STRANGE FRUIT

SOMEONE IN NEW YORK GOT HER PREGNANT... whoever she was, years before I ever went through any part of the state. I was 39 when my bank... Bank of Homewood, in our hometown area of Illinois drafted a check from my rent money to pay her child support to a "Ms. Anderson." It was like... "I'm sorry, Ms, but you owe child support to a Miss..." I didn't know they were doing anything to my account until I looked at my bank statement for that month. The trouble is I never made love to the woman (I am not into women) ... I never heard of to make a baby I never known about either. To top all that... I am yet a woman. I could not have made her a baby. Identity theft and mistaken identity is a blossoming crisis in America. While I have never been to New York and never met the woman I was claimed to have impregnated, $400 was removed from my disability check to pay for the baby girl she birthed by me four years prior. The entity in Upstate New York claimed that someone by my name... misspelled on the order... was being legitimately docked of the amount shown on the document. My bank complied by paying the check with no question of logic. All in all... I was a woman who never met the woman or her child and most likely never met or known the man she'd messed around with. She evidently did not know who got her pregnant either. According to the entity sending the note, it involved a Ms. Crass in Buffalo, New York.

The Bank paid the note and left my account low by half the amount due on my rent already paid by check to the Chicago attorney that owned the building. The building owner showed up at my apartment door a few days later asking for a replacement check or his apartment vacated. I ended up losing the apartment for child support being paid to a stranger who had been impregnated eight months prior to 1990 near Buffalo, New York. Nothing I did resolved the situation, so I penny-pinched on food... oodles of noodles, eggs and deli meat that could work at any hour of day. I believe I went without a phone, I did not turn on the heat and kept dim lights until the woman's baby maker incident was covered for the $400. A month or so later my landlord/friend ordered me out of his apartment building. I had covered his campaign success in the race to be a 6th District Court judge... his family was so lovely, his mom included, but I had to check them out later and keep on moving. I cleared everything out and back into a storage shed until time got easier... and I figured out who I had gotten pregnant.

Turned out, she was a woman about my age, related to high school classmates I'd barely noticed while attending high school. She was a sister of a high school football jock. I still have no idea where the baby came from or why they chose to relate her to me. I have still never seen nor met the woman or the child... now bout 32 years old. I never got the money back despite including it on tax returns as erroneous deductions (according to H&R BLOCK)

More extreme than my paying child support charity to a stranger under these rattling circumstances... I was due to receive child support for my two children after divorcing their dad. Although Attorneys Richard Daley and Attorney Ryan, his assistant, drafted the document files for the court order as they did for many women back during the 1970s and 1980s nothing ever came forth from it. I suspect it was the healthy office filled with Hispanic helpers and their friends in waiting. So many women there to do the documentation of paperwork brought into the Attorney's office for a date stamp. Funny how a $50 per week child support sum can build to over $38,000 under watch of such notable men and never get paid... but I can pay another woman $400 for getting her pregnant from over the distance of one thousand miles in New York.

GOD BLESS AMERICA