she could have raised yet another son.   She must have been very lonely when she met my father, doing what lonely people do when they find each other, being caught up in the moment when nothing else matters but touching and being touched.

My mother had divorced Bob's father, Joe, five years earlier and was raising Bob on her own, afraid that Joe would abuse him as he had abused her. However justified her reasons, the odds were very much against her in that time, a divorced woman raising a son on a small salary that could barely support one of them.

If my father hadn't already been married to another woman he hadn't seen in almost a decade, my mother might have had the home life she'd always wanted. To this day I can't understand how she could have yielded to my father like she did and placed herself in such a position. I always saw her as strong, and so I've had to look deeper into a time when she was not my mother.

In 1922 in Centralia, Illinois, no one in her family expected Eva to live past her first year. At birth she caught "oral thrush," a disease that makes feeding diffi-

cult. The third of six children, and the only one ever delivered by my grandfather, she was tiny, frail and sickly. Malnutrition and other complications from the disease delayed her ability to walk or speak her first words. In those first 2 years, she either slept or stared out through tiny listless eyes at a world that didn't seem to want her.

Late in her third year, she recovered. Still small for her age, she was otherwise healthy, full of energy and limber enough to take up gymnastics. She was bright-eyed, inquisitive, extremely talkative, as if all that life had been trapped and suddenly set free. Everyone I spoke to who lived then said that she was my grandfather's favorite, although that could be a mixed blessing.

Jesse Carl, her father, my maternal grandfather, was a temperamental man whose moods rose and sank suddenly, all the more if he'd been drinking, as he often did. I was told he seldom touched hard liquor, favoring beer and wine, but even the small amount he drank was enough to change his mood, usually for the worse. It was difficult to tell how much of the change came from Jesse Carl and how much from the drink.