About Me

How many times have I heard, "Well, it's not all about you, you know!" 

Well finally, on this page it is.

And yet, of course, it's not.

Connective tissues, connective issues, we are all one, we are all distinct. Two doctors. Paradox.

Vitals:

Born Alan George Kessler Sept. 22, 1946

Mother:Grace Eakins Kessler Deceased 1953 (age 43)

Father: Urban (?) Kessler Deceased 1966 (Age 80)

Brother John: Deceased (age 4)

Brother Ron: Deceased (Age 60+)

Sister Barbara: Deceased (age 70+)

Adopted:1955

Name Change: Alan George McLaughlin

Mother: Thelma Kessler McLaughlin (half sister, same father) Deceasaed (Age 85)

Father: Jack Gillette McLaughlin: Deceased: (Age 84)

No adoptive siblings

And to take a consistent refrain from one of Kurt Vonegut's books, "So it goes."

More Vitals

Married Sept. 9 1972

Two Children

Dylan Age 30 (July 4 1978)

Patrick (age and birthdate removed at his request. I think he's 80)

Divorced some year in the nineties (always put painful times out of my head.)

Life partner: Linda Ray Rubel (ageless)

So much for the lost and found list.

"I was born in Dixie in a Boomer's shack, just about a mile from the railroad track"

Freight Train Blues: Bob Dylan

I was born September 22, 1946 in Cook County Hospital, Chicago IL. Later I learned that the hospital administration hired people in the OR and OB-GYN rooms to swat and shoo flies away from the business being conducted there.

My Mother's name was Grace. Shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer (Stomach or colon, I'm not sure which, no one left to ask) she discovered she was pregnant with me. Bound to have been some ambivalence about "the wonder of new life." Some 55 years later I was told that she cried when she found she was pregnant.She died about seven years later. My last unfortunate memory of her was seeing her in the hospital room rasping for breath. The decision was made to bring me in, hoping that Grace would see me, and rise to some form or consciousness. It didn't work. Some fifty years later, I realized that that moment wasn't all about me, and I finally acknowledged the pain she was in at that moment. I'm a slow learner in so many ways.

My Father, Urban Kessler, was sixty when I was born. He was a man of contradictions and predilictions.

A thin, balding man with a sinewy neck, he was aptly named with hard city sensibilities. Having left a marriage to a tyrannical woman, he married Grace when she was pregnant with somebody else's child. He could be chivalrous one moment, an frightenly angry the next. Alcohol played a large part in his contradictory nature. That having been said, he was always good to me in a grandfatherly way.