A final thought on this two part story as I reflect on my early days, I was blessed to be adopted by a successful middle class family. Up until I was informed of my adoption by a family member who was being vengeful, I thought I was right where I supposed to be, and then I was not! I am looking back as an old guy in his 70’s on the actions of a 16 year old. I was a 16 year old that was targeted by a conniving adult female pretending to be something she had no real desire to be a, ‘Mother’, this was Marian aka “Bitch Marian”.
She would say and do things to me just to screw with my mental well being and tell my father things that I had never done. I was just a young teenager. Bitch Marian would actually just make stuff up and my father would believe her. She was an adult and should be shown respect, and that is just not going to work for me as a child and does not do well for me as an adult. Her goal was to get me out of her house that my father bought, in hopes of living happily ever after, without me in the picture. Just her and my father, and of course that old hag, granny!
Thank God for my sister Rena and her husband Kevin for taking me in after I was thrown out of the Palace of Love located in Melrose, Mass. Had I stayed in that environment, no question I would not have gone on to finish school and finish college only to eventually become a police officer. Frankly, I would have finished my education in a correctional institute…..”for troubled youth” of the worst kind, a juvenile murderer. In saying that, I had no doubt in my mind I would have been an incredible criminal. Just could not do the time as they say.
Something else that was even odder was that I would at one point be in charge of a small juvenile division. It was my job that while on patrol I would respond to all juvenile crime or contacts generated by other officers. It was now my duty to respond to trouble youth and come up with solutions to the problems in their lives. I actually sat in judgement of juveniles at the lowest level as to a decision to be made what the punishment would be for ‘mistakes’ kids would make. Punishment might be to sweep the neighborhood or wash police cars at the police station. This also gave kids to interact with police officers and myself in hopes of their seeing a different side of law enforcement. The best comment I loved was when one of my juvenile offenders would tell me, “You have no idea what I have been through.” I so wanted to ask if they had a “Pillow” or a “coffee percolator,” but no, I would just listen and try to help the best that I could, more stuff for John J. Nazarian to deal with, ‘play the cards I was dealt’.
