I hold my sister Jane blameless in all things due to her having suffered so much from experiments to her "female plumbing" by my mother and Dr. Fowler in Cincinnati, OH, the first few years after her birth. I feel certain that the long periods of time she was examined under the fluoroscope -- including the anatomy lessons Mom and Doc Fowler gave me -- are why she has to watch so closely for cancer, although they really didn't know then how destructive the early fluoroscope's high-powered x-rays were then (1953-1956). Also, Jane survived a botched assasination attempt the spring of her Junior year at UNC Chapel Hill, but did suffer some minor brain injury.
My FAREWELL TO THE DEVILS address:
First of all, as you can tell, I survived overnight in my car despite having the most retched cold I’ve had in years – no thanks to my immediate family, who could have simply paid for a cheap motel room for me online. But it only went down to about 34 here last night, so no big deal. Kenans are indeed like cockroaches – you simply can’t kill us unless we want to be killed. As I’ve pointed out before, my great-grandma Julia Pridgeon (Bordeaux) Kenan was the oldest surviving Confederate widow in NC (portrayed –fictionalized -- by Faye Dunaway in relative-by-marriage Allan Gurganus’s book and award-winning TV movie, THE OLDEST LIVING CONFEDERATE WIDOW TELLS ALL, 1989.
The longest surviving survivors of both the Lusitania (Owen Kenan, physician to Henry Flagler) and the Titanic (Yes, Kate Winslet portrayed a Kenan) were both blood relatives. Also, a careful reading of THE KENAN FAMILY, Mercer University Press, 1999, reveals that the American Psychiatric Association was headed by Kenan relatives (remember, they are descended from the 3 original brothers and few have the surname) most of the 20th Century. In a separate event, the psychiatrist whose work led to taking homosexuality OFF the list of mental illnesses was a Kenan – and, I suppose, no wonder: among Kenans in an economic class to afford it, about 1/3 of the men never married, another third did, but had life-long devoted male secretaries, and the final third seem to have actually been heterosexual.
Kenans commonly married first cousins – a technique that preserved estates and guaranteed a spouse who understood the peculiarity of being a Kenan!
I don’t know why Mom called cousin Nell to claim I intended to move in with her. I had hoped to run across her at church (which I didn’t), and considered asking if I could do a load of laundry at her house. Then yesterday, I thought maybe she would put me up for a night or two until my cold broke. But Mom, ever destroying anything that might help me, had proactively warned Nell with lies. And she claims she does it because she loves me so much. LOL!!!
My first true wake up clue to Mom’s being the Devil incarnate was in 1980, when I accompanied her and Dad from Hampstead, NC to my Meyer first cousin, Karen’s, first wedding. As I tried to slumber on the back seat of their yellow, Olds 88 land-yacht, Mom piped up in an angry voice to Dad, “Bill, I’m going to give that asshole the finger!” That certainly got my attention. She had always been such a goody-goody Catholic in speech, but I guess forgot I was in the car. She was annoyed that we’d been stuck climbing a two-lane mountain road behind a semi.
Then, at the wedding, almost as soon as I sat down to talk to Karen's sister Jan and meet Jan's husband, Kim Opperman, for the first time, Jan said to me (with pressure-of-speech), “Dad (my Uncle Bob) said the reason your mother came to Karen’s wedding but not mine is because I married a Jew!” I was shocked and immediately denied it could be true, but I confronted Mom with it, and she rushed to Uncle Bob’s room and threatened to brain him with a cast iron frying pan if he ever said such a “lie” again.
Later, Aunt Pat, whose divorce from Bob may or may not have been finalized (and Pope-authorized annulment, despite three children – yes, Kristen, the 4th, was not fathered by Uncle Bob, an open secret), showed up with her 10-years-younger fitness-trainer squeeze in a shag-carpeting-lined conversion van, high on cocaine and swilling a Martini, which she dropped and broke on the steps up to the entrance.
After that wedding, I knew there were at least skeletons in the Meyer closet – although, amazingly, I had not yet connected the significance of the swastikas on the dinner plates we were raised with in the 1950s and 60s. That came much later – as did Aunt Pat’s and Aunt Jean’s denial that they had ever seen swastikas on grandma’s good china – Mom’s claim of where she got them.
And yes, the swastika was a good luck symbol before the Nazis co-opted it, but what sane mother raised her children eating off swastika plates when the TV showed Nazi atrocities???
It was later that Uncle Bob began his second career: traveling to watch (drool over) college athletes all around the Midwest, and later still that he admitted to me that he was gay.
No wonder Mom forced him to go to VA hospitals, where, with her Republican allies, she was able to force him to take double dose Lithium, which not only gave him the shakes so he could not practice dentistry, but gave him “chemical diabetes,” of which he died after a slow, painful decline as his body parts were chopped off one-by-one, beginning with his toes.
I do have in her ORIGINAL hand (not photo-copy), a document dated BEFORE Bob was put on Lithium on which Mom wrote in her distinctive handwriting “1.5 Lithium = chemical diabetes.” 1.5 is double the therapeutic dosage of Lithium for Bipolar Disorder as measured by blood level. My decimal might be in the wrong place, but not my understanding. (Bob’s “monopolar” diagnosis was a sham. He simply had reactive depression – and for good reason!!!)
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