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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Life

“Let Me Tell You About Ms. Martha…”

10 Thursday Dec 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Conversations, Death, Life, Living, Martha Levy, Mom-in-Law, Mother-Son Relationship, Ms. Martha


Ms. Martha with her grandson, Silver Spring, MD, December 25, 2009. (Donald Earl Collins)

I’ve been reluctant to write this post. Not because I have nothing good to say about my late mom-in-law, someone I’d known for nearly half my 51 years. I have nothing but good things to write about her. Not because I’m grieving. I often write when I’m in an altered state emotionally or psychologically. No, I’m a bit nervous because this will be my first blog post about any specific member of my wife’s family, Thanksgiving 2001 excepted. I’m mostly concerned that some will see what I have to write about my mom-in-law as an indirect slap toward my own mother and parents/guardian in general.

Trust me, it’s not. That I first met Martha Mae Guinn Levy (1931-2020) a month after my twenty-sixth birthday meant the nature of this relationship was never going to be strictly parent-to-child or mother-to-son.

The truth is, Ms. Martha really did treat me that way. But not just that. Sometimes our conversations could be contentious, like professor-student, or like two bickering friends, or brother-sister. The woman had nearly 39 years on me, but the battle-axe of a geezer could just as quickly be affectionate and a never-ending fountain of love and optimistic clichés. There are so many conversations, so many arguments, so many moments I could discuss that made me see all the facets and contradictions of my mom-in-law.

Ms. Martha made herself available for nearly every important event in my life since my then girlfriend introduced us on the last Saturday in January 1996. She attended my doctoral graduation at Carnegie Mellon the following year. She drove me and her daughter to the Greyhound bus station in “dahntahn Picksburgh” in August 1999, so that we could begin our 20-plus years of living in the DMV, the Washington DC area. She shared a hotel room with my mom in 2000, just a few months after me and her daughter eloped. She came here to Silver Spring and watched at Sibley Hospital in DC as my wife gave birth to her one and only grandchild in 2003. She stayed with us for six weeks to watch her grandson in November and December of the same year, so that my wife could go back to work, and just before our son would start daycare.

But there’s one conversation that really and truly encompassed the evolution of our relationship over the years. It was in December 2013, just a few months after I had self-published Boy @ The Window. A week earlier, I had called my father about his yearly Christmas ritual of sending barely cashable Western Union money orders to give to his grandson for the holiday season. Instead, he mumbled and gave gruff one-word answers to my questions. “What’s wrong?,” I asked. “I told you not to put me in your book,” he said, sounding hurt and embarrassed. “I didn’t want nothing to do with your book. You shoulda left the past in the past.” My dad actually hadn’t said any of these things in the seven years between first sentence and the rough final draft I ended up publishing that April. I had been completely open about what I was going to write and why. I guess having a paperback copy of Boy @ The Window in his hands to leaf through was too much for him.

The weekend before Christmas 2013, Ms. Martha called. She dialed up my partner on her cell phone to talk to me (mind you, she had my direct number, but called her daughter first). When I picked up Angelia’s phone, I heard “Hey Donald” in Ms. Martha’s gravelly voice. After a brief exchange, she said, “I wanna talk to you about your book.” I mailed Ms. Martha a copy of Boy @ The Window, along with my dad and a few others, but I hadn’t expected her to read it, at least not so quickly.

“I started reading and I didn’t wanna put it down,” Ms. Martha said. I was surprised. Really, I was dumbstruck. I hadn’t expected this response at all. Not because Ms. Martha didn’t read. I figured, Oh, she’s just being polite, especially after hearing from my dad a little more than a week earlier.

We talked about my book for nearly an hour and a half on my wife’s iPhone. I might as well have been doing a book talk as conversation with my mom-in-law. Ms. Martha asked questions about my Boy @ The Window years, wanting more details beyond the stories I did include. There were a lot of “I didn’t know…” and “I couldn’t believe…” comments about what I and my family lived through. She asked at least a dozen questions about my mom and her decision-making, about my brothers and sister, about my asshole classmates.

