When I was a kid, my family lived on a big farm in Indiana. We didn't stay more than a couple of years, but if I had to pick a place in the universe that felt like 'home' to me, it would be that farm. Of course part of the reason for that is that even though we moved off the farm, my father's family still owned it and we visited it frequently over the years. But I digress.

When we first moved out to the farm, there was no electricity, no mechanical heat (we used a coal stove), and no indoor plumbing (I know what you're thinking, but we didn't even have an outhouse - we had a POT). Dad was, and still is, a very handy kind of guy so he got all that remedied pretty quickly...although now that I think of it, I'm not sure if he ever installed central heating. I remember very clearly that in the winter, we all moved out of our bedrooms and slept in the living room to be near the coal stove.

We were smack in the middle of six hundred acres of farm and woods, and over an hour away from any of our relatives or friends. I had to either hike a mile uphill to catch the school bus or Mom had to drive me across a creek (sort of a smallish river) on the tractor to catch the bus at another location. We were very isolated and I'm sure it was hard on my mother. But we had all the pets we could have wanted--lots of dogs and cats and horses and ponies and pigs and cows and chickens and a duck. Just the one duck. It was also the first and only time I can ever remember feeling particularly close to my father.

Maybe it was because we were so far away from other human beings and because he was lacking his other activities (which largely consisted of womanizing), that he seemed to have time to spend talking to me. I was about six years old. He'd go for a walk in the yard, or hang out on the big porch that went all the way around the house and just talk to me. He'd say things to me like, "Girl," (I think he knew my name, but I'm not sure), "if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut, you'll learn something new every day." He was right, and that little gem has stuck with me ever since then.

It was during one such conversation while we were strolling through the yard together that I made a grievous error. I was feeling particularly close to him and I threw my arm around his waist and said affectionately, "Dad, you old son of a bitch." See...I knew there were two "sons of" that you could call somebody. I'd heard Dad and his brothers saying things like that to each other. I just didn't realize that while "son of a gun" was basically harmless and might be used affectionately, "son of a bitch" was another thing altogether.

Needless to say, the whipping I got with a switch pretty well broke the affectionate mood I'd been in. Afterwards, Mom (realizing that I was just not the kind of kid that went around cussing at her parents) asked me when I knew I'd said a bad word. I told her, "When he said 'What'd you say, girl?!?'" In retrospect, I think it was probably at the moment when I saw his head come swiveling around at a high rate of speed. But you live and learn, right? I haven't called him a son of a bitch since then.

Not to his face, anyhow.

Just occurred to me that Denzel is not necessarily an entirely ridiculous name. I started applying it to my mother's husband years before I'd ever heard of Denzel Washington (a fine actor).

All the best stories have titles. All the worst holidays end up with titles. When I get together with my family for a holiday, I am always hoping not to end up with one that we'll have given a title to a few years down the road. For example: "The Thanksgiving Denzel Brought Home an Armload of Guns." There have been a handful of times in my life when I've been really afraid, and this time had to be somewhere in the top five at least.

Denzel (not his real name, but it's equally ridiculous) was my mother's husband from the time I was about 17 until I was 31 or so. He was one of those really awful controlling alcoholic violent people that are just not a hell of a lot of fun to be around.

James Ruppert was this guy who murdered 11 of his family members on Easter Sunday in 1975 in Hamilton, Ohio. This may seem irrelevent, but it isn't.

During my mom's marriage to Denzel, every time we went to her house for a holiday dinner, events would follow pretty much the same pattern: Denzel would head for the bar and start drinking, my mother and my sisters and I would have dinner and enjoy one another's company, then Denzel would come home drunk and start some obnoxious huge fight with my mother that sometimes ended in violence. I had started to worry that one of these days, he was going to come home drunk and just shoot us all, a la James Ruppert. Every holiday that went by, I was more convinced that we were all goners. I started to refer to our eventual murders as Denzel 'pulling a Ruppert'.

So on this one Thanksgiving when I was in my very early twenties, we'd followed the usual pattern. Denzel had gone to get drunk, we'd had dinner, and I was sitting around afterwards feeling nervous and uneasy. We heard a car pull into the driveway and my sister went to look out. My mother asked, "who is it?" and my sister replied, without the slightest trace of alarm, "It's Denzel and he's carrying a bunch of guns." I was immediately on my feet and on the way out the sliding glass back door until I realized that no one else was running. So I stopped. And Denzel came in with his guns, went to his room, and didn't come out for the rest of the evening while we carried on visiting with each other.

So I guess what I learned was that my intuition wasn't all that great, because I sincerely thought we were all going to be shot, and it turned out to be the most peaceful holiday we'd had in years. And I also learned that even I didn't trust my own intuition. I stopped moving out the door when I realized no one else was coming, despite my entire being telling me to run. If he'd come out shooting, I would have ended up dead from the peer pressure to not run away. That would've pissed me right off too.

I love a good story. I love hearing them and I love telling them. Sometimes I think going through unpleasant experiences is almost worthwhile if you come out of it with a good story to tell. So I plan to tell stories here. Some of them will be my stories -- things which I've seen or experienced, some of them will be stories that others have told me, and probably I'll end up telling stories that I heard somewhere out in the world and which I thought were cool. This isn't going to be all uplifting or humorous stuff, although probably some of it will be. At least some of it will be humorous -- uplifting I'm not so sure about.

Basic facts about me just to give some background: I'm 38, a lesbian/mom/artist type person living in the deep south amongst the Baptists and Republicans. I come from people who if they aren't exactly poor white trash, aren't too far removed from that. I was freakishly smart as a kid and somehow grew into something of an underachiever as an adult. So that's who I am. More or less. I left out a lot of traits -- a lot of good ones, but I don't think all that's really necessary anyway.