Thursday, October 20, 2005
Toto this isn't Kansas. You know you've changed districts when the constituent calls you receive no longer involve, 'I'm homeless, can you please find me a shelter,' to, 'I think it is outrageous that Countrywide Bank sent out my $100,000-plus CD-matured check by priority mail as opposed to overnight Fed-Ex'...
Refreshing. To go to a Council on Aging Meeting in a district where the elderly don't drop their 'R's (ok in this respect I'm a snob about accents) and the Rep gives a compassionate speech that makes you rather proud to be working for this person.
Family Bonds. Quality moments are historically arbitrary amongst families. Thanksgivings and Christmas can be busts but a random car ride to Midas Muffler can bring forth epiphanies of progress towards family connectedness. Go figure. The call to Mom this evening was such a moment. After: job is good, my hand is bad, hubbys are incurable, bathroom renovations are moving forward we started an out-of-nowhere conversation about grandparents. My maternal grandmother was a piece of work (to employ an understatement). She was an alcoholic for one. She was bitter for two (now THAT'S a story...). She was un-diagnosed, but most certainly clinically depressed for three, and had not a shred of warmth/love/sense of continuum that she cared to share with any of her offspring or offspring's offspring. Case in point: when I would visit her as a grandchild, she would send me across the street to a strip of green grass that served as a dividing line between two streets. She called this a 'playground.' There I would sit cross-legged until such time as she deigned to ring her little brass bell indicating it was time for me to cross the street into her Formica white kitchen for perfectly awful fried eggs. After eggs, I would sit in the living room with her and watch "As the World Turns" whilst she belted back her bourbon. As a grandchild I didn't take her eccentricities and addictions personally. I only felt sorry for her. I can only imagine what this ice-woman did to my mother... I am happy my mother shared some of that pain with me this evening. I have always felt it a shame that human beings do not have such a thing as collective knowledge-- knowledge that could be passed down through each generation: oh the stupid mistakes we could avoid!; oh the wisdom we would have within us!.
Family trees are in my mind completely uninteresting. I don't want to know who married whom; I want to know the joy, pain, and disfunctionality of it all. I want to pass that on. I want that continuum to be something that eventually gets hard-wired into the evolutionary process so that we might learn from said dysfunctional grandmother. So that we might learn to hug and love our children unconditionally. That we might not make drunken spectacles of ourselves. That we might not become bitter beings who serve up a gorgeous lamb dinner only to pronounce how nice it would be to be dead...And then our children might not become us....
Refreshing. To go to a Council on Aging Meeting in a district where the elderly don't drop their 'R's (ok in this respect I'm a snob about accents) and the Rep gives a compassionate speech that makes you rather proud to be working for this person.
Family Bonds. Quality moments are historically arbitrary amongst families. Thanksgivings and Christmas can be busts but a random car ride to Midas Muffler can bring forth epiphanies of progress towards family connectedness. Go figure. The call to Mom this evening was such a moment. After: job is good, my hand is bad, hubbys are incurable, bathroom renovations are moving forward we started an out-of-nowhere conversation about grandparents. My maternal grandmother was a piece of work (to employ an understatement). She was an alcoholic for one. She was bitter for two (now THAT'S a story...). She was un-diagnosed, but most certainly clinically depressed for three, and had not a shred of warmth/love/sense of continuum that she cared to share with any of her offspring or offspring's offspring. Case in point: when I would visit her as a grandchild, she would send me across the street to a strip of green grass that served as a dividing line between two streets. She called this a 'playground.' There I would sit cross-legged until such time as she deigned to ring her little brass bell indicating it was time for me to cross the street into her Formica white kitchen for perfectly awful fried eggs. After eggs, I would sit in the living room with her and watch "As the World Turns" whilst she belted back her bourbon. As a grandchild I didn't take her eccentricities and addictions personally. I only felt sorry for her. I can only imagine what this ice-woman did to my mother... I am happy my mother shared some of that pain with me this evening. I have always felt it a shame that human beings do not have such a thing as collective knowledge-- knowledge that could be passed down through each generation: oh the stupid mistakes we could avoid!; oh the wisdom we would have within us!.
Family trees are in my mind completely uninteresting. I don't want to know who married whom; I want to know the joy, pain, and disfunctionality of it all. I want to pass that on. I want that continuum to be something that eventually gets hard-wired into the evolutionary process so that we might learn from said dysfunctional grandmother. So that we might learn to hug and love our children unconditionally. That we might not make drunken spectacles of ourselves. That we might not become bitter beings who serve up a gorgeous lamb dinner only to pronounce how nice it would be to be dead...And then our children might not become us....
Comments:
Post a Comment
