Thelma Mae Crites Mason Sheirer, 1923-1995

William Junior Sheirer, 1923-1982

Annie Katherine Stuby Sheirer, 1890-1987

All this, of course, cannot be verified.

Mark DeFoe, Bringing Home Breakfast

Prologue

I wasn’t kidnapped as a child, never abused, abandoned, beaten, or sold to the highest bidder. My parents didn’t lock me in the basement. The cults never got hold of me—not counting a pretty wacky Bible camp. I wasn’t transgendered, interracial, or multinational. No president denied that I was his love child. No aliens abducted me (although sometimes I wished they would). I wasn’t blind, deaf, mute, epileptic, dyspeptic, or unable to digest milk. I wasn’t an altruistic autistic. No one in my family was a psychopath or a sociopath, but a few of my cousins definitely went down the wrong path. My worst disease was mumps, and the closest I came to physical tragedy was a bee sting on the lip.

I’m not a celebrity or related to one or sleeping with one.

I breathe air, drink water, eat food.

But on a Tuesday afternoon in fourth grade, I realized for the first time that I was only “mostly normal.”

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