My Dot to Dot Connection: An Autobiography

By Rev. Diane Cross

Minister and a Distributor of Messages Words from the Lord He was preparing, Preparing me or you. God has a plan. Can you see how? He prepared me to help others. Why God? Why me? Look where He brought me from, How He prepared me, Learning by experience. Just tell the truth. Don't be afraid. Can't tell it all. There are dots between the lines. There are lines between the dots. What is your real connection, Teaching by experience? Rev. Diane Cross

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781641914550

Book preview

Connecting Dots Beginning

When everyone tells you, You need to write a book, where do you really begin?

I guess I can begin with the day I had an emergency surgery due to my appendix bursting and was told I could have died at the age of four. Later, at the age of seven, I had my tonsils removed followed by hernia surgery.

To this day, I still believe I really didn’t feel sick at the time of the hernia. I remember it was my sister who was complaining, hurting, and generally not feeling good. There was a thunderstorm that day, and I was so scared to stay at home, so I came along to the hospital. The doctor examined me, too, and ironically, my sister and I both wane up in the hospital for the same reason.

I was eleven years old. We had mean nurses, and when our parents would visit, they would tell our parents that we were such sweet little girls. However, when they left, they would call us little brats or something else that wasn’t nice in the least bit. I remember eating ice cream when my tonsils were removed, and a week or two later, one of my cousins had the same surgery.

There were times when my legs would suddenly give out and I would just hit the floor. My mother made many trips back and forth to the doctor with me; they even flew in specialists to give their medical opinions about my legs. After weeks of this, the conclusion was that I was just growing rapidly and that I would eventually grow out of it. Later, in my twenties, my hands started dropping things. This stopped, but only after so many years.

Backing up a little, I remember when my mother was to bring home a baby at the age of forty-two. She had narrowed it down to two names and she asked which of the names I liked the most. With great excitement, I chose one and she brought the baby home with the name I picked.

Flashing back a little further, I can remember a bald man with an earring coming to the door advertising a well-known cleaning product. A couple of soldiers visited our home for a few days; they were my uncles, handsome as can be in their uniforms.

I recall asking my father to take the training wheel off my bike and the first thing I did was fall into some rose bushes. Not too many days after that, my cousin got a ten or three speed bike, and I wanted to ride. I didn’t know where the brakes were and right into the light pole I went, bending the wheel. Boy, was he mad at me! I used to ride my tricycle in the hallway where we lived in an apartment building near Mack Avenue on a street called Pennsylvania.

I was told when I arrived as a baby, we lived on a street called Van Dyke near Mack in a two-family flat home. Other family members stayed there also, and even to this day, a young generation of our family is living in the house.

I do remember a girl playmate, a little older than I, living upstairs. We lived in a two-family flat house on a corner between Agnes and St. Paul. During this time, we had moved down the street into another two-family flat house. The street we lived on was called Sheridan.

I remember I didn’t like my closet door open. I had a doll that was made of cotton with a torn head, and when the cotton showed in the dark, it scared me. I don’t like open closet doors even today. I also really didn’t like the lights off. One time, I had a nightmare about snakes crawling all over the ceilings, walls, and the floor. I never liked snakes after that.

Aside from the nightmares, I had the best times of my life while living in that house, playing marbles with the boys, climbing trees, jumping off porches, and running in the rain with soap claiming we were taking showers in it. My mother and other women used to catch the rain in pails, saying it was good to wash your hair with.

I had so many relatives on that street, as well as friends on both sides of the street. It seemed like we owned the entire block. There were fun times of yard barbecues and times we all went on holidays to a park called Kensington. What fun memories! Except the time I got lost in the woods where the older children had left me behind without noticing. One of my older boy cousins found me and carried me on his shoulder back to the family picnic.

There was a set of triplets living across the street and a twins next door, all friends. The lady upstairs from us attended church almost every Sunday, and every now and then, she would take me with her and her family. There were three boys and a girl, and I had a crush on the oldest boy.

One uncle of mine always took us children fishing a few blocks away. We would help him catch worms at night for our bait. My daddy, my uncles, and Daddy’s friends used to make wine and played cards or shoot dice in the basement. On one side of the basement, I had a big heavy dollhouse to play with.

