After a recent trip to New Orleans and a dinnertime discussion with my niece about the voodoo culture of the Big Easy, I looked down at my mother’s copy of Reader’s Digest and saw a totally different cover.
The original cover:
What I saw:
Tag Archives: motherhood
Books of my father
While we continue to celebrate the holidays with my new friends and family, enjoying this morning’s early breakfast hospitality of my brother in-law’s folks and, later, dinner with mine, my sister and I reconcile our differences, strengthening old sibling bonds that run deeper than temporary political hot topics.
My mother, in the meantime, reconnects me with the early adult education of my father, exemplified by the following scanned book/calendar/flashcard titles:
My brother in-law and I look through my father’s small collection of tools, from handmade ballpein hammers used in my great-grandfather’s metalsmithing days to brand-new circular blades still in their plastic packaging.
Let us remember the usefulness of what we have and worry less about what we don’t have.
Thirty-one years ago…
Tired of turkey and dressing for dinner, my wife and I treated my mother to a supper of pizza a few days ago.
At the table next to us sat a family celebrating a child’s birthday.
After we ate, we spoke to the family and discovered they lived about 20 miles away from my wife and me in north Alabama.
Quite a coincidence, eating at the same restaurant 300 miles from home, it seemed.
Then, the grandmother at the table spoke up and said she recognised my mother who, as it turned out, had taught the 37-year old man with graying beard whose son’s birthday was sung by the pizza restaurant staff a few minutes before.
There we stood, watching a couple with a six-year young boy, recalling when the father was six 31 years before, under the tutelage of my mother.
On the ride home, my mother described what she remembered of the man when he was a boy — smart, skinny, shy — who is now an engineer working for our government’s military.
In our country, a popular phrase called “fiscal cliff” hangs in the air, with hints of government military cutbacks threatening to dampen celebrations of birthdays for little boys who depend on their parents’ government salaries to support local restaurants.
The “trickle down theory” is no longer popular but applies in many different ways, from the effect of a first grade teacher on a boy’s future to the effect of political wrangling on the income of restaurant workers.
The future is in our hands, which are the signs of the effects of the past.
Time is irrelevant. Action is everything.
Belief systems and families
The last time the remainder of my “nuclear” family got together, my sister gladly rejected the belief systems of her/our parents, making my mother sad and me angry at my sister for emotionally upsetting our mother.
The question I have to answer for myself — do I ever want to speak to my sister again?
Do I want to keep away from her (and her away from our mother) because she resoundingly rejected our parents who sacrificed their time and love for us?
My wife’s mother died more than a year ago, changing my perspective of family.
My father died this year, changing my mindset about life in general.
My wife and I have no children, only nieces and nephews who will be responsible for our care, should we live into our senior citizen years.
They say that blood is thicker than water but now that my mother in-law and father are gone, I can consider thoughts that I buried deep inside me a long time ago.
My sister was my rival from the moment she was born.
She clung to me wherever I went for many years so, as a result of my jealousy, I did everything I could to get her in trouble with our parents instead of me (and it worked most of the time).
I could not get rid of her until I started school.
Even then, we saw each other every day after school and usually on the weekends so, of course, I did everything I could to get her in trouble instead of me (and it worked most of the time).
For decades now, our belief systems have drifted further and further apart, reminding me of my early childhood experience where my sister was a rival for our parents’ love.
Now that my sister has demonstrated she is not interested in perpetuating our parents’ teachings, should I just tell her goodbye and let her drift off and away from our family’s core beliefs?
Every generation decides what the previous generation’s contribution to society was worth.
My sister and I hold different opinions on this matter.
I have many thoughts to consider before making a major decision about my relationship with my sister while my mother is still alive, especially with the holidays coming up.
More as it develops…
A Box of Old Baby Dolls
In the quick succession of events we call life, when we say one event or another is more memorable than the rest, do we take time to notice our thought processes and how they influence future events?
Have you ever heard a child request a toy, then you saved your hard-earned money to buy the toy and felt more affinity for the toy than the child ever did?
While butterflies chase each other through the woods and a bird tries to catch one of the butterflies in its mouth, I wonder about opportunity costs.
I finally read about the race called the 2012 Indianapolis 500 and the exciting story of dramatic turns of events during the race.
Instead of watching, on the day of the race I helped my wife’s extended family fix up the house and grounds that belonged to my wife’s mother and now belongs jointly to my wife and her brother’s children. [I would have enjoyed watching the race in memory of my father but chose not to this year, my father having expired mere days before. There’ll be other races during which I’ll recall motorsports events my father and I shared, shedding a tear or two of happiness AND sadness. I could have spent time with my mother that day, also, but didn’t.]
My in-laws closely managed their finances, creating a legacy to give their children, including a box of old baby dolls that were purchased for my wife and a house left to my wife and her brother.
