The Pond is Polluted & Putrid

tommyfocus2003 for LGBT Rights are Human Rights

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Saturday February 01, 2014 · 7:09 PM PST

2014/02/01 · 19:09

Recently, I spent one evening and night with my son and his family, following an Endoscopy. My Daughter-in-Law drove me home. My son and his wife are around forty - with two children, a girl seventeen and a boy twelve - they are wonderfully sweet, intelligent and kind - all four of them. They live in a more conservative suburb of Tampa - and the children attend public schools (the younger child recently was moved to virtual school as he refused to attend his public school. He is artistic and I consider him to be an Indigo Child - google that if you are interested). My granddaughter is a superb student (Senior), highest grades, socially popular, smart and kind and loving - and wonderfully humble and sympathetic/empathetic to those in need. She is remarkable.

The children have always been respected and deeply loved by their parents - and vice versa. I am so proud of how they were raised. Sometimes there is friction. Sometimes there is a major crisis (intra-familial), but family members are loving and caring and it is always worked out.

I am the son of and FDR/JFK/LBJ Feminist mother and a Steelworker/Farmer father who both taught me about the social contract and the solidarity of workers and families and the US middle class/working classes, as well as the love and support society must provide to the most helpless among us.

I have been aware that the area where they live and attend school has a history of racism and racial inequality. This is Florida. When the children were younger - they and I never discussed socil issues - we discussed TV shows, artistic and school issues, how to get along at school and at the mall, as well as many mundane things. That changed recently.

tommyfocus2003

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Monday August 09, 2010 · 7:39 AM PDT

2010/08/09 · 07:39

From this moment on, should you decide to read this Diary, I must warn you it is a tale of soul-wrenching sadness. I was reading another Diary about Anne Rice and her second departure from and break with the Roman Catholic Church. I began thinking about my childhood, growing up in Northern Kentucky in a community where the small Roman Catholic church, St. John the Baptist at John's Hill, Kentucky, was the center of the universe for me and my schoolmates. I entered the school at age four, into first grade. My mother had three small boys at home, all under age five. She begged the nuns to allow me to try first grade on the condition that I could stay in school if I were able to "keep up" with the others. So, I was always the youngest child in every grade through High School. Where I was most loved and inspired and where I was given the most joy and wonder I have ever felt in life, was in that small school at the back of that little country church in Kentucky.

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The Pond is Polluted & Putrid

The Death of My Childhood