This story (about the Trask family) caught my eye, and I for a minute I thought you were talking about a family I knew. Their last name was Griffo though. Really nice ppl, kind hearted, but crazier than fruit loops. The father was a painter as well, and they moved from cong. to cong all over the country. I remember when I was a child, they were in our cong. in Saratoga Springs, but then moved on, out west to Oregon, Arizona, California....all over the place. (The mother's family, the Whites, were pretty wild as well. Her brother stood up in 1st grade and told all the Catholic children they were going to die at the hands of Jehovah.....they all went home crying). There's not enough room on the Internet to share the amount of stories I have from this family. At 15, we moved to AZ, and at 16 I moved back to NY, by that time they also had moved back. I met up with one of their kids, my age...we were in his car, and he stopped off at his house, and I'm in the back seat of his jeep waiting. All of a sudden, his dad, Larry comes flying out of his front door with a huge sword.....runs to the car and tries to stab me with it, yelling some kinds of crazy African sounding something or another. He kept jabbing that sword into the back seat, and I'm squirming all over the place....I make it out of the car, and Larry chases me down the street....in nothing but his underwear! It was great (especially being that I survived). They had like 5 or 6 kids, and I hung out with them alot, they were more fun than the rest of them. Larry Jr. took the cake (last I knew he was in Attica)...He was hanging out with us one night at another friend's house, and the father of this other friend had all sorts of meds (he was in Vietnam), so Larry gets ahold of something, valium I think, and swipes it. Next morning, Ruthie, the mom calls me up...."you have to come do something about Larry, he's on something!".....I go over there, and Larry (JR) is just out of it, took the whole bottle I think....anyway, he swears he's going to work, and what with the insanity in the family I wasn't arguing. So, he puts on his hockey skates, and off we go. He was working on a construction site, new condos. And he worked on the roof. He climbs up the ladder, somehow, took him a while (I stuck around for the show, in my car). He gets to the peak, and you know those big fires they have on construction sites, to warm up in the winter, and to dispose of the scraps? Yep, you got it right.....skated right down that 3 story roof, and right into that huge fire, funniest thing I think I've ever seen! The family was always dear to me though, they took no crap from the church, NONE, and I appreciated that. They moved to a town just outside Orlando, and we went to visit them once. What a trip....Larry (the father) had me out in the bayous in the middle of nowhere, and he was going to catch dinner (they ate anything). He finds a huge snapping turtle, and he's gonna catch it (mind you Larry was a very big man, biggest gut I ever seen) so, he jumps on this thing, and it takes off running, which I was amazed at the speed this thing got, especially with Larry on it's back.....he ran into the swamp, which was infested with alligators....and him and Larry were flying around this swamp like crazy, under water above water, it was insane....gaters licking their chops by now....finally Larry knew when to cut his losses and swam out (we ate cray fish that night, easier to catch). To say the least, this family was not all there, but like I said, very kind hearted. I was upset to hear this past weekend that they're not together anymore, and the kids are scattered all over the country....so sad. And their one son (Sean, with the jeep) has passed away. I haven't been in contact with the family in years due to my disfellowshipping, but if anyone reading this ever runs into any of them, please send my love. Ruth Griffo, I believe is in Coos Bay, OR area, I believe Sean (who passed away) was in the Davenport, FL cong. And the rest of them I don't have a clue. This type of thing has been the hardest for me to deal with, as with all the rest of us DF/Possessed members....
Matthew Hill
Saratoga Springs, NY Congregation Refugee
http://www.land-and-deed.com/emart/emartstart.html