Mavericks

I have always admired people who are willing to be different, who defy "authority" and the standards of living we are expected to live by. At the same time, I am a person who likes order, who is sometimes shocked or thrown off by behavior I am not ready for. I grew up in a Los Angeles neighborhood that had a wild diversity of people in it, and many of my early memories are of those people, of course.

My Father was a mechanic and had a garage very close to where we lived. Often he brought customers home for dinner because they would be around until he got them on the road later that night. One of my favorites was a singular gentlemen who was a good story teller, who sold fruits and vegetables off a small truck like vehicle, and who was the first gypsy kind of person I was to meet. He entertained us as we ate, with anecdotes and yarns, and I can well remember my Father's responses.

Years later when my parents were making their way through middle age crisis and beyond they became very active in the Latter Day Saint Church (Mormons). Thus they were moving into a kind of closed society, one very different than the one we grew up in. Like a lot of LDS people they became interested in genealogy and thus made a kind pilgrimage to New Orleans to look at the city/county records there to see what the Roberts background was. Well, it didn't take long to find that at the Great Grandfather level (I think that was it) they found the word "mulatto" loud and clear. A firewall, they turned away. But for my siblings and myself we have become even more interested, and one of my sisters pursues the record to this day.