Mostly, she doted on me. “Oh boy! I liked this sentence here…,” Ms. Martha said while reading me back to me a number of times. When I explained away my accomplishments or challenges, she’d say, “…as far as that matter goes…” to remind me that what was normal for me was not normal for most tweeners or teenagers, not even Black ones living with poverty. “This was a joy to read,” she said so many times. She said she laughed and cried while reading the book, and laughed and cried while talking to me about it.

I ended that conversation with Ms. Martha thinking, Wow! This tough old woman really loves me! It made me feel better about writing Boy @ The Window. It made me feel better at a time when I felt low, about my writing, about switching careers, about life in general.

And yes, I truly loved and love Ms. Martha. I will miss our conversations, our rational disagreements, our out-of-nowhere arguments, our hugs, our embraces, and her love for me, her daughters, her grandson, for family and community more broadly. I will miss your presence and your voice in my life. May God bless you and keep you…and give you peace, in your life after life.

Death and Debt

11 Saturday Jul 2020

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, race, Youth

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Death, Debt, Life, Life Decisions, Sarai, Sarai Washington, Student Loans


Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

My post today will be short. Today marks a full decade since the Sunday morning my youngest brother Eri called me, waking me up with the news that my only sister Sarai had died overnight at Mount Vernon Hospital. It was due to complications from sickle cell anemia, the disease that denies the body sufficient oxygen for carrying out it functions, ever debilitating and ever more painful as one grows older with it, as anyone with the disease can attest. Too many blood transfusions, too many invasive procedures, not enough healing. Sarai Adar Washington, who did live, and did try her damnedest to live her life her way, died at 27 years young.

Yes, I love her, and miss her still. There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t think about her and the life that she didn’t get to have, the life that she did live, and how my life was affected by her existing. It causes me, Sarai’s older brother — one 13-plus-years older than her when my mother gave birth to her, one at one point argued for abortion to save us and her the anguish of the disease — to let out the occasional tear or feel a sense of loss. I can only imagine how much deeper the loss is for my mom, of course, and for my three younger brothers, who truly grew up with her. My only solace today is that Sarai isn’t here to try to survive the pandemic, because she most surely would not have made it if she had contracted COVID-19.

On the other end is the week that reminds me of one of the worst best decisions I have ever made. To take out the first $2,625 of what would be over $41,000 in loans between July 1987 and October 1996. I paid out the principal of my loans at least three years ago. But Sallie Mae (and PHEAA and Marine Midland Bank before that) set the interest rates back when those rates were much higher. Eight percent on a series of loans taken out between 24 and 33 years ago would be incalculable to a 17-year-old in July 1987. But as a 50-year-old, it translates to debt peonage, more than double the actual loans themselves. Except that I know that one way or another, this debt will go away, if only because I will stop living this life, eventually.

The proverbial “they” say the only two constants in life are death and taxes. No, there are at least three constants — death, debt, and taxes. Maybe in my death I can finally see my sister again, and see my debt and taxes burn in the fiery pit in the event horizon of a black hole.

Blog Hiatus (at least until November 2019)

30 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic

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Blogging Hiatus, Life


To all my readers. With the new school year, my teaching schedule, my writing schedule and deadlines, and heightened familial responsibilities has come the need to take a blogging break. I’ve only taken two breaks in the past 12 years, with neither running more than a month. This time, I need more time as I transition one project and revise another. In the meantime, there are 1,000 posts here to read, plus my published mainstream and academic articles, plus my interviews. I may be back for a post if the lethal world in which we live dictates that I should comment, but otherwise, I do not expect to be regularly blogging again until November.

Thanks, all, for your support of my blog and my writing over the years. You know who you are, and know that I appreciate your support very much. Until the leaves turn and fall…

My Life as a Scrambler

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, culture, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, Pittsburgh, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"Comin' From Where I'm From", 616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Academia, Anthony Hamilton, Burnout, CMU, Contingent Faculty, Football, Graduate School, Humanities, Hustlin', Joe Montana, Life, MVHS, NFL, Nonprofit World, Publishing, Russell Wilson, Scrambling, Shawshank Redemption Quote


I wish I could say that it was different. I wish I could say that the key to success in my life was crafting plans, developing rubrics, and building out scale models of every step, move, and smile toward achieving Points A, B, and Z on my life-sized to-do list. I wish that life was like being Tom Brady (not really). Or really, like being every White male statue that’s ever stood behind a bruising, blocking, dynamic offensive line in American professional football. One where even a mediocre quarterback like Trent Dilfer or Jim McMahon could stand behind and take as many as ten seconds to find an open receiver for a first down or a long touchdown on their way to a Super Bowl championship.

