Blog Assignment #5-Planning an Interview for a personal profile

For this Personal profile piece, I am going to conduct an interview with my mother. There is no one else I would rather interview. My children and I are blessed to have her in our lives. She is still working, healthy, and strong.  Last week my mother turned 68 years old. As I think back to my childhood, and witnessing my mother getting older, I remember when my mom was a young vibrant woman in her 30's. It seemed like yesterday as I was combing through her wardrobe and trying on her shoes. Can you guess where I developed my love of shoes? It can be dearly described more so as shoegasms!!! Anyway, being an only child from my parents, my mother and I are very close. My mother and father's marriage was very short lived didn't last very long. It was my mother who decided to exit stage left when she was pregnant with me. Turned out that my father wasn't the ideal type of marrying man. I don't doubt that he loved her; they had their grown up reasons. But "yay" it's good to know that I was conceived through marriage. My father thought my mother would conform to his cultural ways. That wasn't going to happen--not from "spitfire Rose". My father was Puerto Rican, born in San Turce Puerto Rico. You would have never known when you looked at him because he looked more like a light-skinned Black man. He didn't reveal this to my mother when they met because my family was in mourning from the death of my late cousin David. He was killed by a Puerto Rican man who stabbed him to death. So at this point my mother hated  Puerto Ricans and made it vocal and very clear. My father was scared to tell her, so he rolled with what worked. I am the seventh of eight children from my father and the only one conceived from marriage.
My maternal grandparents played a big role in raising me too. We lived with them as long as I can remember. We moved several times back and forth in my younger years, but we always found our way back to Mama's and Daddy's house. I won't talk about them because the loss hurts way way too much and the sorrow is maddening. I love them very much and if it weren't for them my family wouldn't exist.
My mother always told stories about her childhood. The stories intrigued me because I was learning that my grandparents as parents were the bomb then too. I kno what my mother's life was like after she married my father and became pregnant with me. She took the time to reveal her story to me when I was old enough to understand and filled in the gaps when we heard through the grapevine that my father had passed away, just a matter of weeks before my 18th birthday. What really hurt about his death was that I mourned the loss not knowing the man with no closure.
The part of my mother's life I'm interested in is the life she had before me growing up as a teenager into a young adult. I guess the questions I would ask would be those stated below....

1. What did you want to be when you grow up?
2. What was the best memory of your childhood?
3. Did you meet your own expectations in any of your life's decisions?
4. Moving forward, what do you anticipate the most in the second half of your life?

These questions may be subject to change as I continue to put this project in motion.

Memoir: Angela's Ashes

As I read chapter three of Frank Mcourt's memior, it stirred up several emotions. I couldn't read this piece objectively. I immediately retained this reading from a woman's  point of view and it pissed me off. I'm amazed how Frank was able to recall his childhood memories so clear and descriptively. I feel as though he re-lived every inch of those moments as he graced the paper. His poverty stricken life is way beyond anything I have seen or witnessed growing up in the hood, and yet he survived. This level of poverty he lived in and detailed is beyond words. That severe womanly sorrow his mother endured seemed to take on a hard core character of its own.  I can't imagine how Frank and his siblings felt about their mothers' emotional state and not knowing then how their father contributed to most of it.
My personal thoughts about what she endured I defined as abuse. Not abuse in the obvious way that most would see or define it as, but emotionally and financially Angela was dragged through the mud. Any woman would lose it, through the tragedies she endured, but she managed to muster up strength and kept her loyalty to her useless husband through it all. Her life is depressing and pitiful, and if her husband was a better man, perhaps he could have placed the family in a better position.
Frank's father is what I call a "prideful bumb". He lives in a world where keeping up appearances satisfies his pride, but on the reverse side if the coin, his pride covets his selfishness and ruins his familys' quality of life. His family is placed in embarrassing positions and ridiculed; in which the role of a man is to never leave his family open or placed in compromising positions. His alcoholism made me angry. His wife and children are helpless and victimized from his addiction. His wife's moments of optimism for the family is short lived anytime her husband lands a job. Angela can only pray that he would be considerate enough to come home with his wages knowing they are always in need. He has no sense of rationality, and he uses his pride as the "man code" of righteousness. In hypocrit land, he wanders aimlessly looking for only what he wants in his tiny little world and what he perceives his tiny little world should be.  How quickly do you forget that after a long days work, after having no money and living on a dole, that the money your family desperately needs doesn't make it home? Where does the conscious lie? With mouths to feed, what connection in his brain got severed along the way? With everything that is wrong he finds a way to make things worse.
Their house is next to a lavatory thats full of shit that leaves an unbearable stench. In comparison, Angela is married to a piece of shit. The shit that her husband pulls leaves them in a whole heap of shit called the stench of poverty. Angela could do bad all by herself.

Description of a Historical Photo

The landscape appears far and wide as farmland or a plantation. Kansas? Wyoming? Wisconsin? Maybe Utah? From the look of this very photo, it would harden anyone to believe that this island still exists, right here in the middle of New York City. The trees that sit on the land appear frail, leaves sparse, hanging lifeless as if the sick people that are housed and treated here completely devastated nature with all of their ills. 

This eerily frightening picture mimics the scene of a horror movie; perhaps the House of Horrors or even American Horror Story: Insane Asylum. It's as if you can see the gang assault of the walking dead approach while the beating of the dry cold air cuts to the bone. But the walking dead live on the inside.
In there, is where the howling cries of the insane bellows through echoing hallways and the tundra of torture is open.The grass is windblown, brown, and dry as if this land owes its debt to nature.

In fact Welfare Island is the very place where the mentally insane were held, mistreated and dumped onto barges after their deaths to be shipped to where ever to be forgotten about.The story behind this hell hole of an island that once was, has notoriety and truths, and from the grotesque happenings of the past, it is no wonder the mention and sightings of ghosts reign true.

I can hear the sickening screams of the insane through dark hallways and rooms that resemble jail cells with one bed, a bucket for a toilet, and a chair strategically placed in the crazy corner behind the door. I can hear the dripping of stagnant water as you approach the tundra of torture in the basement. The patients, better yet experimental guinea pigs are dragged through dark never ending hallways with huge metal doors on each side of the walls. You can hear the frightening screams and the banging coming from behind the doors as they can hear the next victim being dragged to condemnation. The orderlies waiting in the chamber are dressed in all white scrubs prepare the rattling chains to strap the victim in. Their mouths are covered with surgical masks and their eyes with goggles. Their hands are adorned with long black latex gloves up to their elbows as if mere touch or skin contact is toxic.

The leader of the insidious pack enters the chamber and instructs the rest of the minions to bring in the the meat to fry. The rusted gurney that sits on the side of the electro shock chair is ready to welcome the victim's soon lifeless body. The black-gloved minions pull the lever upon request from the leader of the damned, as the the electrical sparks reflect off their goggles. The violent convulsions of the victim indicates that meat is now fried. After about 25 electrical lashes, the dirty gurney is ready for company. As the last lash of the victim is complete, you can here the shrill screams echo in the hall from the next victim being dragged down the hall as the banging of the metal doors begin to sound like the melodic theme song of the condemned.