Steve Kates

Family Matters! Steve Kates

Pure happiness is a Walt Disney, M-G-M myth, which is why their beatific output has been so universally embraced for decades. It's what everyone wants but will never attain. Ozzie and Harriet were a lie!

I have selected incidents from my life that reflect both the laughs and the sad underbellies of my familial connections and interactions. There are good people, and there are good people doing bad things, knowingly or not. There are mean-spirited people. There are pathetic people. There are smart and unintelligent people, both making good and poor choices. And there are failures.

Yet I would wager that if you could have polled the characters herein, 95% of them would say they had happy lives. Perhaps that reflects our miraculous human faculties for self-delusion, survival, and finally, eternal hope.

Some memoirs do not directly mention their author, yet the very narrative can often tell much about the writer--I'm sure many of mine do.

Most of the people in this memoir are gone and thus defenseless in the face of what my memory has directed me to put on paper. Obviously, my recollections reflect a certain personal bias. But whatever transpired during their lives with me, I wish almost all of them peace.