The dolls have lost all but their sentimental value, reaching the state where entering the city dump or landfill is their final destination.
The house retains both real and sentimental values, carrying on the legacy that my wife shares with the children of her deceased brother — her niece and nephew.
In the age-old, perennial complaints/comments about the way our children and grandchildren never completely appreciate the sacrifices made to give them the clothes on their backs and the toys in their room, my wife and I virtually face our adult-aged niece and nephew, wondering where they were when we needed them most to help them honour their father’s legacy.
The cycle of life…sigh…
Little time to mourn my mother in-law before my father died.
Now I have a wife and a mother to separately help not only with the grieving process but also the financial/legal hurdles that our society places in front of us to ensure the government gets its [un]fair share of carefully-tended legacies and insurance companies give out as little as they can to protect shareholders more than policy holders.
I was a great-nephew once, living less than 15-minutes drive from a great-aunt who could have used my assistance. Instead, I was a frivolous college student more interested in having a good time with my friends. Thankfully, my great-aunt changed her will and essentially cut me out, teaching me that ignoring a family member in need has consequences in the here-and-now, if not the afterlife.
Love has no price, no matter how painful the loss of a monetary inheritance may feel.
If we’re lucky, we innately know to give love unconditionally, buying toys for children who may never know the price we paid in money but more importantly in time sacrificed on the job to put toys on layaway when budgets were tight.
Hopefully, we teach our children that time spent together with family is more precious than objects like toys or houses.
Although toys, houses, and rooms full of antique furniture have their value, too.
I now own a suitcase full of shirts that belonged to my father, including his favourite blue, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. I cherish them but I’d trade them in a heartbeat for another chance to sit with my father or hear him talk German with a stranger on the street.
I have a box of his unfinished balsa wood airplanes on a stack of boxes behind me. It’s up to me to finish one of the planes and pass it on to his grandson who will never know the love of airplanes my father and I shared for the first 50 years of my life. I know it’ll just be a toy airplane my nephew will probably think his middle-aged uncle poured a lot of old-fashioned sentiment into, wondering where he’ll put it in case I ask about it ever again.
That’s just the way life goes.
I sure miss my father today…one of his first childhood balsa wood planes sits a few feet away from me, gathering dust, its engine long since clogged with old fuel. The only thing of his father I have is a U.S. Navy knife and leather holster. I have nothing of his father’s father, not even memories. I knew my father’s mother’s father but have nothing of his, either, except a story or two my father told — there are handmade garden tools and kitchen gear of his still around, though.
Otherwise, we pass this way once and are quickly forgotten.
Our business is with the living, our moments together more important than memories of those moments, which will fade soon enough.
At my funeral, will people say “I remember Rick’s blog and how it changed my life” more than “I remember Rick talking to me every day and how important he made me feel when he recalled something I’d told him in person once before?”
I have one foot in and one foot out of social media. I don’t want to predict 1000 years from now whether our virtual lives will have stronger emotional impact than our physical connections but take me away from this computer and all the social network connections of the world quickly fade from my memory because I never held them in my hand, patted them on the back, smelled their perfume/cologne/body odours or noticed their unique personalities up close.
Will social media be like a box of old baby dolls one day, easily thrown in the trash, its opportunity cost and sacrificial price quickly forgotten? If you ever used a BBS, you already know the answer.
The other day…
The other day, my father recounted the first snow he remembered at Christmas.
He was in the Boston area, interviewing with MIT for an undergraduate student opening.
My father was a very independent child, often, in his early teens, riding the train from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Washington, D.C., seeing the museums, going on to Norfolk, VA, to visit his father who was stationed at the naval base there and then returning in time to attend school on Monday.
To earn money, my father had a newspaper route.
So it was not a big stretch, as it might be for some, to imagine attending, let alone applying to, MIT.
Fast forward a few decades and his daughter, my baby sister, a school counselor in the Virginia public school system, just received Teacher of the Year.
As a counselor!
Wonderful news.
Soon, my sister’s son will graduate with a baccalaureate and start his postgraduate career, possibly in law school.
Where?
Well, if my father put MIT in his sights, perhaps his grandson will set a similar goal.
We’ll see.
In my parents’ empty-nest years, they’ve volunteered to serve food at the local middle school football games, sell Christmas trees for the Colonial Heights Optimist Club and give assistance to neighbours in need. They’ve attended Citizens’ Police Academy, providing support for the local Neighbourhood Watch program, as a result.
These are the examples my parents have set for their offspring, raising successful children and receiving successful grandchildren in return.
That, in a nutshell, is what life is all about. Everything else is just spare pocket change.
May all of us inspire our children to seek great achievements, just like Nanxi Liu and Annette.
And congratulations to my sister one more time!
treetrunkdings 