'...Uh, Driver, I'm On The Wrong Bus, Its Headed To Earth...Can I Exchange This Ticket?'

If you've really never been there, Earth is a weather nightmare. Its too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer. And most of the food will eventually kill you - if your neighbor doesn't do it first. Realize, you don't get a choice. When a female and male species mate, its a lottery for both the parents and the offspring. The parents don't know what they are getting, and the children don't know what's ahead for them. Certainly as a child, you don't get to pick location, parents, siblings and economic strata. We won't even mention religion, IQ or color. If I had a choice, it would be well-educated loving Christian parents in an upper middle class family with open-minded non-violent siblings where everyone were friends with everyone else. I didn't get that...

I was born on July 27th, 1952 at 10:55pm at Deaconess Hospital in Old Brooklyn, a west side Cleveland, Ohio neighborhood. My mother was a stay-at-home-mom, my dad worked as a tool and die man at a General Motors assembly plant. I had an older brother ahead of me - he was born on May 1st, 1951 - aptly on what is considered May Day in the United States of America. I was conceived sometime in November 1951, it was obviously a boring evening of television on the old Muntz. A few weeks before I was due, my old man wanted to visit his mother in West Virginia, with a very pregnant wife behind the wheel and a one year-old in the back seat. My dad was not really an intelligent nor reasonable individual. My mom refused.

Lets face it, Floyd Daniel Boggs had seen the birth of one child, why worry about the second - you know...been there, done that. So he left his wife, Carol Louise Boggs, home, and wearing a new hound's-tooth (remember, the guy hails from West Virginia) suit, with bag in hand hopping the first Greyhound bus to a farm outside Parkersburg. Reason for the trip? He was homesick and wanted to show his mom the new zoot suit he bought. My mother was left to care for my older sibling, Holden Daniel Boggs. Dan's first name is from one of my mom's favorite teachers at James Ford Rhodes High School on the westside of Cleveland. When my father got down there, his mother, Sylvia, was horrified my dad would pull such a dumb stunt and sent him straight back to Cleveland.

Now we really have to analyze this for a moment. First, my mother did not get married for love, she wanted to get away from her domineering mother, Anna DeJean. And it was a choice between a guy who lived in his parent's attic or my father...dad was the lesser evil. With what I know now, it would have been better if my father never left the hills of West Virginia. Or since it was too late and I was on the way, allow him to stay in Parkersburg and forget the whole thing. I mean early on it was a loveless marriage to a buffoon with a home study high school degree from the back of a matchbook. I know that seems cold, and it is! However, I have a good reason to look at it that way. Ahead, I didn't know all the physical and mental abuse I would take from this man.

When I came into this world, I was christened Floyd Andrew Boggs. Now I'm a little chagrined by this. I get my dad's first name which is really seconds in my opinion. However, it was the only name left of my father's, and I suspect that my mom was trying to avoid the use of Floyd because it is a pretty crappy name, not thinking the second child would get stuck with it - and geez, that was me!. My younger brother Mark lucked out - both names were already used, and certainly Mark wouldn't be named after his real dad...might cause a few problems for my mother in the Boggs household! Oh, fyi, my younger brother's full name is Mark Matthew Boggs...well the last name on Mark's birth certificate -  he changed it to DeJean before he married his second wife. However, Mark was at least a decade away from my birth.

There are no real first day pictures of me - chances are no one showed up at the hospital with a camera...at least in my family - I was not a star. However, Dan didn't rate a photograph the day he was born, so I'd say that makes us about even. At least photo studio shots were taken separately of us both in color - the ones of Dan may still exist, but I fear the ones of me are gone. Unfortunately, my mom and to a much greater degree my dad were not very good at passing down family history, so a lot of information in the 'Family History' will be cryptic at best. But this chapter is on my beginnings, so that's where it will be centered. My offspring and that to come will be able to add to the information giving their own personal perspective.

To Dan, I was an interloper - cutting in on his action. Hey Dan, I would have been only too pleased to let you be the only child in this family. I didn't want to be here...BUT I WASN'T GIVEN A CHOICE IN THE MATTER! As I said earlier, its a lottery which family I'd join from the spirit world - and I drew the short stick on this one! Very early on, Dan would make sure I'd know who was the head bull in this family - and I wasn't in the competition! I truly wanted to be an equal - not more than, but certainly not any less. However, as far as Dan was concerned, the battle lines were drawn. From this time on, I would take a lot of beatings not only from my father, but Dan as well. It was to be a bitterly long ride for at least the next two decades, a very painful one!

Life was going to be Hell!

We are born into this world

- no roadmaps are we given.

There is no negotiating

- for we are but pawns to fate.

- Andrew Boggs -