On April 18, 2024 I woke up at 4:45 to take Abby, our oldest Tsi Tzu. outside to relieve herself. Unfortunately upon coming inside she began to vomit and eventually my wife and I were up together cleaning up dog vomit. Yesterday, I was helping my mother prepare some online orders for a few birthday presents in the family, it took all the time we had till she had an appointment to run off and see my brother in the Behavioral Medicine Clinic. Earlier that day I visited my godfather who seemed to be in very poor health, although we did not really visit because he remained asleep while I was there. Our evening together included a pleasant interlude at a local art gallery and museum exhibiting young artists including the daughter of one of her coworkers. We followed the visit to the gallery with participating in a rosary at church for three children having open heart surgeries in the coming days. My life today is one in which I am very aware of suffering and in which I expect there to be many troubles around me which I cannot easily address. But in 1978 in Cuernavaca, our family were hoping to start a new phase as Spanish speaking missionaries in Mexico. We had a kind of optimism. Part of it came from the climate and the place we were in at the time. Weather still affects my mood I suppose.
The springtime weather is pleasant here (and we know in south Louisiana that for many of us Summer will be much harsher) the weather in January 1977 in Cuernavaca was pleasant as well. The Soviet Union had not nearly fallen in those days and Leonid Illich Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the extremely powerful executive of the USSR and Alexei Kosygin was the premier of the Soviet Union. There had been a time when the offices were fused but separating them had not greatly liberalized power relations. There was a Ukrainian- American at IDEAL studying with us who was very eager to oppose the Soviet backed communist machinations in Latin America. But he made it clear that he did not believe anti-communism was his primary motivation. He was anti-Russian every bit as much as Anti-communist. His family had a Ukrainian RIte Catholic branch and a Ukrainian Orthodox Branchand according to him, both sides had been persecuted horribly by Russian backed political figures and thugs and the Russian Orthodox Church. I was rather an admirer of Russian art and culture. It was not easy to hear what he said then. But today it seems more meaningful.
On April 17, 2024 my brother with Prader-Wili Syndrome was admitted to a Behavioral Medicine Clinic. I feel sad about that and I remember the year and half during the COVID-19 pandemic health and labor crisis when I worked as his caregiver. It made a lot of difference to me, to see him as a member of a health club with a pool. Itmeant something to me to see him going to museums, visiting parks and historical sites and doing things like art class. But this is a different time. Of course on Holy Thursday he did have his feet washed at church and that was very cool. I look at his life and mine and I think of all that is changeable over the course of my life.
April 16, 2024 was a day to try to make the best of some good things in the world we live in and the lives we lead in it. It was a day to hear that my mother and my brother who was born with Prader-WIli Syndrome were having a problem that was going to involve the police. I was also very busy at some levels and yet between two insurance training meetings online, cooking two meals with enough leftovers to share for at least a few days. I think of SImon’s mutation and its consequences as do the Fabry mutations of my nephews, the spina bifida issues of my aunt, the mosaic Fabry of my father, the cystic fibrosis of my niece, the varied freakish conditions that my grandmother concealed from all but a very few. It is through the lens of my own family experience that I see some of the experiences in this memoir that are hardest to process and believe. I am pretty sure that I also am different than other people. We are all different. Clara and I watched X-Men First Class on April 16. Movies about mutants with special powers would not be as popular as they are. People are aware that there are secret differences between their won inner lives and the world around them. I believe that is the human condition, But I also believe that I am more different than most.