But, with some notable exceptions, my life, and the successes I’ve garnered in my life, have come from scrambling out of the pocket, usually because my proverbial offensive line couldn’t block the pass rushers in my life. It’s hustlin’ really, but not the kind of hustlin’ that would bring me notoriety. My life has been mostly Joe Montana and Russell Wilson, with occasional periods of Warren Moon half-standing in the pocket and half-scrambling in between.

Graduate school was the one exception that almost ruined me. I took the lesson I learned about keeping my schedule of work, social life (however ill-defined in 1991), and classes and transferred it to my five and a half years of working toward a doctorate. After a straight-A first semester and finishing my master’s in two semesters, I took it as a sign that this drawing up plans and executing them with brutal efficiency was the best way for me.

Keep in mind, I scrambled all through middle school and high school, for all six years I was in my Humanities Program. I scrambled because I had to. I couldn’t make concrete plans to study at 616, to read books by a specific date, to just have a day to myself just to work on me. Not with my abusive ass, idiot stepfather Maurice/Judah/Maurice there. Not with my younger siblings running around. Not with my Mom going through welfare and depression. Not with having to track down my alcoholic father on weekends for work and money.

San Francisco 49er QB Joe Montana scrambling to make a throw, Super Bowl XIX, Stanford Stadium, Palo Alto, CA, January 20, 1985. (http://youtube.com).

And yet with all that, I finished 14th in my graduating class of White, Black, Afro-Caribbean, and Latinx hyperachievers. I received scholarship offers from every school I got into (with Columbia withholding only because they couldn’t believe I came from a family of eight with a $16,600 per year income in New York). Scrambling worked, even though it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Which was why I went the other way. And so, for my graduate school years, and the baker’s dozen of years that followed, I stayed in the pocket. I drew up plans like an architect for my career and life, and followed those plans as if I’d gotten them from God him/herself. And the truth was, most of my plans worked to perfection. I earned a two-year master’s degree in one, earned a big-time dissertation fellowship without overwhelming support from my advisor and committee, published articles, presented at conferences, and, once fully immersed in nonprofit work, job after job, promotion after promotion, more publications and teaching opportunities.

Or so I thought. I hadn’t realized that while my 150-PowerPoint-slide gameplan seemed to be working, that I was still scrambling every chance I got, and hustlin’ myself in the process. I only completed my doctorate in November 1996 because I scrambled, and left my advisor little choice but to approve my dissertation. This after lobbying my other committee members, documenting every comment from my advisor on my dissertation going back a full year, and otherwise turning the academic politics of Carnegie Mellon to my favor that summer and fall. That, and having a complete, 505-page manuscript, sealed the deal.

I scrambled for work all the while, went the summer of 1997 without work before hustlin’ my way into nonprofit work by lying about only having a master’s degree that year. I scrambled into my jobs at Presidential Classroom, both of my positions at Academy for Educational Development, and every single teaching position I’ve held since 1998, AU included.

It just took me until 2008 to realize that I wasn’t the figurative pocket passer. I ran myself and those who’ve been there to catch my publishing, teaching, and working passes open. I’ve never had a good offensive line, because America stacks their lines for privileged White men and White women first, second, and third. Sometimes I’ve had to take the proverbial ball to the end zone or for a first down myself, because there hasn’t been anyone else who can help. Sometimes, too, I have to take the hit, also because I don’t know what I don’t know, and I’ve fought against the mantra “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” for most of my 49-plus years on this Earth.

I’ve come to accept that this is my life. I don’t have to like that despite all the article publications, conference and public presentations, grant money raised, students taught, students now in prominent positions themselves, book manuscripts produced, friends made, and so many other measurables, I am a bad six months away from career collapse. And with that, maybe my marriage, my status as a dad, and  my health and life would be at risk as well.

