Family

When I was growing up, I believed I lived far, far away from a nearby mob of relatives such as my playmates enjoyed (endured?) on Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays.  Family picnics? We had ONE family picnic in the years before I left home after high school graduation. I took photos of it myself with my new camera--an eighth grade graduation gift.

Present at the picnic table were Mom and Dad, my brother Paul and his wife, Gertrude, and their three small children, Susan, Cindy, and Mark (Mary, Paula, Lisa, and Tom had not yet arrived), and me. We feasted on Mom's delicious fried chicken and potato salad, and possibly watermelon--which we had packed into our 1936 Plymouth for the drive from Fargo to Wahpeton. My brother & his family recently had moved to Wahpeton. Their new home was next to the railroad tracks in a house that had a rather biggish hole in one corner of the living room floor when they first moved in. 

After we ate, the kids played on the swings in Chahinkapa Park, and we all walked through the nearby zoo, which had a bear and some chickens, and I don't know what else. Probably nothing.  It was early days, as my late mother-in-law used to say.  Chahinkapa Park now has a Rose Chapel for weddings, and Paul has retired after a long, successful career with the telephone company.  In those days, however, his job title was "cable splicer's assistant"--whose main responsibility was to stand near the bottom of the telephone pole and toss pliers and other parts up to the cable splicer working on the wires at the top of the pole.

Unknown to me at the time, was that, besides my Uncle Henry's family, 2.5 hours away, we had scads of relatives--Uncle Joe, Aunt Frances, Aunt Anna, Uncle Tony and their large families--within half a day's drive of Wahpeton.  WW2 was always the reason for our nontravel back then, and that was that. But when I was a kid, I didn't know all of these people lived so close by.

This morning, my niece Susan sent me a copy of my great-grandmother's obituary, and I learned, to my complete surprise, that my dad's father had TWELVE siblings, and not the half-dozen I knew about.  I never met any of them, including my Grandpa, who died right after WW2.

I'm still digesting the news. Not that it matters, I guess.  I was visiting Penny, a lovely woman and my oldest grandson's mother-in-law, in Chicago this past weekend, and she was talking about feeling one of her flaws is not being "social." I laughed and said, "After nearly 50 years of being deaf, I have to be reminded to call my family." Compared with me, she's Perle Mesta.