My father effectively has not existed since the night of October 5th, 2001. I had only turned 8 years old the previous month. My personal memory is not great that far back. I do remember him reading to me. For all but about a month of the entire span of time I knew him, when he uncharacteristically shaved for a round of job interviews, he had a beard, generally a large one.

There's a few things I'll always remember him for, the backstory to which is unpleasant. This is because every day when he was gone at work, his wife would keep a record of all the things his children did "wrong", this could be as simple as bringing a cup of water into the wrong room, say, one with carpeted floors, or whatever she could make up on the spot, to ensure our imperfection in her eyes. For the most part, after her only sibling died, her younger brother, she became extremely paranoid. Where before, my older siblings were enrolled in school, and could watch Transformers, X-men, animated cartoons on television, and could play with Pokemon with their friends, and so forth, all of a sudden, these things were Satanic or demonic, or both. In short, joy and happiness were banned. All of us were then effectively "unschooled", or little better, as she believed a child learns according to their own interests, and her grandfather Bill Olsen, who she revered, had nothing more than an 8th grade education.

Anyway, this "record" of "wrongs", which might even be written down at times, would be told to our father once he got home from work for the day, and each of us would be spanked on the behind, a number of times. Often even if she had already done so, and often, even if she had already punished us in another way. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" and all that. Depending on how they were feeling, each of us might get whatever punishment they felt we deserved, times three, once for disobeying "god", once for disobeying our father, and once for disobeying our mother. It was all very dramatic. And usually based out of the most trivial of actions on our part.

He seemed most often like as soon as he came home from work and got in the door, all he wanted to do was sleep, often lying down and doing so on the couch right next to the door as soon as he walked in. It often seemed to me like he couldn't care less about however each of us might have inadvertently said or done to raise the ire of our gingerheaded mother. I can remember her telling my father to go punish me for something and he took me in the bathroom, where the spankings would often take place, leaning over the bathtub, but this time, instead of spanking me, he told me to make some grunting noises while he hit the bathtub instead of me. He told me not to tell my siblings. I ended up telling some of them.

Another time, after I'd broken a toy by accident, she told him to discipline me, code for spanking, and again, he took me in the bathroom with the "weaver", a leather dogging bat as usual, and set it on his lap, while he sat down and talked to me like I was a human being, capable of understanding and communication. He told me to be more careful with my belongings, and to try to be more wary of my mother and her expectations. And then the two of us walked out.

On the other hand, he developed a fondness for the preachings of Denny Kenaston and Gospel Light Fellowship, which is founded in Anabaptist and Mennonite teachings. And again, there were 8 of us kids at our peak, so a lot of work to do if our asses were going to stay sore.

There were times we all got along too, probably most of the time, but these don't stick out like the somewhat dramatic or painful occurrences. I do remember an awful lot of reading. I was read to a lot.

Every dinner, called "supper" (I actually didn't hear the word "dinner" to mean the last meal of the day used in person until years and years later), would begin with "devotions", a reading from Scripture or some book usually written by a Mennonite, that had some moral or lesson to present through the story. Aesop wasn't for the table.

I'm certain the health effects that lead my father to undergo the debilitating stroke that incapacitated him were effecting him, his behavior, temperament and decision making, in the years leading up to the event. The turn of the millenium was a strange time. He and his wife bought heavily into the "Y2K" paranoia. He would talk of building a bunker, somewhere more or less "rural". They were stockpiling foodstuffs, preserving all kinds of edibles by canning, which to be fair, my mother would have had her children doing anyway, and did long after the "Y2K" scare was over. The election coverage was on constantly, I can still hear Rush Limbaugh's voice if I allow it in my mind, from the program my second eldest brother especially got very into.