But I do not intend to be a contingent faculty member and an older man pretending to be a youngish freelance writer with fresh ideas (with the rare consulting opportunity) for the rest of my most productive working days. Either all this works out, somehow, or I’m driving as the Uber professor/Trader Joe’s stock boy/MCPS bus driver (ala Steven Salaita) down the line. Anyway, Red from Shawshank Redemption put it best. “Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’.” My mantra for the past four and a half years.

My Muhammad Ali

05 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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"Impact", Blackness, Bonds, Boxing, Closed-Circuit TV, Death, HBO, Legacy, Life, Maurice Eugene Washington, Meaning, Muhammad Ali, Parkinson's Disease, Robert Farmer, Roots (1977), Self-Awareness, Self-Discovery, The Greatest (1977)


Meme of Muhammad Ali quote on "impossible" combined with iconic photo of Ali in 1st Round of first fight with Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964. (Getty Images via Twitter).

Meme of Muhammad Ali quote on “impossible” combined with iconic photo of Ali in 1st Round of first fight with Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964. (Getty Images via Twitter).

There is so much I could say about Muhammad Ali. His greatness. His contradictions. His imperfections and frailness. And all of them would be true. He was both a great man and a deeply flawed man at the same time. But, from 1964 through 1980, Muhammad Ali was the most recognizable person on the planet, with every aspect of his complicated onion on display in every corner of the world.

I have a few childhood memories of Ali’s headier days and nights. One was in ’74. It was the “Rumble in the Jungle” fight between Ali and George Forman. My father Jimme took me and my brother Darren over to his drinking buddy Robert Farmer’s house to watch the fight on closed-circuit TV (yep, Mr. Farmer spent good money on this fight). I do remember seeing bits and pieces of the fight, with Ali using the ropes around the ring like they were a trampoline. But mostly, I remember my dad and Farmer and Lo and others drinking and smoking away while watching the fight. October 30, 1974 was also the night that I learned my first colloquialism, the “rope-a-dope.” I know that the “dope” was Foreman, but I’ve seen lots of people as dopes in the four decades since that fight.

The Rumble in the Jungle poster, October 29, 1974. (Armbrust via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution for reproduction.

The Rumble in the Jungle poster, October 29, 1974. (Armbrust via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution for reproduction.

I remember watching the “Thrilla in Manila” nearly a year later between Ali and Joe Frazier, either at Mr. Farmer’s place or at a bar, I’m not sure. Again, smoke, drinks, beer cans, sunflower seeds and cigars, all in the midst of two fellas knocking the hella outta each other. My father sure knew how to show his two young sons (I was five and Darren was seven at the time) a good time.

These two fights became vague but embedded memories, perhaps two of the greatest bouts of all time. Although, Jack Johnson-James Jeffries, Joe Louis-Max Schmeling I and II, and Ali (née Cassius Clay)-Sonny Lister also come to mind in terms of historical significance.

But where I remember seeing Ali in a context beyond the right was in this movie The Greatest in May 1977. Believe it or not, my soon-to-be idiot stepfather Maurice took us to see this mediocre docudrama of a biopic on Muhammad Ali’s through 1974. (So I guess I was wrong when I said my stepfather had only done two good things for me growing up). At seven, there was no way I could know how bad the film was, between scenery chewers Ernest Borgnine and James Earl Jones. Still, the movie put those hazy memories from ages four and five in better perspective. After having seen Roots a few months earlier, I was really conscious of the wider world, of race, and of Muhammad Ali’s importance for the first time.

Muhammad Ali tweet re: Prince's death (pic is from their first meeting in 1997), April 22, 2016. (Twitter).

Muhammad Ali tweet re: Prince’s death (pic is from their first meeting in 1997), April 22, 2016. (Twitter).

