Your grandfather Don was born 1924 in McFarland Kansas, or maybe in Alma hospital  a few miles away.
This was during the depression and dust bowl days when his mom hung bed linens over the windows to keep the dust out.
My father's mother's family, my great grandparents, the LaMars, lived two blocks down the street.

McFarland is a small town with a hundred or so houses, gravel streets that all lead to the small grocery store with a wood porch and screen door.

The old stockyards  and railroad roundtable are just a few blocks farther down the street. They were the economic hub of the town when my grandfather worked on the old steam locomotives and then became a self made expert on the new diesel engines.
Word around town was that my grandfather's skill at fixing train engines was the reason they kept the place open.

In his 50s, my grandfather, Charles had a heart attack. Then bit by bit he got his health back by walking a few yards, and then walking farther, and finally walking a city block and then he started walking all around town ... then took a job reading gas meters which turned into the most joyful experience for him and his wife Edith, because everybody in town would stop by to pay the gas bill and visit.

As I was growing up, my family would visit my grandparents once a year .... in the early years we walked to the outhouse out near the garage at the end of the garden, we used the hand pump to get water ... and we took a bath in the metal tub on the back porch.
Grandma Edith would boil water on the gas stove and pour it in with the well water, and it got nice n hot except most of the body got frozen, sticking up out of the water on the unheated back porch.

My brothers, Larry and Chris, and occasionally one of my cousins would walk down to the long-gone stockyards that overlook Mill Creek where my father and his friends used to swim.
My father told me how Charles bought a boat for him and his brother Bob. My grandmother, a faithful church-going woman, was strongly against it because so many people drown in that creek. But my father and the other kids around town loved swimming in what my father laughingly described as a sewer since it lay just below the stockyards.

My grandpa loved playing dominos ... he taught us the game. We played on his screened-in front porch.
Looking back, I wish we had visited more, but it was a long days drive west from Bloomington, and somehow we were just paralyzed as a family.

My family reached financial stability as my father found success as a school book salesman, and then district manager. We moved from Bedford to Bloomington and bought a newly built home in Park Ridge.

Age 13 thru 16, I delivered morning newspapers and drank a quart of chocolate milk each morning then went home and fried 4 eggs before walking a mile and half to school, cutting across the farm field where the Fiscus brothers and I went skinny dipping in the cow ponds and went sledding down the hill.
Sometimes I took the bus but mostly I liked being outdoors.

Starting at 14, Steve Fiscus and I went caving out by the Bloomington airport. It was his idea, and Iwas a good partner for any adventure. Word got around at school and I took a couple groups to different caves. Saved John Hickmans life, pulling him up off a ledge he shouldn't been on.

However my extracurricular activities throwing eggs at cars, shoplifting, bike theft and general vandalism had finally attracted attention of law enforcement. I was a clever boy and sidestepped their set-ups, making them furious. I could feel it in the air, they were coming for me, but most fortunate, we moved to New Jersey as my father got a promotion to the home office.

Living in New Jersey my last year of high school, we got a call one night that my father's brother, Bob was killed in a head on collision. Bob was drunk and told his family he was going to 'burn the carbon out' of the engine.
Apparently he was traveling high speed into a curve and killed a carload of teenagers.
My father said nothing more about it and went alone to the funeral.
We were not a close family. No hugs or expressions of love. There was an overcurrent of protection and caring, but absolute to-the-death friction between my mother and father.
I graduated Chatham Township High School where I had 2 dates and generally hung around with Paul Freedman who introduced me to his sister who didn't kiss boys .... and Tom Trevor who introduced me to recorded music ...
Following year I went to college .... where I met Barb who was my first girlfriend.