Child Protective Services were called in the fall of '06, and we finally left our mother's household, but that wasn't the first time they'd been called. We left Minneapolis when I was 2 for St. Paul, and our neighbors made complaints, one of which I know was initiated due to my actions. I was 5 or 6 years old, my father wasn't home, and some backstory, if my mother thought whatever we had done was "bad" enough, we would be spanked bare bottom, so you'd have to pull your pants down or what have you. I couldn't take what she was doing, and ran out the front door with my pants and underwear still between my legs. Then this obese raging ginger in a handmade dress and headcovering runs out the front door trying to find her son, who in her mind is hopefully still in the yard. I remember making eye contact with a neighbor who was looking out their window. I know my mother did as well. She feigned caring for me, putting her arm on my shoulder. My eldest sister ran up to me, as I was still in the yard, pulled my pants up and buttoned them. This would have had to have been the summer of '98 or '99.

There were a lot of reasons to leave the Twin Cities. Great grandpa Olsen passed November 11th, 2000. December 7th 2000, Raymond Waddell murdered Vickie Mollenhoff in his attempt to rob the Minni-Mart where she was working a shift as a cashier, a convenience store my two older brothers in particular would frequent as it was on the same block and just three houses down from our house. Weeks later we left for Texas, outside of El Paso, where we stayed with a Jewish family my oldest sister was friendly with for a few months. It was the first time I saw a longhorn. Looked pretty intimidating to a 7 year old. Still does.

A few weeks after the Minni-Mart incident, Child Protective Services did a wellness check, dropping by our house after receiving recurring complaints of abnormal and potentially abusive behavior. They apparently didn't find evidence enough to take us out of the household. But my parents packed us in the car, pretty much that night if I recall correctly, all of us except my father who stayed behind to work, in a passenger van along with some basic foodstuffs and such, and headed south, to the Friendship state.

My mother's somewhat estranged father lived there. Her parents divorced when she was still in grade school.

Before we left for Texas, we stayed one night spread around my grandmother's small apartment, or condo. This was my mother's mother. We would see her every now and then, she was ok. She was a little "hip", for a 60 something Christian grandmother. Our household didn't allow contemporary music whatsoever basically. I'd never even heard of DC Talk, and she had the Jesus Freak album, as well as some recently released Michael W. Smith, like a good evangelical Christian of the time. My mother gave her some sob story, and packed us into the car the next morning, and started driving us to the other side of the country.

She was born Sheryl, but got the nickname Saunnia given her by a few friends at school, apparently one of whom was the school janitor. This was because she looked very "Finnish", which to be fair, she was about a quarter "Finnish", because of the "Forest Finns" who left Finland for Sweden some 400 years ago. They had come from a place called Savonia in Finland, and that word is not pronounced the same as it looks in English. 

So we stayed with this Jewish family for a few months, often eating ridiculous meals, if you can call them that, like peanut butter on corn tortillas. This tastes absolutely terrible. Don't try this at home. Our father joined as after a bit, and then we split for my grandfather's house. Norman had a frying pan he never washed, and steak seemed to be his most often consumed food. He had been an accountant, and then started teaching accounting for a local university, if I recall correctly. My father bought a school bus, intending to live out of it temporarily, along with his wife and 8 kids, the oldest of whom was 22 years old at this point, and still living with her parents. We took the bus to a campground for probably a month or two, frankly I have no idea really where we were at this point, I think back in Minnesota, but we then moved on to La Farge, Wisconsin, where a bunch of hippies had basically started the commercial Organic farming movement with brands such as the well known Organic Valley, and where a family friend I think we'd known for ages lived, the Hege's. They owned a lumber mill, and the patriarch was also very into the Anabaptist movement, Denny Kenaston, and so forth. Affiliates of Kenaston had started a church nearby, and of course, we attended. We lived in the bus and a few nearby tents on their farmland for another month or so, before renting a mobile home next to a church inside the town. And this is where our father had his stroke a short while later.

At this point he was diabetic, the preventable kind, and his blood sugar readings were off the charts. He had never really taken care of himself, certainly not as he should have. I don't have horror stories based on how he treated me, but my older siblings certainly do based on how he treated some of them. His mother was incredibly manipulative, and the person he knew as his father was as well, and often neglectful or worse.

When my father was 14, he had his appendix removed. Shortly after, and apparently due to seeing him with his pants off, changing bandages and helping him use the restroom due to the ordeal, Edgar had my father circumcised a second time.