Invisible Ink

This is the beginning of a 110 page memoir that I had been writing for 10 years, which has been lost... ouch!

Preface

Writing about myself, I cannot escape myself.  Yet no fact or figures, timetables or diagrams of family trees can reconcile the past to me or fetch something forever lost in youth.  But perhaps these words can be a grand gesture of absolution from myself, unto myself.  Through the act of transcribing, I can reverse certain misconceptions that keep a full-lived life at bay.  And so I break open this tired shell and expose my flesh for what it is , scarred and aching, yet resilient.  Presently at twenty-nine years and nine months after my birth, I document my precarious existence through a history of the pieces of my life that I have thus far assembled.  Disclosed in these pages are the noted events that transpired between my first breath and this one, and how I came into the knowing the tenets from which I base my life and define the who of "I am."  Here I account for both my heart and the blood that pumps it.

1973

On March twenty-ninth in 1973 the last united States soldiers left Vietnam.  My father, his number uncalled, was not among them.  Gratefully allowed this exemption from slaughter to be instead husband and father, he delivered me the following day in an apartment in Greenwich Village.  My mother named me Cayanne, after the pepper she has madly craved and drank, every day, a teaspoon ground up in water.   Perhaps it was that ingested fruit, known for its ability to purify the blood, which caused me to emerge as red as the battlefields of that controversial war, which ended as I began.  Or perhaps born under the sign of Aries; a fire sign, and ruled by the planet Mars, the little red planet of war and passion, it could not have been otherwise.  My middle name, Bead, was the product of a series of barters that concluded with the obtainment of books on delivering infants.  My father traded Moroccan beads for a guitar, the guitar for the books he nervously read as I made my second appearance in this world, the first being upon my conception, approximately nine months earlier.  I was not the first child of my mother, Barbara Jean, and my father, Edward Joseph, and I was not the last.  However I was the first to be born outside of the confines of a hospital.  While my mother was in the process of birthing me at home, my brother was in the hospital with my father.  Russell Libra, born two years and six months before me, had ingested a lethal quantity of plant insecticide, used to de-bug a cactus which sat in the window of the Three Swords Cafe, which was owed and operated by the very friends whose apartment, on the second floor just above, I was being born in on Washington Street.  My father returned in time, with my brother's stomach newly pumped, as empty as mother's would soon appear to be.  Our surname, Ramuten, traveled with my great-grandfather from Lithuania to America in the early 1920's.  I would never know him or my grandfather, his only child, who died during my father's adolescence.  This is how I became me.
There is no birth certificate in existence documenting my entrance into our world.  The first official account was on June twentieth, a record of my immunizations at a clinic in Asheville, North Carolina.  The date of my arrival became somewhat obscured over time.  Having been raised by my father, never good with dates, and with both of my brothers born on the last of their respective months, October and September, both having thirty-one days as March does, I celebrated mine on the day until in my early teens, my mother told me it was the thirtieth.  Twenty-seven years later, when trying to procure a passport, I was informed that it was not possible for me to be in existence without a birth properly documented by the appropraite authorities.  I assure you that it is and that I do indeed exist.

The Complicated Family Tree

A Documented Discovery

As I write this brief interlude, now at the age of thirty-nine, ten long years after I began this journey of words and their meanings, for this is a memoir and my life continues as these pages unfold.  My grandmother, the mother of my father, passed away last year.  After her passing, my father and his sister went through all of her belongings and found among her many papers, because she saved everything of value, a letter dated ....  This letter was written by my mother, and is as follows...

And so, here is the first unofficial document of my existence.

Before my grandmother passed, she also shared many stories which she had kept quiet over the years.  One of these was about my grandfather, her husband, who died from alcoholism in his thirties.  My grandmother had left him years before and had no contact with him.  She never remarried or lived with another man and always loved him, "I always loved your father.  He was the best husband and father, unless he was drinking." my grandmother said.  He was a mean and violent drunk, and the day my grandmother left, with her two young children and their belongings piled in the car, my grandfather took out his shotgun and shot at the car as it drove away.  What we had never known was how my grandfather became who he was.  His father owned a still.  And it was a custom, in those days, to "but the kid a drink" when you bought yours.  It put more money in the coffer and was the entertainment.  My grandfather, an alcoholic by the time he was ten, never had a chance.  He passed on this gene to my father, my brothers and myself, who have all struggled with it in our own lives.

The following are the facts about my family.  It is impossible to decipher how these facts have affected who I am.  Three months after my birth, my family moved to Sandy Mush, North Carolina, where my father built a small cabin, bereft of modern conveniences, where we lived with a goat and chickens.  My parents separated in 1978???.  Soon after, my mother had a child with another partner, her fourth, who dies of SIDS.  I would not know the depth of this loss until I had a child of my own at the age of thirty-six.  My mother subsequently moved back to her family in her home state of Connecticut.  My two brothers moved with her, she remarried and bore two more sons.  I stayed with my father.  My parents tell me this decision was based solely on geography.  After their separation, I mostly stayed at my father’s house because my friends where close and same for my brothers at my mothers, and it was this which decided the rest of our lives, geographically and custodially.  Again, having a daughter now myself, I wonder how my mother could have left me, which I discovered many years later, was possibly to root to my abandonment issues.  But that comes much later in this tale.  My father also remarried and thus I gained a step-mother and step-sister.  Incidentally, I was born in my step-mother’s apartment in New York as my parents traveled through and stayed with friends there.  She had been a witness at my birth.  When my sister and I became of school age, we moved to the closest city of Asheville.  In 1979 my half-sister was born.  My father and step-mother separated in 1987.  I didn’t found out until much later that my parents weren’t legally divorced and my “new parents” married until the birth of my sister.

passage elaborating on family relationships

The dynamics between family members is incomprehensible and inexplicable.