Memoirs

...she started doing what SHE did best.  ------------------------------------------- What Stacy did best (from my adult perspective now) was stand up for herself. My "little" sister has always been the tough one. Back in our cul-de-sac world on sixteenth avenue, the Smith kids would recruit her to play backyard football... on the front line. They used [...]

It all started with the TV. That day I decided to stand up to Bruce, -------------------------------------------- Did I decide to stand up to him... ? Probably not. Considering the way it happened and all that had gone on up to that point, the state of my nearly fifteen-year-old mind was not anywhere near aware enough to [...]

Just a typical scene from a typical middle class, midwestern family. ----------------------------------------------------------------- It all started with the TV. That day I decided to stand up to Bruce, we were all watching TV. Not Mom and Dad, but all us kids. It was a pretty typical scene for our family at that time. As soon as [...]

I’ve gotten so sick of Bruce that it won’t be long (this coming summer actually) till I kick his ass and end that misery. ------------------------------------------------- Of course it never really ends. I simply learn to live with it (or not) and then every day I get to choose wether or not to implement what I've [...]

They were so taken with their own ideas, that they truly believed we would appreciate them as liberators...  ... the smart kids got away with murder, the dumb ones floundered and ate up all the teacher’s and administrators’s time, and the rest of us… ? Well we did what teenagers do, when bored and unsupervised. We [...]

It was a really fun place to be so everyone… EVERYONE! wanted to be there ALL THE TIME. ------------------------------------------------- Everyone also wanted to eat lunch with all of their friends everyday. Why wouldn't we? We were Teenagers. We wanted to socialize with our friends as much as possible. The school was letting us do this quite [...]

... this factory was there to manufacture… rebels. That’s right, rebels." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ But who wants to be a rebel if you don't have some fun doing it, eh? And yes, we teenage rebels did indeed have fun at our brand new and modern John Adams Jr. High School in my home town of Rochester, Minnesota. My [...]

Then I kinda went to college And I learned how to drink Then I took all kinds of mind-expanding substances and I... Watched myself think Woo Hoo!! ---------------------------------------------------------- Only it wasn't college, it was the brand new and modern John Adams Junior High School in my home town of Rochester, Minnesota. And it wasn't alcohol [...]

“Hey von Ahsen, watch this.”  ----------------------------------- These memories often seem like like I'm watching a move. But in this scene I'm not in it... not in a way that can be seen by the audience anyway. They are seeing what I'm seeing through my eyes. And these fourteen year old eyes are looking up at [...]

Christmas Guangzhou, China December 25th 1991. My parents were teaching English at Sun Yat-Sen University of Medical Sciences and living in the foreign students dormitory. But another aspect of their job was that they were there as part of the Lutheran "Missionary" program and as a Deacon, Dad happened to be the ranking Lutheran in [...]