<center>![CreativeDir-MatthewRogers.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmQ23GxqCe4i9xid211n3eaPyrwXdSHxUJx49YSpoHWyuH/CreativeDir-MatthewRogers.jpg)</center>

<h1>I've been writing a book.</h1>

Let me be slightly more authentic. I've been writing down random stories, memories and conversations over the last decade to one day compose them into a book. I think I have a title. I hate it, then I love it, then I hate it again. Right now it's called "Good Boy".

I have chapter upon chapter of morning shower recollections and notes all voice-recorded or on legal pads. I could never write well when behind a computer screen. I needed the familiar scratch of pen on paper, an inky film on the meaty side of my forearm that blurs previous incomplete sentences.

Long story short though… I’m going to start recording these snippets on the Steemit blockchain and hope I can reconstruct them before I forget everything. They won’t be in any order and they won’t be professionally edited. But your feedback is always welcome. SBD rewards for those with excellent editing ideas.

<center><h1>Gin Gin. (my paternal grandmother)</h1></center>


The naïve and self imposing world of my childhood has always sprung a deep polarity in my earliest memories. My mother's family was always open, caring, fun and full of endless adventures. A stonewall and white picket fence welcome to my sister and I each year with a harmonic song written in homage to ET and his underwear. It goes like this:

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But my fathers side, the darker side of my memories, always cast luminous and ominous clouds upon recollection. The Rogers side was my first experience with sickness, with death, with divorce. They were relatives I did not relate to. This was the opposite of everything I experienced with the Akin branch of my tree.

To my young mind, the leading figure of the Rogers clan was my father's mother, Virginia Clair Embry (Rogers). Or as we called her, Gin Gin. Her olive skin, her piercing green eyes, her boy-short goldish grey hair. She has a sweetness that was tactile and left you with a glaze over your teeth. She personifies the notion of a sweet little lady. But through her sweetness came a chilling coldness and stubbornness layered onto a blindness to reality. She always reminded me of a jalapeño jellybean in a bowl full of caramels.

She was always so feeble, so victimized in my young mind. And compared to my own mother, and the Kin that shaped her - Virginia seemed like an equal in a sense. But she, like I, needed taking care of, needed coddling, and continuously practiced the art of manipulation. When I stumbled upon letters my father wrote to his mother, it would always bring him down a mental notch in my mind. 

I have no bad memories of Gin Gin, no ill-will or dislikes. She has never been anything but kind and caring to myself and my family. The darkness I speak of isn't a darkness of the movies or of the biblical sense, but a Darkness that’s as natural as its predecessor, Lightness. She was just everything I didn’t want to be.