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For most of my adult life I hated my parents. They were my aunt and uncle, actually, and they became my parents when I was twelve and when my mother found she could not abide me and begged her sister to take me. Legally, they became my parents when they adopted me at age sixteen. In that four years I came to loath them with a passion reserved for enemies of state, such as Nazis; in fact I thought they were Nazi-like in their dedication to dominate every aspect of my life.

My uncle/father was a large Southern man with whom I had had a wonderful relationship when I was a younger child. But upon greeting him at the Chicago train station on June 29, 1951, my twelfth birthday incidentally, I found him cold and distant. Also present, of course, was my aunt/mother, a gaunt, long-nosed woman who appeared so tired that I thought she might fall onto the train tracks. In my mind, however, was their promise made over the telephone that they would take me to the Brookfield Zoo and to dinner in Chicago.

Well, he insisted that we had very little time because he had to go to work that afternoon, and the best we could do was have lunch downtown somewhere near the South Shore station so we could get a quick train back to Hammond, Indiana, where they lived. My train from Denver had arrived Chicago at six o'clock in the morning, and I wondered why we didn't have time to do it all. Remember, I was twelve.

Hammond was a familiar place for me; I had visited there with my grandmother a few times. Located in what is commonly referred to as the Calumet Region of Northern Indiana, Hammond was at that time part of what I called the Feculent Crescent of Indiana, after I learned that feculent means unbelievably filthy, of course. Coated with a thin layer of muck spewed out by several steel mills, oil refineries and their ancillary industries-foundries, toolmakers, tire manufactures, among many-Hammond appeared gray and oily. I remember being close to tears when the South Shore pulled into the Hammond station because the day before I had awakened in Denver where the sky was bright blue, the air was pure and the odors were flowery. Hammond smelled like diesel fuel. In fact, by the time I graduated high school, I believed fresh air smelled that way naturally.

I will say my new parents fought the grime, especially my mother. In fact, she wore out both my dad and me with cleaning, polishing, scrubbing, and dusting, but inside their house it was not Hammond. It was spotless.

Resentment in me began

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