It was 2:10 am in St Joseph's Hospital in Ann Arbor. He had been listening to me scream bloody murder all through the labor extremes from about midnight, though the labor notices were begun around 10 am in the form of butterflies around my hips that tickled their way around to the front of my middle to disappear into my navel and let Glen know we were going to meet early the next morning.


That was what he was hearing, as he grew in utero, he had heard me play piano and sing, he heard my mom and dad talking to me and he heard his father getting closer and closer rather often; his father, the sad man perpetually in a torment that only the incest victim endures.

He heard his grandmoms, both decent loving people, one of whom never saw him after he was an infant, but who spirited herself, her daughter and two sons away a bit more northerly (Saginaw) of the mitten to protect them from any echo of the man who had made their lives a living hell, one with moments of sanity and humor and sweetness. The latter bits of reality stemming directly from the grand woman who never saw her grand son again but died longing to have that desire assuaged.

Her husband was not fit for the appellation, he was a spouse, he was an albatross, he was a constant source of fear and intimidation. The man had steel blue eyes, black hair, very much resembled another short man, one who was a tv actor, playing the good guy in Wild Wild West. But the grand father in question was a violent and terrifying man, brilliant but cruel, constantly in control and not in a good way, ever.

So, Glenn became a boy in the care of my mother, my father, and myself. He had the kind of home that children wish for, especially when life hands them the kind of home his father became a boy within, along side of his brothers and one sister. That sister is a whole story in her own right.

In their dreams, children might hope and even pray for a granddad like my dad. He was one who shows a child (if they but listen and watch carefully) how the immediate world works such that they might have a sense of the world as a reasonable and rational place. To such fortunate few the world is a place within which to laugh, love and thrive.