At one point in time, we had a dog named Butch. He walked to the stores with us in the neighborhood. Five and Dime store, drug store, liquor store, candy stores, the bank, car shops, anything you can name was nearby and in walking distance. Butch didn’t let my mom whip me when I was in trouble or let white people near the house. One day, my father told me Butch had to go to the hospital and would be back when he was better. I cried and cried, and I never saw Butch again.

We had fruit and vegetable wagons and an iceman that came by way of horse sometimes. I would love to see them come down the street so we could buy something from them. We also enjoyed going to Belle Isle for pony and buggy rides.

I attended a school on the next block over called Field Elementary. The first day of school, I met a little girl who became a good friend of mine. Thinking back, I remember Pledge of Allegiance and singing God Bless America every morning in school. I also remember sitting in the corners or behind something as punishment in school. I can’t forget the ruler on the hand or the paddle on the behind.

A close cousin and I would sometimes get picked up from school by my aunt. One day, a boy was picking on my cousins. My cousin didn’t want to fight, but we looked up and saw my aunt sitting in the car watching the whole thing. At that moment, we knew it was going to be the boy getting beat up or us getting whipped for not fighting back.

Yes, we whipped that kid good and he didn’t mess with my cousin anymore. We were taught to help one another in our time of need, not fight one another. My aunt whipped a cousin and I, as well as putting us on punishment for fighting each other.

This one aunt was nice looking with long, pretty hair that I loved to brush. She even cut my first bangs after I cried so much, begging to have them cut. I even cried when she cut her hair off. She was so pretty that men used to follow her home. One time, a man followed her and she went into the backyard where she knew there were some two by fours. She picked one up, ran back to the front of the house, and knocked the man out near his car. At that time, my uncle and my dad were coming home from work. They helped him up and sent him on his way. I bet he never forgot that day or followed a lady liked that anymore.

I had two sets of neighbors that were always fighting. One next door neighbor’s husband was after her one day, and I remember her running through my aunt’s home. She hid from her husband under my aunt’s bed, and another time, she even jumped clean over a car running from him. The other couple had lots of children, and the husband and wife stayed into it.

I don’t recall my mother and father getting into it like these people. Once, I got in trouble and my mother whipped me with an extension cord, leaving marks on my leg. My daddy was very angry with her and told her she better never do it again. That was the first and last time I felt an extension cord on me.

Back in those days, my mother didn’t really work; she was more of a stay-at-home mom. I can recall her being an Avon lady going door-to-door. My sister and I used to walk with her while she was selling.

It seems like I’m rambling on and on, but this is my way of connecting my memories as I think back.

At the age of seven, my mother was told by my school that I had to have my eyes checked. It was winter, and we went downtown to a store called Sam Cut Rite Drugs with the eye doctor’s office in a corner at the back of the store. I ended up having to get glasses after all. The next day, I went over a friend-of-mine’s house. My glasses got frosted up, and not knowing any better about cleaning them, I broke them in half. My mother was so upset with me when I got home. Later, I got new ones, but I learned my lesson about glasses at a young age and I am still wearing glasses today.

I can’t forget the big two-piece snowsuits with big boots we wore, and back in those days, it took us forever to get out of them. We wore rubber boots on rainy days and our big black-and-white shoes. I cried because I had brown and black and I didn’t have the same color shoes the other children had.

As life went on, my little sister was growing up and I was the spoiled only girl until she came along. We got into it, and out came her teeth. I truly believe her mouth hasn’t been right ever since then. All over a toy iron and ironing board. I’m so sorry, even all these years later.

An older sister of a friend of mine used to teach us how to put tissue in our clothes for our breast, which weren’t even developed yet. She was a teenager at the time, and I guess she was experimenting like teens do or did.

I had older cousins move to Michigan from the south after finishing high school, trying to get a job here. The first one I recall was a girl. Before moving here, she visited once; and at that, my mom and aunt were going out. They needed her to babysit us. I remember when they were gone out, my boy cousin and I didn’t do anything she instructed us to do. We bit her and probably hit her, too. She was running down the street toward my mom and my aunt when she saw them coming. She never babysat us again.

2

Parents Decided to Move

I was in the fifth grade when my parents decided to move off my favorite street. My father promised me he would buy me a new dollhouse because he said the one I had was too old and too heavy to be moving around.

