These words were written by my father I think not too long after his father was murdered in early March of 1983. I thought that it would be a great forward to what I am trying to do with this chance.

When I was younger than I am, my father and I talked one day, while we worked away in his shop trying to make something work that didn’t work anymore. He told me about his grandfather and about how he was always making things work again, too. My father’s stories of his youth were always rare, so I listened in that way I have where I never forget, and as he talked, I found myself thinking about my uncle, who was also a big man who loved the outdoors and fixed all kinds of things with his hands. I remembered sitting in my uncle’s little town office, watching the people come in with their aches, pains, cuts and problems for my uncle to doctor and fix, and I had the thought that it might have been like that for my father, as he watched his grandfather work. Then my father told me that he thought that his grandfather was still alive. He said that he believed that as long as he remembered his grandfather, then the man had a sort of immortality, the only sort my father said that he could really ever believe in. It gave a new way to think about my uncle, whom I missed fiercely at the time, as well as my grandfather and my great-grandfather, who had died before I could know them. When my father died, I spent a long time one night watching the stars off the end of his dock, thinking about him and all the others with all the wisdom I could summon up, and playing my harmonic so that it rang out over the lake…

Ok it’s me again, my name is Lucinda Evelyn Knowles, my friends call me Cindi. I was born at 8am on January 11, 1969, a Saturday. I am a redhead with crazy eyes that change colors, blue, green, grey and gold and a combo of all of those. In no picture are my eyes really ever the same color. I have never been really skinny, I have curves and I am 5’2”. My parents are Sharon Lynne Pollard (Sheri) and Timothy Cecil Knowles (Tim).

I began to read at 4 and I guess that set the stage for me learning extremely fast. I never skipped any grades but was always grades ahead in my school work. I also had an aptitude for music. Here in our school system you were supposed to start band, orchestra or chorus in the 4th grade, so around 9 or 10. I started when I was 7 on the clarinet, so I was ahead by the 4th grade and that put me with the advanced bands at a very young age. I eventually got bored and began to teach myself more instruments. I played 7 altogether, so by the 7th grade I was going to the performing arts high school in the summers to take classes. 

I did eventually go to Northside when I began the 9th grade and was in the honors classes and went to summer school not because I failed but to take extra classes, so that during the regular year I could take more performing arts classes.

I got married very young to Rafael DeCarlos Johnson straight out of highschool. He joined the navy and we ended up in Honolulu, HI. We had a son, Rafael DeCarlos Johnson II on October 11, 1987 and a daughter, Desiree Nicolette Johnson on October 21, 1990. While I was pregnant with Desiree I went to Hawaii Business School and got an Associates Degree in Computers and Accounting, I finished the program in 8 months. Two years later the marriage didn’t work so I moved back to Atlanta in July 1992.

I started college at Georgia State University in the fall of 1994, majoring in Psychology and minoring in music. Eventually I dropped music as my minor and changed it to Sociology because I just didn’t have time what with working full time and being a single mother to 2 kids. Somewhere in all of this I met back up with Vincent Gamble who had also gone to Northside but was years ahead, we dated on and off and on July 29, 1998 we had our son Trevor Sean Gamble. I had a complicated pregnancy, so I withdrew from school. 

In the fall of 1999 I transferred to Mercer University and graduated in May of 2002 with dual Bachelor of Arts Degrees, one in Psychology and the other in Criminal Justice. I was in an accelerated program, taking classes faster, working full time and doing my internships for each degree, one with the Fulton County Police and the other with the Atlanta Crime Commision. I maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout, Dean’s & President’s List and Magna Cum Laude. So I graduated with the highest honors.

Unfortunately 8 months after I graduated I became ill and I never ever fully recovered. It took them 8 years to figure out that my gallbladder had been failing every time that I ate or drank anything. So that destroyed my insides. Surgery removed it in 2012, but I had lost a decade, my career, my house, possessions, my kids, etc. Took many many years to forgive family and friends that walked out and never tried to help us fight the doctors and such. But I look at it now as it put me in the place to take care of my kids now when they need me, their kids, my mom who is very very ill right now (I live with her as her caregiver and at this moment I don’t know if she is going to make it, we have both had covid and she is not ok, I am slow moving).

I am also who the family calls to help out when they need someone to take care of them on a short term basis because I am also an empath. So I am very caring, calm and soothing to those around me. I feel their needs before they need it and often just touching them where they hurt the most helps them not hurt as much. We have Native American on my paternal dad’s side of the family so they often tell me I get that from them.

I am also very good with animals, I get called the animal whisperer all of the time. All kinds of animals just fall in love with me, they follow me around and want to just be with me. I have always had a cat until I lost my house 10 years ago, it’s killing me not having one. But I just borrow other people’s animals when I go visit family. 

So if I had finished all of my degrees and become that famous Forensic Psychologist I wouldn’t be this me I am now. Yes I won’t lie and say that I know I would have been great in that field. But then my granddaughters wouldn’t be hanging all over me screaming Mama Cindi and my kids wouldn’t depend on me to be there when they called and my family wouldn’t have me either. 

I have to believe that God has this better plan for me and wanted me to sit down. He knew my health was going to fail and be all over the place. Even after I had that surgery about a year later the migraines started to get worse to where they eventually started to trigger seizures, but not grand mal kind. The doctors have never quite figured out what is wrong or what to do. So I take the meds and either they happen out of nowhere or I don’t have them for a while. My beautiful brilliant mind is now forever changed, I have no real memory like I used to, my everyday language skills suck, I forget words that I need, say the wrong words, I stutter or rather get stuck in what I am trying to say and all of this causes a lot of miscommunication with people that are not used to talking to me on a regular basis.

I have worked at all since 2004. I was working at The Coca-Cola company as an Executive Assistant. I had a great job and was going to move into management while I went back to get my master’s and PhD. But I lost that job behind my illness, I got to where I couldn’t keep straight much of anything and was sent on leave. But that was so long ago, I am no longer employable because of health issues and I no longer know the technology or can even sit in a chair long enough to do the job.

So as I said this must have been God’s plan, to take care of everyone else. And after all… I do this all to honor my father, because this was his place in the family when he was alive.

Now Please understand that as I am writing this I am taking care of my very ill mother and putting this all together in less than a day. So it probably has no real order or organization like I had originally planned on it having. I have done my best to condense all the pictures into collages to get them in. I have listed who is who, where and when. As you will see we have a very racially mixed family. Bare in mind that I grew up in the 1970’s with a black step father and that was not the ideal family mix. We dealt with a great deal of racism in those early years and to be honest it was all through my school years and I often had to kick someone’s ass as a result, so despite not being very big people quickly learned don’t mess with Cindi and her people.

So please excuse the utter rambling and all of that.

I am including some of my writings, I don’t write anymore because of all of the damage to my brain from the many migraines, seizures and concussions… so this stuff is many years old. I just content myself to reading like a book a day, helping other authors to edit their books and reviewing them. Hoping that one days that the doctors will find out what exactly is wrong with my head so that I can get my life stories out and written.