In the back bedroom closet of our family home lived a filing cabinet. The filing cabinet smelled like manila folders, you know the smell. In the filing cabinet lived personal belongings that my momma deemed important enough to survive if the rest of our home burnt to a smoldering pile of waste. 
My mom is the keeper of all things needing and not needing to be kept. Borderline paper hoarder, if there is anything on paper that I need a copy of, or quite possibly that you may need a copy of, or if you want a copy of the map locating where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, my momma is your Kinko’s. She now has multiple filing cabinets and they have their very own room.
I go from ten thousand miles an hour to stalled boredom faster than a hot knife through butter. When I had lost interest in running in the woods or throwing rocks in the air and watching bats dive for them, and I knew no one was around to scold me I would dig through my momma’s manila folder smelling filing cabinet and go on an adventure.
I always looked over my birth certificate in search of any hint of anything that would give me a glimpse in to my past. I read every letter and detail a hundred times. Its like when you open your refrigerator door over and over, each time thinking something new will magically reveal itself and satisfy your cravings, but all you’re really doing is letting cool air out. All I was ever doing was getting on my own nerves because nothing new on my birth certificate ever appeared like magic ink. My birth certificate has my adopted parents’ names on it.
The unwritten birth certificate, blank canvas…
1975
Gas prices were $0.44 cents a gallon… the average cost of a home was $39,000.00… minimum wage was $2.10 per hour… the Watergate scandal was juicy gossip and inflation was raping America. The Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Minnesota Vikings in the Superbowl held in NEW ORLEANS!
The 1st Blockbuster movie JAWS was released and is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. I watched Jaws when I was a little older and that shark terrified me and the sharks in the sequels all terrified me. Jaws still haunts me and is the reason I won’t get more than ankle deep in the ocean and why I tell my kids that when they dip their toe in the ocean they just became the lowest on the food chain. I had nightmares that my bed was floating in the ocean and that shark was swimming around me ready to make me its supper. I HATE SHARKS just about as much as I hate scorpions! 
If it were up to me every shark and scorpion on this Earth would disappear.
A bunch of fabric clashing, sack dress wearing, nonmatching fools and thanks to John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever folks thought they looked smashing! History says the 1970’s had the most unflattering and disliked fashion trends of all times. 
The Vietnam war finally ends, and these great and United States of America brought home Vietnamese orphans in what was called “Operation Babylift…”
In the same Country, single parenthood was a scandal. Babies born out of wedlock were considered illegitimate or a love child or the worst of words… we were bastards.
Shortly prior to 1975 public schools dealt with teenage pregnancies by expelling girls or pressuring them to drop out.
It was common for young unwed pregnant women choosing adoption for their unborn child to be shipped away to “visit relatives,” temporarily hidden, swept under a rug. When they returned from their extended Walk-About, they had to pick up the ruins and throw themselves back in to a civilization where they were not legally or socially ever acknowledged as mothers.
In 1975 on the last day of the sun sign Leo and the new day of the sun sign Virgo, in the midst of the women’s workplace equality movement, when Maxipads no longer needed pins or belts to be held in place… I was born.
Stigma erased.
My onset of boredom would eventually take me on a two-year adventure of hounding relentlessness.
I can be very annoying.
That's What She Said... 
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