I never received another dollhouse.

The big, new house had five bedrooms, two dens, a dining room, a basement, and a kitchen that has glass cabinets. There were unfinished closets upstairs with three of the bedrooms up there and one of the dens. My room was close to the dining room, and I was sharing with my sister.

The house was a mess the day we moved in. Someone came in and broke the kitchen glass cabinets and poured molasses on the basement floor, kitchen, and living room floors with toilet paper on top. I didn’t like this house from day one. My sister and I had to help my mother along with a friend of the family, which we referred to as one of our aunts. We had to clean the floors on our hands and knees, and of course, I hated this. I swore I wasn’t going to ever clean floors like this again in my life, and prior to that, I had never had to do any work in a house.

In the summer, I made a friend down the street who my mother said was a little too old for me after she found out the girl had lots of brothers. My mother didn’t let me be around her too much. She had sisters, too, but I didn’t get the chance to know them until way later. My sister was friends with one of them until my mother said she couldn’t play with her in the house anymore. They were playing house and weren’t supposed to be cooking on the heater we had upstairs. Something caught on fire, and they hid it. My mother found it later and that was the end of her visiting the house to play with my sister. I didn’t find out about this until later in life, and I always wondered why she couldn’t come in anymore.

There was a little white girl next door who became my sister’s best friend. There was another white girl two doors down from her. Both had brothers and one had a sister older than all of us. The brothers of the girl who lived further down the street always got in trouble. Somehow, my father would always be close by and was able to help get them out of whatever situation they got themselves into. I’m friends with both of those girls on Facebook.

Moving was such a big change, and I cried for many days. I wanted to move back where my cousins and friends were. I had to walk six or seven blocks to get to my new school. I met a lot of children, white and black. My previous school didn’t have any white children in it; it was a predominantly black neighborhood. This new one was a completely mixed neighborhood.

I remember cruel attitudes from family and school children. I heard family members were saying my parents thought they were something special, moving to where the white people were at. My father bought new carpet, and when family would come over, he asked them to use the side door. After that, they said they weren’t coming over anymore because they felt that he felt they weren’t good enough to even enter through the front door. Of course, after a while, he changed his mind.

My dad had gambling parties, and there were one hundred, five hundred, and even up to a thousand-dollar table stakes. If you don’t know about gambling, stakes are the amount of money you need to have to just to be able to sit down and play. Poker was the game they played.

With own eyes, I saw family members putting holes in the carpet on purpose with cigarettes. How jealous could they be? He eventually stopped having poker games at our house, and later, other family members started buying their own homes and hosting gambling games at them. They also all bought Cadillacs, including my dad. He had always had a Cadillac as far as I can recall when I was growing up.

Children at school were so mean and ugly to me. When I was in sixth grade, my mother had bought me a cute little blue dress that I liked a lot because it was my favorite color. Mind you, I was a little on the chubby side back then. Each time I wore the dress, some of my classmates would say I looked pregnant and I didn’t really know what they were talking about at first. After a couple of times of me wearing it, they kept saying I looked like I was having a baby and I finally caught on. I was so embarrassed, but I never told my mother what they were saying to me. I just started telling her I didn’t want to wear the dress anymore. I hid it from her, and when she would ask where my dress was, I would tell her I didn’t know.

Back in those days, I would get maybe three dresses, a couple of skirts and blouses, of course my underwear, and two pairs of shoes—gym shoes for gym and regular shoes for school. This was how it was every year for school, and on chilly days, I would add a sweater or a jacket.

Speaking of chilly days, my mother didn’t believe in missing school. I can remember one winter day with so much snow that was up to my chest in height. My mother was sending me to school anyway, and I got stuck in front of the house. Watching me from the front window, she had to come get me and bring me back in the house.

I remember wanting to play an instrument in the fifth grade when instrumental class was offered. I decided I wanted to play the clarinet, later wishing I had chosen the saxophone. My parents purchased the clarinet for me at an instrumental store where some of my classmates would rent their instruments. In addition to music, other classes I had were auditorium, Spanish, arithmetic, and homeroom where we were taught handwriting, spelling, and other basic things.

