazine world. The first TV Guide was published and so was the first Playboy magazine. My brother bought both. Marilyn was proudly displayed on the wall of his den style bedroom on the new Playboy calendar. Her naked and beautiful body was descreetly coverd by an overlay of a black lace Teddy. It was the beginning of a new era.
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The great broken window caper ~
If it hadn't been Garry's window, I don't think I would have been quite as afraid of fessing up about it. Garry had a slap first and ask questions later attitude. I was slapped in the face by him at least three times that I can remember during my childhood. If he had slapped my arm instead I wouldn't have minded as much by far. Face slapping was too reminiscent of my father's abuse not only because of the physical pain but somehow a slap in the face is demeaning. He never did it to his children because he had matured enough to know there was something wrong about it.
A big rock placed right in the center of a basement den - style teenage boys bedroom covers a multitude of sins. At least it did in my case. Garry never suspected that Tommy Page a neighbor boy and I had caused his top opening hinged window to break upon Tommy's third entrance into the room. This turned out different than the time I lit a match to see how the colors in the dark after waiting until all including me had gone to bed.
And then there was the match lighting. I wanted to see the colors that were displayed when a match was lit. I don't know why I didn't just ask my mother to allow me to light one with the lights out in the first place but I guess I didn't think lighting one match and putting it out in a glass of water would be a problem. I brought the matches and the glass of water to my room after everyone had gone to bed but my room had no door. As luck would have it as soon as I struck the match, Garry opened his bedroom door to go into the bathroom. Garry was able to see the flare of the match. Slap!
When Garry was young he used to slap our faces first just like our father did and ask questions later. That was the only thing I didn't like about Garry. I hated being slapped in the face. My mother only slapped me twice, but never in the face.
There was too much space between our ages for us to ever get to know each other as individuals and to just talk about whatever was going on and reason it out. l always listened to those who took the time to explain things reasonably to me or to ask why l had done something they didn't understand. My childhood was always avoiding trying to explain the whys of anything to avoid being slapped or yelled at. Later we became friends but he lived far away by then and wasn't much for writing or even later when he was so ill emailing.
He was always busy until he was forced to slow down and then time ran out. I really wanted to talk with him more about many things, like childhood memories. After he died his wife told me that she had always had to be the disciplinarian because he couldn't bring himself to punish their children. I can only surmise from this that he grew up and became a kinder, gentler and more humane person who regretted the times he reacted as our Dad had when he was young.
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Catching hell in the Catholic Church ~
This was another time when Dinsi wanted to do something nutty and like a stooge I went along with it. I was like Beaver from the TV show getting into trouble with Whitey or one of his other mischief making friends. If Dinzi only didn't insist on always sitting in the front row we'd have been allright. She was fooling around waving a handkerchief back and forth and giggling. The priest told us to go into his office after mass was over. We should have run off then but we were more afraid of the pastor than we had been of the cop in the bottle stealing incident. We got a big bawling out. Lucky for us we weren't Catholics. We only had to say the Our Father without the Rosary or any of the other Catholic prayers.
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Sailor suits and Billy ~
Dinsi and I met Billy at the Ware Theater not long before her daughter Cindy was born. It was a warm raining off and on day in late August or early September. Billy was a handsome 19 year old with blue eyes, curly light brown hair and a turned up nose. He looked something like Kevin Bacon only shorter. We were both about the same height. Billy came over to me in the lobby and started to flirt wanting to know my name. Dinsi looked torn between agony and the green eyes of jealousy. Billy barely acknowledged her when we introduced ourselves. We went back to our seats after the break and then when the movies were over - double feature - Dinsi wanted to run away towards my house. I knew she wanted to keep me and Billy away from each other. I was interested in Billy, but not seriously because I was only fifteen and I knew my mother would never let me date him.
About two months after Cindy was born, late in September of 1956, Billy and Dinsi hooked up and were a couple for at least part of 1956 and 1957. He happened to rent a room at her neighbor Helen Rusts apartment. Dinsi's mother and father had rented in the same building and after a while Dinsi had her own apartment there too. I met Helen only twice that I can remember. The first time she made fun of me when Dinsi was teaching me how to dance because I danced like a dork before that word was coined. The other was after Dinsi and I bought our white buck shoes. They ran out of my size so I bought the next size up. My legs were skinny and the big shoes only exaggerated that fact. Helen made sure I was kept aware of it because we went over her house so that Dinsi could see Billy who was boarding there. Helen was probably in her early thirties when we knew her. Helen wasn't pretty. She was unattractive. Her figure wasn't good either. Maybe she was jealous of me. I don't know. She wasn't someone who would make fun in a way that you knew she was being friendly but in a way that you knew she really meant it. I don't know what ever happened to her over the years. I remember only because of her cruelty.
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A valentine's Day dance at Memorial Jr. high School and Maryanne smoking reefers
I always looked up to Mem and Dinsi because they were two years ahead of me in school and I thought they were cool, but Dinsi always looked up to Maryanne a girl theid age who ran with the wild reefer smoking crowd and hung arount the Beverly Ice Cream Parlor commonly known as The Greeks on Cabot street. I was about thirteen when Dinsi and I went to the Valentine's Day dance at Memorial Jr High. We never danced, just spent time looking around and taking pictures with Dinsi's Brownie camera. We went into the girls restroom and while we were there she took one of Maryanne standinfg inside of a stall with a tough look on her face and a reefer hanging out of her mouth. Maryanne was like the leader of the Pink Ladies from the television series, Happy Days. Compared to Maryanne we were wimps. Even Dinsi with her I'm so tough act seemed wimpy when standing next to Maryanne. That was why Dinsi always looked up to her.
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Busted, A wound in the heart ~
From my Journal ~
This was the original title of my manuscript about losing Janice to suicide. I started writing about my sister after she died suddenly on March 5, 2004. I was going to write a book about her but was having a hard time writing it. I then turned my attention to putting up a website for my children and grandchildren. After Ann Rule, an author of many books whom I call a friend suggested that I turn my story into a book I decided to transfer what I wrote about Jan to this book in progress site.
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The financial aid officer ~
I think this happened in the fall of 1978. I had a work study job in the financial aid office of a college where I was a student.This man if you can call him a man, was talking out of turn to both he permanent and work study employees. I'd worked as a teacher aide with the CETA program as an off campus college work study student in the spring of 1978. I wanted to come back in the fall but the supervisor who was later fired for cocaine use and stealing funds from CETA was going ballistic at everyone under her supervision. I decided to reluctantly go elsewhere before I lost out on a work study position altogether after she kept not getting around to signing my new work contract.
I was stuck with only a few job positions left so I took one in the financial aid office along with some other students. My job ended up being short lived because the supervisor of that office a new one who had replaced the woman who had run it and who had accepted a new position somewhere else, was making sexual remarks to the female workers. He told one of the permanent employees that she had nice big breasts and told a young woman that women love to be raped. This after he had asked for volunteers to work later to catch up on work that was needed. She expressed her fears of a rapist who had already attacked other students on campus after dark.
I wanted to go straight to the dean who later became the college president and write down everything and present it to her. I was fighting clinical depression at the time which plagued me often and did not feel that I had the emotional strength fot this fight. After all the women in the office merely laughed when this revolting creature behaved in this way. I pictured me against the lot of them and him being called a liar or something like that. I couldn't handle that or staying in my work study job so I quit both school and my work study job without any fanfare, just walked out and sent a note in to the registrar giving some excuse to drop out.
Many years later after my sister died I wrote to the president of the college and explained what had happened. She wrote that she would have done something about the situation if she had only known.
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