The Beginning

My earliest memory is of me and my grandma on a Greyhound bus. I don’t remember the exact circumstances however, I do know what I was told. First off, I am the only son of Mr. Carl Jerome Green and Miss Margaret Robin Smith my parents met in 1974 at Edinboro State University in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. My mother is Irish born in Ireland immigrated here with her parents as a teenager, from my understanding.  My father he was born in Ridgeville South Carolina, to Mrs Mary Louise Nelson Green and Mr. Moses Green. On August 2nd 1980 God saw to fit to allow me to enter the world. It was Saturday I hear it was one of the hottest days of the year. I don’t know any details surrounding my actual birth but what I do know is this: the woman who gave birth to me had a very hard time with my father. it’s been documented that he was very abusive to her both emotionally and physically. My understanding, and this has been corroborated by my sisters (my mother and my father had three children together I have an older sister and younger sister and I am in the middle, we’re born July 79 August 80 July 81) is that my father would abuse my mother and she in turn would abuse me because I looked exactly like him and the only way to hurt him was to hurt his children. However she didn’t hurt the girls but we’ll get into all of that. There was a time where my father broke my mother’s leg and she turned around and broke my leg, Apparently the abuse was completely out of control. It’s by the grace of God that I have no recollection of that time. Apparently, the last straw was when she put my hand into a space heater. The reason for this varies depending on who you ask. Only she knows the reason and you would have to ask her. However, she said that I stuck a teddy bear into the space heater and started a fire so the way to punish me was to put my hand into the fire. Yes, that’s what I said, she put my hand into a space heater. Now, that earliest memory that we talked about in the beginning I was a little more than two years old so all this abuse that I suffered at the hands of my mother all happened BEFORE I was 2 years old. Moving on, the state intervened and took me from her and placed me in foster care and that is when my grandmother became involved.  My father had left Erie (actually he was put out. he was driven to the edge of town by the police and told if he ever came back they would kill him) this I know to be fact directly from my uncle my dad’s brother. So, my father was living here in Philly with my grandmother and they found out that I was in foster care. I can just imagine the drama that went down behind learning that Chip (name given to me by my mother because when she looked at me I looked just like my father so I was Chip off the old block) was in foster care🤦🏽‍♂️ By this time my grandmother was a foster parent in her own right getting bigger and bigger every day in what would turn into a 40-year career. Her and my Aunt Maryann got on the Greyhound and came to Erie “to get her grandchild out of foster care” (her words. You’ll hear them again as the story goes on) she said I was living on a farm with a whole bunch of dogs and other animals and before I left I had to kiss every single dog🤷🏽‍♂️ I’ve heard this story all my life. And that is exactly what she did. That is the kind of power and anointing that my grandma had. She would

put her mind to something and will not rest until she was done with whatever it is that she was trying to do. Her faith in God is what got her through all that she had been through, and it’s because of that faith that she put into me that I was able to go through everything that you’re going to learn about me and still be here. That brings us to my earliest memory of me being on the Greyhound bus. To be continued…….