Frozen Moments: The Life & Times of Taylor Pero

Everyone has frozen moments in his or her lives. Things that just happen and, for reasons we can't understand, stick in our brain for decades for no apparent reason. There we are, going through our normal day and routine and, from out of the blue comes an unexpected, unplanned flashback of something so obscure in our mental history that we're shocked to have it pop up, if only for a nano-second, to remind us of something in our past so ... fill in your own blank here.

In my case it's something having to do with my childhood, my bio-dad who left when I was four, my older brother by three years, Francis (named after our father, the jerk) who died of Bulbar Polio when he was sixteen and myself just thirteen. Hey, it was 1955 and Doctor Jonas Salk had not yet discovered the vaccine ... that would come six months later, after Francis succumbed after just five short days of anguish and ending up in an Iron Lung which, when he saw it at the hospital made him turn his head to Mom and say, "Oh, I don't want to spend the rest of my life in that thing." He didn't have to. Less than 24 hours later he was dead. Six feet two inches tall, weighing 210 pounds, a High School Freshman conscripted into the Varsity Football Team the moment the coach set eyes on him. He was my older brother, my tormentor, my guardian, and I wonder to this day what my life would have been had he lived to see me through my marriage, the birth of my only child, my daughter with whom I have such a great relationship, the lows following my unwanted divorce, and then my rise to public recognition as the lover, personal manager, and intimate confidante of one of the most beautiful humans God ever made, a shy young girl from Wallace, Idaho destined to become the isotope of femininity the world knew as Lana Turner.

All of that and more are to be chronicled here in my stream-of-consciousness autobiography titled, for the moment, Frozen Moments.
(Saturday, October 13, 2007)