Demon Spawn and His Mother

It's both my mother's and my birthday this month, so I thought I'd post a pic of us together, when I was three or four, in the mid-sixties.  We were good pals.  This was probably taken on my aunt's farm in what is now oil-boom country of western North Dakota, around Voltaire.  (The farm is long gone now, grown back to prairie.)

My mom, Yvonne, and I were a lot alike--in good and bad ways.  (I'll save the bad for the memoir.)  I must have gotten my story-telling ability from her, cause she loved nothing better than to tell stories over cups of black coffee or, later, whiskey and water.  Her yarns were all true--at least, as far as I know--and she colored them with word-pictures so lens-clear that you could see exactly what she was talking about.  I mean, when she told of those two boys in her little hometown of Noonan killed in a car wreck and left in the back of a pickup truck, battered and bloody, while the family gathered--that was vivid.

She died from complications of a heart attack and surgery in 1999, months before my first book came out.  She was 62.  She was a walking good time, that woman.  I miss the hell out of her.

Below is my sister, Stacey, born three years later than I--in 1966.  This was taken in front of our grandmother's house in Bottineau, ND probably around '68.  As you can see, she didn't feel very safe in the hands of her big brother.  Oddly, she's still cautious...