We used to set up paper targets in the house and shoot at it with a BB gun. One time my dad met some random younger guy at the liquor store and invited him over to shoot. I think maybe my dad was missing having guy friends and having to do the family thing full time. I thought it was creepy.
My oldest brother gave me a timex watch on my birthday in 1966. I liked it. There is a picture somewhere of me holding it up for the camera in my pajamas with our black lab asleep behind me. I feel bad that after he and my dad died I had both of their fancy watches and hid them in the house while I went to Scotland for graduate school and the maid found them and stole them.
My oldest brother, unlike me, was disciplined enough to keep a diary growing up. He kept them locked up and never let us read them. After he died I found them and am reading them because he was documenting the rest of our lives not just his. In one he found out that a girl in his class writes things down in a red book (just like he does) and he says “I must find out what it is.” Certainly the greatest incident of “not connecting the dots” in his life!!
1967
After we were grown we all found out that there was some child molestation going on at our elementary school. Nothing happened to me but I don’t know about my two older brothers. There are places in the diary where my older brother makes marks that look like crude multi-cross markings. Several pages have them only. One page reads “found out how to kill (the marks)”. At the end of the diary the mark is there with = “worried about you know what.”
I don’t know what but I am very suspicious.
vignettes 