When she got pregnant, she told me it belonged to another boy. That was before paternity tests that are so common today and I just didn't know what to think.
She wanted me to go with her to her parents house and tell them that I was the father and that we would get married and that will be that. Her parents were dead silent mad and disappointed as I slept rigid in the basement until the following morning when we left.
Her parents we're not like the people I had come to know. They were "blue collar," and stuck in rural america... or whatever.
I'm sure they were nice people but I didn't know them. The husband was overweight, I felt strongly that the wife was cheating on him, and I don't know why I knew that or anything more about them. He worked at Alcoa aluminum, but I don't know what kind of job it was. Their house was small, but maybe large by local comparison.

I went back to my life and she went back to hers, I went home to New Jersey for the summer and I suppose she and I wrote each other because I remember her telling me that she was going to go to a home for unwed mothers. Her family never ask anything from me. And that was that.

That summer I worked as a caddy at the golf course next to my house in New Jersey. I made $12 a round carrying two bags. I liked the freedom of hustling for a living instead of a steady job.

At the end of the summer, my mom told me that she and my father were getting divorced. He left with the encyclopedias packed into the trunk of the older car. I think I went in to say goodbye to him and he turned away because he started to cry. I walked out of the room because I didn't know what to do, I was too young to make sense of this. I watched as he drove away to his new position as regional manager in Chicago. He felt heavy and alone. I felt nothing and everything. It's been my talent to feel across these things and know what is next, but here I had no answer. Why did he like Larry so easily yet had no way to share with me? I was right there. I was willing. Did he think I was going to laugh at him or betray him? I would never betray a confidence.... or would I? I never ratted the guys in high school that told me the crap they did.

Mom loaded the car we started driving toward Bloomington.
about halfway across Pennsylvania she told my younger brother that dad was not coming along. My younger brother said 'oh good.'
My father was hellacious and uncertain, he didn't want kids yet he wanted kids, but he honored his agreement with my mom where a lot of men would not. She got annual payment, got the better car, and with his assistance or however it was done, she paid in full the new house in Sherwood Oaks in Bloomington in 1970, near where you moved in 1974.

I returned to IU that semester torn, broken, and unsettled. I had long hair, was taking drugs off and on, and probably loud and stood out. My grades fell to zero .... F .... across the board and I dropped out. I was hustling small jobs for people around town. Then I went to work for Ray Fiscus my childhood friend who bought the Baskin Robbins there along 10th street. Crazy it was, he let me sleep in the back room in exchange for my labor. I was a good worker. He had gotten in debt and not able to pay for the store. He had his back to the wall, and when that crashed he lost the store. The previous owner took back the store and offered me a job, but I went with the other Baskin Robbins instead.

The police ran a few set ups at me for drugs. It was never because I was selling drugs, it was grudge over my younger more careless years. My old high school nemesis Mike Shiflett came in to the pizza place and asked to borrow $5. I gave him $5 and he left. A few minutes later he comes back with a small piece of wrapped tin foil and offered it, saying it was morphine. I told him to keep the $5. He left and came back gave me my $5. A few minutes later, the head narcotics guy walks in the back door, as if I would not know who he was, after seeing him toss a guys room in the dorm.

Obviously, my life was unsettled. I got a small room in exchange for labor around the apartment complex.
I had a girlfriend Susan. She was in Tri Delta sorority but herself unsettled. We completed the equation for each other. She knew the situation with Barb because my former dorm roommate, but now it was just a memory... something that happened ... I had no council ... my family was splintered, my life and feelings scattered, my mother devastated ... but my god ... what would I have felt if I knew you were my daughter.... my legs right now are so restless that I know I would seek you ... I would find you, but I didn't know.
I could never equal your parents. I know it, and so glad you have loving parents to introduce you to this world and give you love.
 
Today, other than my health, my life is very standard… I go to bed late have lunch same Jack in the Box every day, answer questions for people who email, write and make illustrations for my website ... I've been threatening to finish writing my last book… and of course we used to go out for Chipotle or Panera each night but we've been sequestered for the last year.

I look forward to talking with you and meeting you, and of course fear being a disappointment ... but that's probably normal.