i was cleaning out my "business desk" this afternoon. all sorts of crap. i found a couple of pieces of 3x5 inch notebook paper with some writing on it. it was from the time i was working in antique store 3 or 4 years ago. a woman of maybe 6o had come in. she saw me reading a book about american history and it started a conversation that somehow quickly became about her brother. i must have scrawled these notes out while still at work expecting to organize them later. i never did. * studied "modern era" (?) beginning 1899 - from michigan - one brother who was adopted who had pernicious anemia (she always looked sheet white) adopted a son from a 17 year old girl who had been attacked (something about a school?). adopted him and told him he was adopted but not who the mother was - "who his people were". someone asked her why she wouldn't tell - it was no skin off her teeth - but she said "not until she was on her deathbed". the boy grows up very religious. enters the seminary. dates a girl for 3 years and then becomes agitated that he had "gone too far with her". the woman telling the story says "so i said to him, 'what'd ya do, kiss her? because a lot of people would think it strange if you hadn't'" but whatever it was it really bothered him. so one day he just walked out of the seminary & joined the navy. while in the navy he went awol twice - almost with no conscious reason, just walked out. both times he went back & turned himself in. the 2nd time they locked him up & gave him an honorable medical discharge. he's living in venice, florida now, where he'd brought his mother to live in a rest home & where she died. he became a minister, she said, & he had 5 kids who live in michigan (where her family is from). the woman blamed his disturbed state of mind on the mother not telling him who his real mother was and/or that it was something in his dna.