Post by RangoA@live.com on Jul 2, 2008 4:59:32 GMT -5
I found Warren and Youngstown to have changed in the way that my friends, whom I had grown up with, had now moved on with their lives. Many of them moved to the more populated cities in Ohio like Cleveland and Columbus. The friends that were still in the area didn't know how to get a hold of almost all of them when I would ask how they were and how to reach them. They would sadly say, that Youngstown had gone so dramatically, downhill economically that these people had to move to the big cities in order to get more highly paid jobs and were married, by the late eighties, so they had to support their families. Also, the only way to reach they did know how when they were home was when they visited their parents and/or grandparents during the holidays. It was still a party city but people weren't partying for the same reasons anymore, the were doing it because they were in a rut that they just couldn't untangle themselves from. There was one person whom was doing very well financially it appeared to me in comparison to almost everyone else I was involved with and it was my brother-in-law. He was and/or is the Prosecutor of Trumbull County and my sister and he were ready to break up after about fourteen years of marriage. That was the main reason why my mother and I moved back to Ohio was to try to save their marriage for their children to not have to go through their teens and childhood while from a broken home. My mother took care of her grandchildren and helped my sister try to get over the fact that she thought it was unconscionable that the father of her children was hardly ever home and she assumed that he was not only having affairs but spending the money he earned from his career on other people, things and himself instead of to support his immediate family. My mother was from the old school as far as that men cheat on women all the time and for my sister to be patient until he got it out of his system, if that was true. I didn't know for sure. I got to spend more time with my nieces and nephew and my brother-in-law and his sister and mother whom were also desperately trying to keep their marriage together any way they could, too. I would go with my in-laws to byzantine and orthodox catholic churches to pray, go to parties there and picnics that these churches would hold. My nieces went to a byzantine school in Warren and that was a compromise between my brother-in-law's catholic orthodoxy and my sister's roman catholic faith. I started to get into more about my family's genealogy at that point in time, especially from my Aunt Irene whom liked to tell me stories of how my grandfather and grandmother on my mother's side came to this country and why they did and what they did after they got here, learning how some of my family were from Eastern Europe, as well as Western Europe. I also surrendered to my own religion and accepted that my family went all the way back to the Middle East like in the Holy Bible. I just didn't go along with the way it was written and that everything in it was completely accurate. I did though recognize that there were roots in the Middle East for us, however. I would go to my old haunts in Austintown during the late eighties and would eat and drink at my parents' old restaurant which I could have been operating had not been so difficult to make money in Youngstown during that ten year period or so. The restaurant was bought by someone else and it was called Squeaky's Place. I did meet people whom knew both sides of my family and caught up with even a few of my family members there. There was one lady whom was partying with me at Squeaky's Place, after Janet wanted to stay home one night, and she liked me so much she wanted me to spend the night with her even with the fact that she said she was married herself and I told her I was married, also. She gave me her phone number and address anyway and told me to give her a call at night when she would be able to answer the phone or get the message since her significant other was working during the nighttime. I told my mom that I didn't want to stay with Janet anymore and wanted to break up with her. Again, my mom's old school principles of marriage got the best of me and she convinced me not to cheat on Janet and to stay married only for all of that to happen in a another way by what seemed to me delivered by mother nature, instead. That was right before Janet went into the hospital, my mother was brokenheartedly sad and I was being forced to move from Ohio back to Florida and get a divorce from her after I got there. My mom gave me her car and I drove to Florida leaving ,my marriage and her in behind while she was still in the hospital. My mom moved to NYC to handle my brother's emergency health crisis and I was on my way to a homeless apartment complex run by Boley Manor in south Saint Petersburg after staying for about five days with my former roommate at Boley Manor whom lived near Janet and I in Stratford Village. During those five days, I was able to go through intake and get right into The Oaks because it was funded, first and foremost, to stop people from being in my position and that was in the state of homelessness. The Oaks and Boley Manor also provided the tools for me to try to get my act together and go for the same reprogramming theme and to rise from the ashes again and stay risen as long as I could like a Phoenix does and stay up as long as I could to become a winner and not a loser in life.