In gym class, we had to learn square dancing, two or four steps with a partner, and the Hokey Pokey. The boys chose the girls as partners and I don’t know why the little fat boy with freckles always chose me. We learned rope climbing, ran races, did sit-ups and push-ups, and so many more exercise activities. They were all graded activities. We also had lunch time.

My mother got a job as one of the lunch ladies at my school, and she kept it for many years. She didn’t let me get away with anything, such as running through the halls or on the stairs. She also had very long, hard fingernails and she could open milk cartons very easily for us children. Sometimes, they called her the can opener. I later grew my own nails out, too, as a hobby I guess.

I became friends with a girl no one wanted to sit by because she had a skin condition. The other children said she was ugly and they didn’t want to catch what she had. I believe she told me she had been in a fire and was very badly burned. This didn’t bother me at all, and we became lunch friends until she stopped coming to the school.

While in elementary, the boy cousin who I helped in a fight came to live with us and my aunt for a while during a summer. At that time, my aunt had separated from my uncle. Other children thought my cousin was our brother, and we didn’t tell them any different.

Where is your brother? they asked, after my aunt and cousin moved. My sister and I wouldn’t really answer them. We knew how to change the subject and talked about something else, or we’d just say he was at home.

At my aunt’s new place, I remember seeing a girl pull a knife on some of the other children. This was the first time I had ever seen the inside of a police station, as we had to go and tell our side of the story at the station after we told my aunt what we had seen.

During my elementary days, my parents purchased a restaurant and my aunts would help my mother. My mom would pick us up and bring us there after school. One time, on the way there, we had an accident at a railroad track. A lady hit us in the back of the car, but it wasn’t a bad one. The lady was my classmate’s mother and that’s how they met. My mom allowed me to go to her house and play sometimes, and her mother also allowed her to come play at our house. To this day, we’re friends on Facebook and still call each other sometimes.

The restaurant didn’t really work out because my father said my mother and my aunts were doing more harm than helping the business. They would cook and give the food away to the people on the street more than they would sell food to customers. Sometimes, they were even taking home things they shouldn’t have. Later, he tried to purchase either another one or a gas station. It wasn’t a go. He talked about purchasing another Cadillac to rent out to funeral homes. My mother told him no, and us girls laughed, telling him we wouldn’t ride in that car if he did that. That was the end of that thought.

When my parents met, my mother had a restaurant in Louisiana and my father came in as a soldier. My father had a job that moved him around in different states, and this had them moving around constantly until they got to Michigan. My mother got pregnant with me at the age of thirty-eight. They had been having difficulty having children, so they decided not to move anymore while she was carrying me. That is where their story began with each other.

My mother was his second wife and he was her second husband. My mother was five years older than him. We were always told by my mother that we had an older sister that was born in Mexico and lived in California with her children and husband who was in the service. My mother always made sure we talked to her at least once or twice a year during Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays. Long distance calls were very expensive back in those days. I would be so excited to talk to her and would imagine how she looked. I would imagine she looked like those Mexican girls on television and in the movies. My father at those times really didn’t have too much interest in her but acknowledged that she was his other daughter as well. I do recall she had wrote a song and sent us a copy because it had been recorded. To this day, I do not have any clue what I did with it.

When she had finally sent a picture of herself, boy oh boy did I get a surprise! She didn’t even look like I imagined at all. For some reason or another, there were other pictures of her as a teenager that appeared later in my life.

Finally, one year in the winter she came to visit us with her four children, which they came by train. My mom, my sister, and I picked them up from the station. I recognized her from some distance away by her picture she sent us.

Her children were about our age—the oldest one almost a year older than my younger sister. The youngest child of hers was an infant.

I had just received a typewriter from one of my uncles. I believe he drove the Salvation Army truck at the time. He would stop and give my sister and myself things off the truck such as television, radio, etc. I believe my first tape recorder came from him too. I was so spoiled by my mother’s brothers and sisters, I was just rotten. My big sister was the one who taught me how to use the typewriter.

I can remember her falling down the stairs from the upstairs floor where we slept, with the baby in her arms. At first, we didn’t know if the baby hit his head or if it was her elbow. It was, in fact, her elbow, which knotted a big hole under the window at the bottom of the steps. My father refused to fix