denying me a so-called "normal" childhood, growing up as I did without a strong adult male to guide me and give me a sense of purpose. I can't deny this was missing from my life. My mother never took up with another man after she left my father, and I'm not surprised the strain of supporting us all those years took its toll on her. I have only the haziest memory of her as a young woman, but I remember vividly seeing her grow old in a just a few years. If there was some Piper to pay, she paid him more than enough.

She is dead now, having lived well into her late 70s, mellowed and humbled with age and having forgiven and been forgiven by the two of us. Only someone with far better judgment and a true command of the facts of her life can evaluate it. I can only recount the events. That all-seeing, unblinking eye that defines Truth in those moments when there are no other witnesses can only judge Truth itself.

My part of her story begins in the breach between her best and worst decisions. I was conceived in a moment of weakness, and yet my mother in all other ways was

the strongest woman I ever knew. There is no other way to do this than to let the events speak for themselves. Much of what follows happened before I was born, so what I tell comes from her lips or from those who knew her. I don't claim to be objective. I only know what I understand to be true.

She was 27 and had already lived a life full of trouble. She met my father in the fall of 1949, when the world was recovering from one war and being swept into the next. The following October, American troops had captured Inchon, and the Korean War kicked off a game of chicken between superpowers that would last four decades.

None of this mattered to me at the time. I had opened up my eyes after being ripped out of the comfort of my mother's womb when her doctor could not detect a heartbeat. My mother was very fertile and could easily conceive. Her pregnancies, though, were almost always near brushes with death. Her doctor said that another pregnancy would kill her, and so I was her last child to come to term.

My half-brother Bob was 8 at the time, and she had weathered so much with him that I often wonder how