I have lots of bad habits, but the most annoying to me lately is not writing stuff down when I first experience it. I have a fear I’m going to forget things, experiences, emotions, bits and pieces of my life. Everyone forgets stuff, but I keep having this sense that I’m losing a lot of stored memories. This probably explains the compulsion to back up all my old CDRoms that I’ve been going through. A lot of it has to do with the Alzheimer’s that is rampant on my mother’s side of the family. To see strong people gradually losing their identity & a lifetime of experiences… it’s ugly. Part of the reason I got started doing LiveJournal, and now this blog, was so that maybe I’d feel compelled to jot down the day’s events, or observations – journaling. I know a blog should probably be more about the observations, rather than a bullet point of what happened, but I was hoping that I’d start writing stuff down in order to fill my public place, and then be so into the groove that I’d actually let the overflow drip into a personal journal. I have a hard time keeping a personal journal, but if something is public, maybe I’ll feel the urge to keep it filled? Anyhow, the personal journal is still collecting dust, but the blog is moving ahead, maybe I’ll make the transition in the new year. Anyway, this rambling piece of text is just a preamble to get across that the reason I’m now writing about Thanksgiving in January, is because I have bad discipline (currently) when it comes to jotting down stuff when it happens – but I’m working on it. Ahem.

So, Thanksgiving – instead of flying like I do the rest of the year, I always drive home. Since I haven’t taken a restful, exotic vacation since, ever, I use the 15-hour drive as my actual vacation. It’s just me, the music & the road. For me it’s relaxing, a nice break away from work, and a buffer before I get back home. Nothing exciting happened on this road trip, which is fine. But thankfully the road between here and there is chock full of Waffle Houses and truck stops.

I should clarify that I didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, but actually the week before that to celebrate my grandmother’s 100 birthday. It’s funny because in the past, Nana didn’t want to discuss here age, but as the century mark drew closer she shocked us all by looking forward to the event. Not everyone made it to the event, but a lot of people did. My sister and her family we able to come – I hadn’t seen her in two years. It’s hard for us to get together because we live nowhere near our parents & grandparents. I actually saw my niece for the first time ever. She’s gorgeous and can really light up a room. My sister and have never been as close as either of us wanted I think. She’s eleven years my senior, so she was always gone when I was beginning to get interesting. There was a point in college – I think around my sophomore or junior year – where she worked in the same town I went to school in. We were able to have lunch once a week, and were starting to get to know each other better. But of course things change, she moved and got a family, and eventually I came up to New York. I love her, but right now, there’s not a lot that we have in common. I expect we’ll grow closer as we grow older – when I have a family and I call her for advice…

Anyway, like I said, most people made it. A cousin of mine flew in for the event. For background, the closest airport is about 60 miles & one state away. He’s already running a bit late, but when he finally lands and rushes to the car rental counter he finds out his license is expired. Of course they can’t rent him a car. He’s beside himself, pleading with them to let him rent, after all, he has to get to his grandmother’s 100 birthday party. The manager says there’s no way they can rent to him, but they can drive him up there. 60 miles. For free. The driver wouldn’t even accept a tip. I’ve never rented from them, but the Avis folks seem nice.

It was good seeing all the cousins and aunts & uncles. I heard a lot of tales and family – gossip I guess. An aunt is dating another aunt’s nephew (this all by marriage, not blood). The nephew is 20 or 30 years her junior. A cousin’s husband left her for the babysitter. I found out there is some history of mental illness in my family – that’s an upper. But the really interesting stuff happened when my sister and I went visiting the grandmothers.

First we visited my father’s mother. Her physical health has been on the decline the past few months – nothing specific, she’s just aging. When we first got there she was telling us all about her recent completion of her funeral plans. “It’s all paid for, so if no one is around, I’ll get taken care of.” I guess she’s planning on outliving all of us. That was kind of depressing, so we got her to talk about old times, old stories. Some of my fondest memories of being little were centered around visiting my grandparents at the lake. He was a retired policeman, she had worked at a sewing plant for a lot of her life. At some point (I’m not sure of the year) they were hired by one of the factories in town to run a ‘resort’ area down on a major lake. The term resort translates here to cabins (with plumbing & electricity) on a lakeside with a dock. It was wonderful going down there. There were frogs, snakes, all kind of critters and great fishing. We got her talking about her pet squirrels. She had them on more than one occasion. Once, my grandfather was cutting down a dead tree, and once it was down, he found a squirrel’s nest. He kept pulling out little baby squirrels, and my grandmother nursed them all until they were old enough to fend for themselves. Another time they had a single squirrel. This one ran lose in their cabin, but they’d put it in a bird cage when they had to run to town to pick up supplies. She told us about how they would put out nuts for it, and it would grab one, and then run off and hide it in the cabin somewhere. Then he’d run back up to the table where the nuts were and would kind of stare at them, like he was counting them to make sure they were all still there. Once they had to leave to pick up some groceries or deliver some fish, so they put the squirrel in his cage. When they came back, they walked into a disaster area. Apparently this particular squirrel was a locksmith and had escaped. As they walked through the cabin surveying the damage – cabinets pulled open, nuts everywhere – they found him, lying on the couch with a “it wasn’t me” look on his face. Or so she says.

Then we went to visit the century girl. For being 100, her mind is still pretty sharp. She might not remember the old stories right off the bat, but with a little hinting she’ll start spilling the beans. When my sister was little, Nana used to tell here about her life as a little girl back in the 1900’s. My sister remembered all these stories, and compiled them into a little book, a sort of long birthday card that was then illustrated by my nephews (cute huh?). Nana had a hard time hearing the story my sister read at the party, so my sister got the card and told the stories again. It was a grand time. Nana started expanding on some of the stories. My sister at one point asked my aunt who was there, if she had seen a book in the house that she had remembered and wanted to borrow. My aunt wasn’t sure, but she had a box of bunch of stuff and said we should look through that. She brought down this big Tupperware box with all this amazing stuff in it. Old garments, a bussell, an MD degree from 1910 (or around there), etc. Amongst the documents, we found some court papers. When my grandmother was young woman, her brother, the doctor was murdered. He had been treating a sick girl in the county somewhere. He was on his way to make a house call, when the deranged father of the sick girl, jumped out from behind a tree and shot him off his horse! Amazingly, a similar thing had happened to his grandmother. She was helping out a sick youngster, when a crazed family member shot her. In that case, there was no trial. A posse went after him and strung him up in a tree. But in the case of my grandmother’s brother, there was a trial. The deliberations lasted 15 minutes and they came back with the death penalty. It seems as if my grandfather even was a witness at the electrocution. So my sister is glancing over some of the court paper and my aunt makes an odd face at another find in the box. She mentions something under her breath and hands the object to my sister. Come to find out later, it was pieces of the gun from the murder trial. Wild. My sister now has the court papers and parts of the gun in her possession. Wild.

The rest of trip was made up of a lot of little moments, hanging with my parents, my sister and her family. It was fun.

Oh, and we saw the Northern Lights, which is odd because we were below the Mason-Dixon line. The skies are so clear down – no light pollution whatsoever – that with the right atmospheric conditions, you can see the Northern Lights. It was wild.

SONG OF THE MOMENT: Poster Children – “One of Us”