Rosalia married Walter while he was still at the University of Toronto. It started off a rocky marriage, and it ended that way when she died some 35 years later. I still have their wedding pictures for you to see. My Mom was a mighty good looking woman, and my Dad was the handsomest man around.

He had an insatiable taste for women. Today he is 80 years old, and I think he has settled down somewhat. We do not talk that often, and when we do he gets uptight mighty quick. Mom died from a six month bout with cancer 21 years ago. It was the most profound experience of my Life.

She was always there, and then she was forever gone. I gave her a single rose for every occasion. She tried her best to do things right. But somehow she got carried away and did things very wrong.

One of my earliest memories was when she attempted suicide. I wasn't much more than a tot, but I remember looking into her half closed eyes and climbing up on a chair to reach the phone. Somehow I reached someone and then there was an ambulance and my Mom was off to the hospital. No one ever mentioned it again. But I will never forget those half closed eyes on her pretty face.

She was just a young adult at the time. Anyway her Life was always very rocky. Sometimes when she was fighting with my Dad she would give him a black eye, or scratch his face. But no matter how much of a fight she put up, my Dad would always win. He had the strength. And she was a delicate woman. A tough delicate woman.

The next day my Dad would have to face his patients with his scratches and bruises. Sometimes he would beat her fiercely, and then she would turn on us little boys.

So very many times we three would take a beating from our parents. It really was a horrible Life. To this day I don't hear so well from being slapped on the side of the head. If it wasn't the strap, it was the electric cord to an appliance, or the good old wooden spoon. In all my childhood Life I can not remember a time when we were not strapped.

One time when I was about 15 my Mom found some tobacco in my shirt pocket. But by then we had a routine. And this one time we three boys made a pact not to scream or cry when we got hit. My two brothers Walter and Richard wailed like puppies, but I never made a sound. That infuriated my Mom and she really went at it. She wacked me so hard across the butt that she broke the spoon and the broken piece hit her in the eye. Then she really got mad.

But all this was a way of Life for us. My Father would routinely take the three of us down into the basement underneath the office and make us strip naked. Then, one by one, he would make us bend over something like a box or whatever, and strap us with the cord or the belt. Mom would come down and stand by him while he made each of us bend over again and again and again. It was never over soon.

I would see the welts turn to bruises as we each took our turns. I would hope for the morning to come because then he had to stop so he could go upstairs to work. This was signaled by hearing people shuffling their feet at the bus stop which was at his office door. Then it would be over for another day. That is how we grew up. It was a horrible existence.

One time I had made a bed in the basement, and my Father was doing his thing to us. He had doubled up the strap and as he swung to hit me, one end came loose and wrapped around my body and snapped against my belly. It started to bleed immediately so I was sort of excused from the rest. I went to my bed just 15 feet away behind a floor to ceiling shelf. There I got to witness the horror from a bit of a distance. That was one of the few times I escaped the brutality, and I had a scar for years where the flesh was torn.

Both my parents would have gone to jail for what they did to each other, and they would have done serious time for what they did to us. And it could have been worse yet. We had a .22 rifle in the house. So we made a plan. When my Father started slapping us around, I would stay out of sight and hide in the stairway. I was a good shot for a young teen, and all I needed was that one shot. For some reason neither of my parents did anything that night and his Life was spared.

I am much older and wiser now, and beleaguered by the concept that my Father, no matter how horrible he treated us, he did give us Life. So he does not have to fear me in the least. I am thankful that he did give us Life, in spite of the fact that he made our lives so horrendous.

Julius Caesar saved Brutus from drowning. Therefor Brutus did not have the right to stab Caesar with a knife. But he did it anyway, and Caesar died. I think Brutus made a terrible mistake in this deed. And that is how I feel about my Dad. He is lucky I feel that way, because I can not bring myself to not hate him for what he did to us. I have tried and tried to just drop the whole thing, but I can not get those basement scenes out of my mind. Most of all I can not understand what was going through his mind when he had three little naked shivering frightened little boys, and strapped them for hours on end.

so I grew up with this 'take no prisoners ' attitude. If someone got in my way he was moved aside immediately. Fighting was a way of Life.

