Today was a fine old day. After little one finished her classes for the day, I took Dylan to Home Depot in our truck so he could buy stuff too big to fit in his car. We ate a little lunch on the way home, then I helped him unload his project supplies at his before he came back to ours to pick up his car, and we had a nice visit.
I had a look at the car this morning, and it still wanted to fault after I had put in the water on the cooling system. I used the OBDII device to reset the check engine light and hence the system, and it ran fine after that. I tried to burn the engine up for a couple of miles, but it ran at normal temeratures. I hate the modern car. Once it hits fault mode, it does not want to drive at all, and one had better have the OBDII device, ir a good pari of shoes.
This morning I had a good think for a bit, and come up with a theory of why I feel a certain way about my family up my mom’s side. I have always acknowledged that there was a difference because of the age gap between my brother and me, totalling just shy of ten years. I have always thought of that in terms of how we see our mom, and how I have memories of mom when she was barely out of her own childhood herself. What I had nto cottoned onto before was the dynamic of the extended family, my uncles and aunts, and how much things changed when mom and I moved to Colorado with her husband back in 1979.
Prior to 79, mom was closer to her siblings. Then she moved off, and those relationships sort of decreased. Everyone of her childhood family was growing up and moving out then, too. My unlces were still fairly young back in those days. My one aunt had been dead for a few years already. I have never been able to fully comprehend how her death had affected them all. But in those days before 79, letters were written which I have found, and found that I feature in them as an important member of the family. I was praised and thought of by all. Even when my mom’s brother married in 77, his faincee alays asked how I was in the time leading up to the marriage.
In more recent years one of my cousins has said his family always hated when our grandparents would bring me and come to visit them on the way out or back from Denver to California. I am sure they did not like the lack of warning before the visit, but I know for a fact that this cousin has not got a clue of how close knit that family was prior to his birth. I have the evidence in the letters, and the memories. And sure, I don’t know all of the politics, but I was there, which is a lot, especially when packed with as many memories as I have of those early days
Well, anyway. All these thougts I had last night has brought me to the conclusion that I now understand more deeply why I feel a sence of betrayal from that part of the family among those left, and she most recently departed. I lost all of that old family. I lost some good things and some bad things there. I took a fair amount of abusiveness from one of my uncles, and that I will never miss. I won’t miss the heartache of Jeannie’s death when she was only 19. Of all of my grandmother’s grandchildren, I was the only one to have heard her voice, to have felt her touch, to have seen her smile light up on her face, I got to know her before cancer set in, and I got to see her at the hospital just before she died. Chhildren were not allowed on ward in those days, unless they were patients, of course, and Jeannie pushed her IV pole down to the waiting room to see me, even in her weakened state. As I remember it, she was in San Diego, and my grandparents were living in Oceanside, and she was dead before we got home from that visit that night. I could be wrong. But there is nobody who can correct that now. That is lost now too.
So here is where I stand. I am alone from that past. Two of the uncles and two cousins are still alive, but I never hear from them or keep in touch. The cousins are especially to themselves. It’s life. As for how my grandma and I fell apart at the end, that was sort of a last severence of me from that past. It was not the greatest. And it has betrayed me, and everything that we once were, including a bit of that past.