Unlike Natalie Cole, David Bowie, Prince, and going back before 2016, Michael Jackson, I’ve been expecting Ali’s death for quite some time. His Parkinson’s wasn’t just Parkinson’s, but likely brain damage the likes of which NFL players have come to fear. That it took Ali until 1984 to announce what millions had suspected as far back as 1978 told us that he had taken a long time to come to grips with what would become his second act, his new reality. That Ali became a symbol of philanthropy, activism, and humanitarianism during this second act suggests that his strong will and support system deserves way more credit for the quality of his life than anything he did in the ring.

“Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy” comes from the 1920 mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald. If he were to write Muhammad Ali’s story, it would likely read as a tragedy. Luckily for us, Fitzgerald isn’t around to do so.

We have glossed over a few things in our millions of small eulogies for Ali this weekend. His sexism and occasional misogyny and abuse, both in words and deeds. His obvious colorism, calling Joe Foreman a “gorilla” and most of his somewhat darker skinned opponents “ugly” as a euphemism for their failure to pass the brown-paper-bag test. His rejection of Malcolm X at the very time when Malcolm needed him the most. Ali in the years between his biggest bouts and his mostly silent second life expressed regret about these -ism words and actions.

Despite this, Ali was still a father, a husband, a Muslim, a three-time heavyweight champion of the world, an author, a poet, an actor, an anti-war activist, a civil rights advocate, a social justice leader, a humanitarian, a hostage negotiator, and a Parkinson’s survivor. Ali was a fighter, in the most panoramic sense of the word. And yes, he was a Black man, in the narrowest and most intersectional senses of that two-word phrase. And all of that made him an icon. RIP.

Striking members of Memphis Local 1733 hold signs whose slogan symbolized the sanitation workers' 1968 campaign, March 1968. (Richard L. Copley/http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/).

Striking members of Memphis Local 1733 hold signs whose slogan symbolized the sanitation workers’ 1968 campaign, March
1968. (Richard L. Copley/http://dlxs.lib.wayne.edu/).

Aside

RIP Sister, Sarai Adar Washington (February 9, 1983-July 11, 2010)

11 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Brother-Sister Relationship, Death, Dread, Eri Washington, Father Figures, Growing Up, Independence, Life, Mazza Gallerie, Sarai Washington, Sickle Cell Anemia, The Matrix Revolutions (2003)


 

Sarai Washington, circa 2003.

Sarai Washington, circa 2009.

It’s been five years since I received my brother Eri’s call telling me what I had known and dreaded would come for nearly thirty years. That my only sister Sarai had died from complications stemming from sickle-cell anemia.

As soon as I picked up the phone five years ago, I knew. Sarai had been in and out the hospital for months since she had returned to New York at the tail end of ’09. Before then, she had lived either on her own or with two of her high school friends in Huntsville, Alabama since ’05. The skin and bone bruises, the constant blood transfusions, the always-there pain of sickled red blood cells circulating through her body. The average life expectancy for anyone with the disease is thirty-three years. That I had Sarai in my life for 82 percent of that life expectancy was still a minor miracle in the midst of what to me seemed completely unnecessary pain.

We weren’t as close in her later years, though. I mean, Sarai saw me as a bit of a father-figure when she was growing up. I had thirteen years and six weeks on her, so that’s how it goes. Between the 616 fire and homelessness for her and my other younger siblings in ’95, though — not to mention puberty — Sarai no longer treated me as her hero. That was fine by me. I already had too many people in my life who thought of me as some sort of hero or saint.

I think, though, that my sister enjoyed not really having to think about her future, about not feeling the need to grow up, since, what would be the point, really? I thought that because she knew more about her disease than anyone, it was her responsibility to grow up and find the best care possible to manage her disease, to bring some meaning to her life. That’s where our closeness became less so. I have a way of expecting more out of people than most people are willing to expect of themselves.

Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

Sarai & Noah, November 2003. (Donald Earl Collins).

When Sarai came to live with me and my wife Angelia in ’03, to help us out with our then newborn son Noah, it was obvious that my sister was doing little to take care of herself. When I finally confronted her about her poor diet and unwillingness to watch over her disease, Sarai yelled, “You’re not my father!,” right in front of Mazza Gallerie, on the DC-Chevy Chase border (we had gone to see The Matrix Revolutions, much more for her than for me). Of course she was right. But of course, I was right also.

