In the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1975, my mother made a hard choice: Her marriage was dead and it was time to leave it.
My father had not been physically abusive, but he had also not been kind. He was a drinker and philanderer who had dishonored my mother, an upstanding and conservative woman who never caroused or cavorted.
My mother left with my brothers and me, a gaggle of little boys stretched out over eight years — from the oldest, at 13, to the youngest, me, at 5 years old.
My great-grandfather had recently died, shortly after his wife.