Bag of Randomness

I did a deep dive into genealogy research at the end of last week. I just unearthed another family secret. I knew my father had married and divorced a woman in Mineral Wells named Odella, which I always thought was because his mother’s name was Della. However, I wasn’t aware he was first married at the age of 26 to a divorced 26-year-old Kentucky woman named Gertrude. It was after his first stint in the service after WWII in 1949, and he worked as a dry cleaner, something else I had no idea about. I have no clue if they divorced, if she died, or really anything else. But I’ve been earnestly playing detective.

The first family secret I was informed about was revealed to me a few years after my father’s death. Mom, for some reason, felt she needed to let me know that my brother is my half-brother and had a different biological father. That floored me, and at the time, I was trying to decipher if my mother was going crazy or if it was a possible language barrier problem. It turns out everyone, even my adopted younger sister, knew but me. I’ll be honest, at the time, it was hard to process, and I was a bit upset that I didn’t know about this sooner in life. Truth was, I idolized my brother, so to me, it didn’t change a thing. It actually made the love story between my parents even better. To put it bluntly, I assumed my father knocked up my mother and did the honorable thing back then and married her. And now the true story of a retired GI falling in love with a young Vietnamese woman with a bastard child made me appreciate my father even more. He even adopted my brother and loved him as if he were his own. Funny thing, I always felt he favored my brother more than me. One evening when I was visiting my brother, I told him what Mom told me, but I first made sure to preface it by stating that it doesn’t change a thing. Little did I know, it ended up changing everything. I never understood why, but from that point my brother stopped communicating with my mother. I can only assume he felt Mom dishonored Dad by letting me know.

I stumbled upon Netflix’s psychological crime series Mindhunter, which follows FBI agents in the late 1970s and early 1980s as they develop groundbreaking criminal profiling techniques by conducting in-depth interviews with imprisoned serial killers. While the show is fictionalized, it features chilling portrayals of real-life criminals like Edmund Kemper and Charles Manson, with actors delivering great but unsettling performances based on actual prison interviews. The series explores how these conversations with incarcerated killers helped FBI agents understand the psychology behind serial murder and develop methods still used in criminal investigations today. I give it two big thumbs up. Sadly, only two seasons were made, resulting in a total of 19 shows. It ended in 2019, but this summer, there have been rumors of its return as three television movies.

I really like the man who played Fritz Von Erich in The Iron Claw, and he plays a salty veteran CIA guy. The other leading cast member may best be known for playing flamboyant King George III in Hamilton.

College football will kick off on Saturday, August 30th. And, in a big way, with my two favorite teams to root for are playing against each other. The University of Texas will be playing at The Ohio State University. You’d think such a game would happen at night, but kickoff is set for 11 AM Central. Since that happens to be my 50th birthday, I thought I’d try to put something together because no one would be throwing me a party or arranging anything. So, at trivia night last Tuesday, I told two of my closest friends that since my two favorite teams are opening the college football season on my 50th birthday, I invited them to come over and watch the game with me, telling them it would be like a small 50th birthday party for myself. One friend seemed apprehensive at first until I let him know it was an 11 AM kickoff. The other flatly said he wasn’t interested in the game and was looking forward to watching the LSU game that evening against Clemson.

Immediately, I remembered why I have always been hesitant all my life about taking risks and putting myself out there. It hurts to get your hopes up for something you’d think would be an easy ask, only to get them flushed down the toilet.I felt foolish for thinking that a friend of over 30 years would sacrifice a Saturday afternoon with three weeks notice to be there for a friend trying to celebrate his 50th birthday. I even prefaced the invite by saying my kids aren’t scheduled to be with me that day, and I’m sure their mother would be making plans so they couldn’t see me that day, as she has in the past for similar occasions. One reason I was putting this together was to try not to feel so bad about turning 50 and soften the blow of how, at 40 years old after climbing my first mountain and dancing with my wife literally on top of Texas, I couldn’t envision over the next ten years she would literally leave me and take the kids, I’d suffer through five spinal surguries and suffer from physical and mental health challenges, no longer be a homeowner, have a church stab me in the back, and be unemployed for months. I’ll be honest. I cried a bit during the drive home that night after trivia as I tried to figure out how everything went so wrong and wrestled with whether I deserved all of this. The pain of being let down or failure is greater than any feeling of potential joy, and that’s why I tend not to put myself out there or take chances.

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