On April 15, 2024 it was tax day in the United States of America. My wife Clara is an inactive CPA and the former comptroller of a large law enforcement institution. We filed our tax returns early and got our refunds, that was great.Today my mother treated Clara and I , her new companion Donald and her brother Bruce’s widow out for dinner at Richard’s Seafood Patio. It is an old association or connection for each of us to our past to eat there. It was the first time Doanld and Ihad ever really conversed, although I think we had spoken before. My mother had a large bruise on her face which she covered in makeup. She said she fell and hit her face on the floor. I know she has had a number of falls and injuries. I hope that she is simply falling, because although that is upsetting, most other possible causes are more upsetting. She paid with the proceeds of the only oil and gas check she ever gets, we all ate for about as much money as the Social Security awards for a death benefit on a fully vested person. I wonder how much we paid for a month of room and board ( we did get most of our board there) at the house across the street from IDEAL. I very much doubt that it cost the four of us more than the figure on the tab for dinner tonight. Much of that financial contrast is related to the inflation of the US currency over the years. However, a great deal of the difference is also attributable to the fact that Mom had a lot more money on this recent Monday evening than she would have had in any account under her name at the time we were in Cuernavaca in 1977 or 1978. Times and circumstances change. They change in both big and small ways and both very quickly and gradually over time. We are all living in a series of changes that distance each of us from the events that we remember. In my current project I am trying to communicate to a theoretical reader the memories and remembered events that seem alien even to me.
One day in Cuernavaca, we were in a more or less optimistic mood as a small family processing the news that the church authorities had agreed it would be good for us to work with a recognized lay evangelist, WIll Rodriguez. This long commissioned lay evangelist would help facilitate us starting a family base of ministry. Mom and Dad were eager to speak in terms of “we” including me in those days. It was always important to them that I was buying in and they were not responsible for missing out on my education. They coached me to say that I was homeschooled when it suited them, they said “The Lord is educating our son” when that suited them. Each of these presentations of my situation was a part of the truth.
Another part of the truth was that (although there had been no other people under age in the classes at IDEAL) I had been involved in school related activities about 11 hours a day, not counting the pottery class I took and other enrichment activities. It was the most intense educational experience in an institution that I had ever known. I made very good progress and a whole new world was opening up before me. This was a world of speaking Spanish, eating and understanding a breath of Mexican cuisine and being able to converse about the arts and crafts of Mexico. I could see from my rich educational experience in a real school that had just ended, that in practice my parents were still providing real opportunities for my education. However, I knew that I was not likely to be happy in school. I knew my parents resented me in a way that most parents did not, but I knew they loved me too. I also knew that parents around the world sold their children into slavery, killed them, pimped them out and beat or crippled them to make them beggars. People avoided pregnancy, had abortions, committed infanticide, abandoned their infants and placed children up for adoption and into the foster care system. It was known to me that regents had killed the heirs apparent they were to guard in wealthy dynasties. I also knew that families starved their children to death in slums because they felt too powerless to act on their behalf any longer. I was not one who compared my parents and their behavior only to the television fare of the 1950s or the family comedies that were to follow.They were not necessarily better or worse than the parents in Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family or even the more complex and exotic portrayals in films such as The Sound of Music or It’s A Wonderful Life. I saw my parents as I saw lots of other parents, it was my primary objective to maximize the good they could do for me and themselves and minimize the harm. I was also very much inclined to believe they would do a lot of good and create a lot of opportunities for good for all of us if they did not get all or some of us killed. But I did worry that they did not see the risks I saw, at least they did not see them at all in the same way. I already had a sense at the age of 13 that cataclysms swept over huge numbers of people on rare occasions. Wars, plagues, depressions and natural disasters hit millions unexpectedly. Many of these people did not seem to process whatever the horrors and dangers of their daily lives and the daily lives of their society might be. For many people when they were caught up in a once in a lifetime tragedy, life seemed something like a fabric of good and definitely reasonably normal circumstances, so when very bad things happened to their whole society and environment it was almost incomprehensible. There were others who were prophets in the wilderness, survivalists, hermits, recluses and perpetual fugitives – for these kinds of people the world was always dangerously and tragically flawed and often evil. A third kind of people were adventurers who flirted repeatedly with dangers of all kinds. I saw in our family an unusual mix of all three perspectives on how the outside world interacted with our family.
But whatever we did expect on that January morning in Cuernavaca we did not expect the news that would come about my uncle Jed when we were only a very long day’s journey away if we really tried to return to Louisiana for a family emergency. We felt in Tonga that we could not go home for crises in the extended family. But we had not really considered ourselves to be far from home in central Mexico. That sense of distance was about to change..