Sarai decided the next day to pack up her stuff and move back home to 616 and Mount Vernon, “where no one told her what to do,” she wrote as part of her going away letter. She also said that I “don’t know anything about the streets” as yet another familial “Just because you have a Ph.D…” coup de grace. I thought, “If I didn’t know anything about the streets, you and the rest of the younger siblings would’ve gotten your asses kicked through the early ’90s.”

But I knew Sarai’s letter wasn’t about the streets. It was about her living her life the way she wanted, without me or anyone else telling her how to take care of herself. That’s why she went away to Alabama for nearly four years.

Luckily I did get to talk to her a couple of times after that. Though we weren’t close, I loved her, and I know she loved me. The sad truth was, though, Sarai never had enough time to take charge over her life, and I couldn’t make her take that precious little time.

The Things I Can’t Say

28 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Carnegie Mellon University, Christianity, culture, Hebrew-Israelite, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, University of Pittsburgh, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Competition, Happy Birthday, Intervention, Jealousy, Life, Mom, Mother-Son Relationship, Sharing, Silence, Trust


U.S. Route 66 shield, made to the specifications of the 2004 edition of Standard Highway Sign, January 27, 2006. (SPUI via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

U.S. Route 66 shield, made to the specifications of the 2004 edition of Standard Highway Sign, January 27, 2006. (SPUI via Wikipedia). Released to public domain.

Today was my Mom’s sixty-sixth birthday. I’m just beginning to come to grips with the fact that Mom’s a senior citizen, considering that she was only twenty-two when she had me in ’69. It’s been a roller coaster ride through hell, with many downs and only a handful of ups over those years. The one casualty in those years that we haven’t overcome has been the ability to share everything that has been my life with her, especially in the last decade.

I learned the hard way sixteen years ago that the lack of distance in age between me and Mom resulted in a sort-of competition. It was one of which I hadn’t been aware until ’97. It involved higher education, finding work and finding full-time work. It involved friendships and relationships, God and church, and finding a passion for a calling. Week after week, and year after year, from ’87 to ’02, I talked on the phone or at 616 with my Mom about these situations and issues. Only to find that my triumphs and failures were only a point of comparison for her, and not a conversation involving life and lessons.

When I finally realized this in ’97, and did an intervention involving my family on this and other issues in ’02, it was the third most emotionally painful thing I’d ever been through. I had to decide how I should talk to my Mom moving forward. I made the choice to not share significant parts of my life with Mom. From that point on, I chose to not discuss any victories or struggles in my jobs, in finding work, in consulting or teaching with her. Nor have I talked about my marriage’s ups and occasional downs, my writings, my publications, my projects, my hopes, my dreams, my fears, or my struggles. Mostly, I’ve only talked about my son and his glacial journey toward adulthood, the weather, my siblings, or something in the news that may be funny or relevant.

Ginsu 9-Inch Japanese Stainless Steel Slicer, October 28, 2013. (http://www.amazon.com).

Ginsu 9-Inch Japanese Stainless Steel Slicer, October 28, 2013. (http://www.amazon.com).

This has been the case since the summer of ’02. Uncomfortable silences and frequent struggles to think about what to actually discuss that could have real meaning, have been what this has meant for the two of us. Given her response to the intervention I conducted in January ’02, I can only imagine what Mom’s response would be to Boy @ The Window. On the one hand, she would act unimpressed, as if I’d written a book about organic chemistry and nanotechnology. On the other hand, my Mom would likely be seething behind her ho-hum mask, ready to rip my throat out for airing family secrets and dirty laundry. (I actually dreamt as much the other night, being at a book talk with Mom coming over the table, slashing at me with a Ginsu knife).

I haven’t been angry with my Mom for years, and I forgave Mom for any mistakes she made regarding me growing up years ago. But I know my Mom well enough to know that our relationship could never be an adult mother-son one, where I get to be an adult and her son at the same time. Part of that means me remaining silent about a significant part of my life, including a memoir in which she’s a main character. It’s too bad, yet it’s also the way it must be. For my emotional sanity, as well as for hers.

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Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

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There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

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Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

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