Now I have hung up the gun so as to speak, and I am a relatively cool headed guy. I can walk the walk if I need to, and do what has to be done, but these days there is little reason for that 'talent'.

So I choose to be a peaceful man these days, and I have not struck another human in more than a decade.

Never, ever have I ever hit my children. Never ever spanked them or even grabbed them. I see them as an extension of myself. And much like I would not slap my stubbed toe for banging against something, I can feel no urge to ever hit my child.

My brothers and sisters don't share my viewpoint. They have the attitude that children need to be spanked every once in a while. Even my dogs have safe passage in that area. If they do something outrageously wrong I will grab them by the side of their neck and growl at them like a parent dog would. And they try my patience often. Both the dogs and my children. I am a patient man with animals and children.

One day when I was eighteen I had fallen in Love with a most pretty girl who was a nurse in my Dad's office. Her name was Yvonne, and she had been married but was divorced. I wanted to marry her because she just meant everything to me and I Loved everything about her.

She could push my buttons, ring my bell, rattle my chain, and pull my strings all at the same time. Many times a night too. We had sex often and whenever and anywhere we could. She kind of taught me things I had never even dreamed of. I couldn't believe how strong I could feel about another woman. She was gorgeous fun. We were a magical Love story.

One day my two brothers pulled me aside and made me promise not to be angry with what they were going to tell me. So I had to promise on my Life not to do anything about what they would tell me. They were very serious and made me say the words, " I promise, on my Life, that I will do nothing about what I am about to hear." And I had to swear to God and all.

"Yvonne is sleeping with Dad."

I staggered in disbelief.

"Come and we will show you."

That night we went down to a motel called the City Center.

We positioned ourselves in the stairwell of an apartment across the street. About half an hour later my Dad pulled into the parking lot. A few minutes later he turned on the lights of his room which was right across the street from us. About fifteen minutes later a cab pulled up to the entrance and Yvonne got out and went into the motel. A few minutes later she walked into his room and closed the curtains. I was devastated. But there it was right in front of my eyes.

That night when my father came home he talked about how cold it was in the Sports Club he had a membership in. I stood there in mute silence. God I suffered over that. Something inside of me shattered. I think it was my heart.

On some lonely nights I would stare at the big white moon and pretend I was making a big sign on it. "I Love you Yvonne." it would say. I felt so broken. I went away to Alberta to work in the oil fields of Drayton Valley, but I never could get her out of my mind.

Later I confronted Yvonne about that night, and she would say she did it because my Dad made her do it, and she never enjoyed it and stuff like that.

A lot of women in my Life would pay for Yvonne's sin. And the first one would be Yvonne herself. We still stayed together for a while yet. But she got pregnant and had the child aborted. We ended our relationship at that point. To this day, I have never gotten over Yvonne.

There would be many other girls. And my Father was always in there like a dirty dog. Once in a rare time he would win, but most of the time he would lose.

One day about nine years later, he tried to slap me again. I told him not to try it but he came around with a 'haymaker'. I knocked him out cold with one punch. It was the only time I struck my Dad. And my whole family cursed me for it. They have a weird sense of values that way. And they all pay the price for their foolishness.

All of our marriages would end in divorce. All except my sister Darlene. Why she didn't divorce is a testemonial to the patience of her husband Bill.

Richard has been married four times. Actually only three. He never actually married his fourth wife. Much to her surprise. They told everyone that they were married but it never really happened. Finally she left him.

The only one who has stayed with their married partner is my sister Darlene, and that is a kind of miracle in itself.

Anyway, we had a weird upbringing, and we were kind of different from everyone else.

In the next part I will tell you how I searched for God. I would take ten years out of my Life and visit temples and churches to find the evasive Truth. I came away from that journey with some very powerful answers. But I also came up with more questions.