I am 59 years old and getting closer and closer to the end of my life’s journey than the start of it by any reasonable calculation. The probabilities of me living to 118 are very minute. According to some actuarial tables and life expectancy calculators I should live to just over 80 on the very course calculator of being a male U.S. resident who is currently 50 years old in 20224. Life is uncertain, so is the time of death. But we can all pick some future date at which we are fairly certain that we will not be alive. To believe in an afterlife is still to know that whatever it is, it is not this life. Death remains a painful farewell, the dissolution of the bonds that make up the body that whatever else we are may animate. Just before we left Cuernavaca it seemed that death might be coming for my uncle Jed who had gone with us to Europe and lived with us in our London flat when school was not in session. At that time, Jed Gerard Gremillion was 23 or 24 years old. Jed was very much in the prime of his life and making great strides, his parents had both attended the university but not finished. His oldest sister and oldest brother had both attended and not finished a degree (Mom would later finish hers). But Jed had graduated from LSU and was enrolled in Loyola Law School. He had gone quickly through a challenging undergraduate curriculum and married a very appealing young woman who got her degree from Saint Mary’s Dominican College in New Orleans, where my wife Clara got her degree.
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It turned out that I was never going to be able to sit back in the glow of secure success and reflect on all of my path through life. I have much to be grateful for but also a great deal of remembered pain to resolve. In this memoir, I will cross borders between many perceptions. In 1978 there were still many people in Mexico who believed an unidentified flying object that could not be readily explained had caused a plane to crash in Zacatecas in 1974. On June 7, 1976 there had been a major earthquake in Mexico CIty; a 6.4 magnitude quake. It was still much talked about. The mess of details that get turned over and twisted over the years are numerous indeed. Only those families who truly have a chronicler for each minute can avoid any confusion. We had a mix of publicity and obscurity over the years. There was so much change that I must struggle to sequence all my memories.
When one adds to the complexity of the task and entire lack of interest in my own life it seems absurd to write a memoir. But there are no outcomes for the future which do not involve me speculating as to the future as we live out the present in a world of change.
On April 15, 2024 Donald Trump began his trial as to whether or not he committed campaign finance crimes when he had Michael Cohen pay porn star Stormy Daniel a large sum of money to keep silent about her sexual involvement with Donald Trump. I was not sure if this trial would start before the election. It reminded me of the role that sex plays in politics. I think it is interesting to consider who Stormy Daniels is:
Stephanie A. Gregory Clifford (born Stephanie A. Gregory; March 17, 1979), known professionally as Stormy Daniels,[7][8] is an American pornographic film actress, director and former stripper. She has won many industry awards and is a member of the NightMoves Hall of Fame, AVN Hall of Fame and XRCO Hall of Fame. In 2009, a recruitment effort led her to consider challenging incumbent David Vitter in the 2010 Senate election in her native Louisiana.
Daniels became involved in a legal dispute with U.S. president Donald Trump in 2018. Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen paid $130,000 in hush money to silence her about an affair she says she had with Trump in 2006. Trump has denied the affair and accused her of lying. The trial against Donald Trump is set for April 15, 2024.
Early life
Daniels’s parents, Sheila and Bill Gregory, divorced about three or four years after she was born. She was then raised by her mother.[1][9]
She graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1997 and considered becoming a journalist.[1]
Daniels said she “came from an average, lower-income household… there [were] days without electricity”,[10] and she has described herself as coming from a “really bad neighborhood.”[1] During high school, Daniels had a job answering phones at a riding stable.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormy_Daniels (as of April 14, 2024 at 5:30 p.m. CDT)
Stormy Daniels is one example of many sexual partners of the powerful who have become involved in the machinations of power themselves. There are other sides to the questions of sex and power and its permutations.
