Mark Allan Jensen Music

The Life of Mark Allan Jensen
To whomever chooses to read on, these are my memoirs.

Winter, rushing, bustling...girl crying , lady telling me to get her a diaper….It's my sister, Wendy on the floor of my grandmother's trailer and my mother is changing her diaper. My Dad left us and we are back in Illinois from Ohio where I was born. I can feel the stress in the air even at two years old and the heaviness on my chest of knowing that something isn't right in life. I don't know where I am and I don't know what it is that I'm supposed to do to not get yelled at by this strange lady with the little girl in the hallway.
Now it's dark outside and I feel safe for some reason. Another lady has a silver pot in her hand and there is the sound of her mashing potatoes. My weird, round toy fell on the floor and rolled under a table, so I decided to crawl and get it. I was hit so hard that I cried; mostly with confusion as to why I was just hit for trying to retrieve my toy. I sat there crying as I heard the other humans grunting at each other and then the old man handed me my toy. He must have been smiling at me because I felt safe again.
Large room, people laughing sitting on the floor. I pooped on my bathrobe while trying to use the big green toilet at Grandma's house. It's dark again, very faint light from whatever lamp is on. It seems like a good night, I think I even laughed too.
Summertime. We're living in the red house behind Grandpa's yard. There were still trees all around then in Lebanon, Illinois. The evenings were so beautiful there. I wanted to stay outside forever and smell the grass, listen to the bugs, watch the ants, follow a beetle, get chased by a bee, get scolded by a blue jay, lay on my back and make shapes out of clouds, and forget about everything else , even forget about going to the bathroom. That's how the abuse started, I think. I got so lost in the wonder of living and the life around me, that I cannot remember to this day the act of ever messing my pants, but I can remember the punishment for doing it. I can remember being dressed in a diaper and swatted with a flyswatter on the leg and made to parade outside in front of the entire neighborhood. Once in a thunderstorm. I remember being set apart by the entire family then. I was the weirdo. I was the one to blame for everything because my siblings knew that my mother hated me. I tried to be careful then, but I was only a child, and very few children know how to be careful. And the years began to pass.
Summertime again. In the back yard of the red house, there was a treasure to be found. Everything that I saw was worth a million bucks to me. I didn't care if it was an old bottle cap. It was new to me at 4 years old, and I would have traded you a bag of plastic cowboys and indians for that bottle cap. A rock fascinated me. I remember how lost I got in the stars the first time I looked up. I sat outside on the swing and refused to go inside. Back in the 70's , there wasn't so much light pollution as today, and you could see the milky way from where I sat in that back yard. My mother said something about the stars were going to bleed on me, and even at 4 I knew that was a crock, so I shrugged my shoulders and sat there on the swing looking up at that awesome sky. In my memory, it's as if there were an orange glow all around the swing I sat on. It was an old chain, seat swing for one person, and the air was sweet with the smell jasmine and honeysuckle. Who would want to leave that to go inside? It was my fifth birthday. Someone asked me how old I was, and I held up an entire hand. I was so proud that I didn't have to fold any fingers down this time. Five meant that I was older and wiser, and of course, TALLER! We were at the old man that I knew as Grandpa's house. He called me his “little buddy.” He would pat me on the leg and say, “ Why you kick the geese in the face; he do you something?” and I would laugh. He bought me a present; a large plastic horse with a saddle and bridle that you could take off and stuff. I wasn't supposed to go to the back bedroom, but I did anyway and found it. I felt safe with Grandpa, he made me feel like I belonged somewhere. I lived, back then, for the next chance to spend time with him, I think. It's what I always looked forward too. Grandpa walked me to the barber shop. I was made to sit in a chair and a stranger starts messing with my head. I cried until he was finished. Awhile later, he walked me to this big building. I heard my mother tell him to walk past a bank. I didn't know what a bank was, but I looked all over for some sign of what I thought might be one on the way to where we were walking, and I saw nothing. My Grandpa leads me into this building where there are other kids and an older lady leaning toward me as she holds open a door. Grandpa starts to leave without me and I start to cry hard. He left me there anyway. I didn't understand what I was supposed to be doing there, when all I wanted was to be outside.
I was the giraffe in our Kindergarten big top circus parade. I remember having to make the costume myself out of wood and paper cut out like a giraffe head. I had to glue the paper to the wood and then color the spots on the neck and head..there were two sides..and when it was finished, I lifted it up and put it over my head and walked around in a circle. Hey, they made me do it, I just remembered it.
We moved into a new house. A big white one with a wrap around porch, french doors that separated the living room and the dining room. Hard wood floors, an old attic, and a musty basement. In the back yard there was a trellis that made a tunnel over the side walk that led to the alley. On the trellis there were red and white grapes that covered it entirely. There was an old fence that ran the width of the yard and a big apple tree sat in front of it. I know the yard well, because it's where I learned how to ride a bike. I probably left skin on every square inch of that property at 110 W Center St. in Lebanon, Illinois. I loved that yard. There was a Pecan tree that grew in the neighbor's yard, but it's branches stretched well into ours. My GI Joe climbed those trees and that grapevine. They did what my brother told them to do. I just stood there dazed , holding this plastic figure. I don't know that I knew how to play with toys, I just liked to look at them. I remember just standing somewhere by myself and being lost in the wonder of the way the sun lit up the grass in the evening. The oranges and yellows, and the sounds of nature. It was like God coming down to visit us in the cool of the evening. I didn't want to leave that world and face the cruelty of reality, but they kept forcing me to face the reality.
Running home from school became an almost daily occurrence. I didn't know why we were having to run, but my brother told me to, so I did. Rich kids making fun of us because we were fatherless and poor. They wanted to beat us up. Dennis learned how to fight early, and though it pissed him off, he protected me a lot. Like when Mark and Kip Crump came into our grandpa's yard and started fighting us, my brother beat them both up to protect me.