Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."

Alan Watts

There are a lot of things that have happened to me in my life that folks who understand psychology, sociology, counseling, philosophy, politics, and spirituality all have a lot of theories and so much to say and write about.  I was there.  The one thing I will say is that each of the things that are on this bullet form list left some mark upon who I know myself to be.  But I am of the school that says there is what happened and then, there is what meaning you give it in your life.  The latter is more important.  So first, I am going to make a list of what happened.  This may take me a few posts to get through.  There was a lot.  In other posts, I will tell you what these things mean to me, or what I learned from these experiences.

• Born the bastard child of David S. Hall and Peggy Hendricks in Stockton, CA.  Two half brothers from father who was more than a decade older than my 21 year old mother.
• Moved in Stockton.
• 15 months later, sister, Sally, also a bastard was born.
• My mother hit me hard across the face while feeding me in the high chair.  I am wearing corduroy overalls, I can remember touching them and crying really hard.
• Parents separated when I was about 3 years old, we moved to San Diego County, I think to a little trailer that I remember in Fallbrook.
• We moved to an apartment in Fallbrook not far from maternal grandparents.  Mom is sleeping with men, names I can't remember, except Dick.
• My father comes to visit me and gives me a harmonica.  I never see him again.
• We moved to San Diego, I remember sleeping in a Quonset hut.  Mom hits me, spanks me, and beats me.
• We moved into an apartment building near the Quonset hut.
• I started school at Alice Birney Elementary.
• I was stalked by a predator and evaded and ran home.
• I remember a man cutting my mother's capris off with a pocket knife.
• We move nearby to a small house and I still attend the same school.
• The baby sitter shows me his erect penis in the bathroom and takes me in my mother's bedroom and tries to put it in my mouth.
• Chicken pox.
• Little sister Sharon is born.
• My mother is seen beating me with a stick of lathe and we are taken from her by the courts and sent to live with our grandparents.
• My uncle is masturbating in front of the TV when I come home from school.  He doesn't stop.
• My teenaged uncle humps me between the legs in the egg house on the cold cement floor.
• My father kills himself.  I am seven.
• My uncle continues, repeatedly molesting me in different places around the ranch, eventually, though I am 9 years old by the time anyone notices, my grandmother thinks this is somehow my fault.
• Another uncle, home on leave from the Navy, tries to get me to give him oral sex.  I am not yet ten years old.  I am afraid to tell because they will blame me.
• We go back to live with my mother, she has a job at a ranch.
• She gets involved with the horse trainer, he is an alcoholic.  He becomes verbally abusive and acts like he is going to beat my mother.  She is taller & stronger than he is, so he must be drunk! 
• I stick up for her and he says all kinds of awful things about her to me, and about me and the fact that I am a bastard.
• I think he tells the minister that I am a bastard, because some kids aren't allowed to play with me, and in the way that adults talk in front of children like they are not in the room, I learn why.
• I am in third grade and attending my third school.  We are about to move again.

For the next installment click on Knowing Myself:  The List Part Two