The love of brothers and sisters is something I have had time and opportunity to reflect upon. My sister Sarah was my only sibling in January of 1978. But what exact day that changed I don’t know. My next sister Susanna Maria Summers was to be born on the 20th day of September 1978. That was the ninth month. She was to be conceived in a time when my mother’s love for her youngest brother ( her godchild) was much on her mind. Sometime in January we were called to the school for a telephone call. We no longer attended as students but there were quite a number of students who did business at this school in various ways when they were transitioning out of the city to their next location. There were a number of other language schools in town. Teaching and learning conversational Spanish was a sort of local industry. I felt the transition from a town much defined by learning and culture towards a neighborhood that was known for need in a vast city known for almost everything. But that was not the pattern to take our attention that day as we woke in the Cuernavaca we were soon to leave. I was very much surprised when we were told there was a phone call waiting for us in the school and I went to answer it with Dad. We went into the main office and they were holding the line for us. I let Dad greet him first and instantly could see that all was not well. My Dad was asking questions about the health and status of my uncle Jed in the hospital. It was a difficult time but I did manage to get a few words back and forth with my mother’s oldest brother Bruce. “Please tell everyone we are praying!” I spoke with tears in my eyes and a trembling voice. Jed and I had traveled in the back seat of a Volvo across much of Europe and
I wrote the main draft of this chapter during the week starting on April 14, 2024. That day was a Sunday which began with Clara and I having been to mass the previous evening. I made coffee, had cereal for breakfast and was devoted to doing a few other things when Clara woke and we visited a bit in front of the television and the Sunday morning news. Clara was using some of her professional skills to help some of her friends. She was very much prepared for the task, her laptop and software had been updating and loading up since before we went to bed the night before. When she set about doing her work for them I started cutting, grass, weeding, cleaning equipment and fixing a gap in the fence. It was an ordinary day and a good one. We have had many good and ordinary days, considering that we have only had a little over a thousand days together as any kind of couple…
We were looking forward to moving to the Colonias of Mexico City for many reasons and had begun to actually prepare to leave Cuernavaca. It did not take long to prepare our little footloose family to leave some we would not have been in Cuernavaca many more days. The previous day I had walked to meet the man who had been my sometimes benefactor at a small park. There were two men there with him. He spoke of the history of the region; he seemed to trace both pre columbian indigenous and Spanish Imperial roots of the culture and people with some specificity. The two men spoke in Spanish and perhaps in Nahuat as well but I understood little. Tried hard to understand. They anointed my hands and head with a strange oil. Then we said the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish that I knew only well enough to say slowly. The man said to me,mostly in English; “You told me the story of your father anointing you and the healing you received. I know that you have been sick and perhaps this shall give you strength. However, I will tell you that I have asked them to anoint you because I believe that it is your destiny to be anointed again and if that happens you may remember this place in peace and goodwill.” He then asked me to keep this a secret for a time and a season and I did. I went back to the house and early that evening I went to sleep and soon I was dreaming of the whole past day. The next day would be a day of trial and I woke up sensing that there would be many trials ahead if I lived for whatever was to be my destiny. I did, however, wonder if I would be living to adulthood. I had many reasons for worry that have not made an appearance in this memoir. But at the start of the day that we went to the school to get the club I had put strange hopes, strange worries and other distractions out of my mind.
MY Uncle Bruce’s call had to be communicated to my mother. Seha and I both wanted to go back to Abbeville. Surely we were at a break in things and this happened and the family needed prayer and support. Dad felt we should go on to the ministry in the Cuchilla del Tesoro. There was an emotional struggle and some tears but ultimately we did what most people would do and did not uproot the whole family because the mother’s married adult brother was ill, The thing that made it different was that we were so mobile and so rootless. We prayed and we believed in offering up suffering and we offered up our lonesomeness for Jed as a prayer for his healing. Jed made a remarkable recovery and would go on to have a healthy enough brain to graduate from Loyola Law School having made Law Review – a great distinction, He is still working and making money was a land man, although he left the practice of law. He and Susan are long divorced and married other people but both are people of faith who remember God caring for them at this time.
It was the sacrifice of not being with Jed that defined our transition back to Mexico CIty, There were no dumps or extreme squalor in our neighborhood. Cuchilla had many stores, shops, small artisans and food carts. Schools and churches were around and could be crowded. I took classes at the church when they were open but neve enrolled in a school. Kids were on different schedules because many schools had an early platoon and a late platoon of students. That made it very hard to notice that I was not in school. It wa sin this context that I and the family began to settle into the big city for a while.
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