Love My Girl

My daughter had practice for the older of the two teams that she plays with on Thursday evening.  (She was born in 2007, this is a mostly 2006 team.)  At one point she was battling a much bigger 2005 girl for the ball during a scrimmage.  She didn't come out with it, but her coach watched her fighting and said to her, "You really are ferocious, aren't you??"

We jokingly call her our little savage. His comment made me laugh!!

All's Well That Ends Well

That moment when you realize that in the mad scramble to get the kids fed and out of the house for the evening's activities, the one thing you forgot to grab was your own taekwondo uniform.  D'oh.

The sad thing: The realization that all is not lost because your 14-year-old son happens to wear the same size uniform you do and his gear bag is in the trunk!!  

The best part: The only reason his gear bag was in the trunk to begin with was because I told him to toss it in there so he could come to class with me in case his soccer practice got cancelled.  So I guess I did provide myself with a uniform for the evening after all, if only indirectly!!  Too funny.

Buried Treasure

On my dad's side, I've been the keeper of the family history for some time.  (Several years back, my aunt sent me all the family documents she had after a health scare, and a remote cousin of my dad's shared what he had around the same time as well.)  I have family trees on ancestry.com for both sides, but haven't had much of anything by way of documentation or pictures on my mother's side till very recently.

Every so often, I get on a genealogy kick and spend days on end updating the family tree in my spare time.  The last time I did, a month or so ago, to my great surprise I found a reference to pictures of my maternal great-grandparents, the first I'd ever seen!  Technically, notes that they had been uploaded but weren't available for public viewing.  Crossing my fingers, I sent a note to the owner asking if she could possibly share the pictures with me.  She is a second cousin once removed of mine, which I determined by consulting one of those relationship charts used by family attorneys since I can't keep that stuff straight in my head.  She very kindly emailed me the pictures and the information that she had, and together we found my great-grandfather's death certificate and filled in some missing blanks in the stories surrounding his death, including which one of my great-grandmother's brothers was the attorney that (family legend says) stole whatever money she had left from her after her husband died!

Turns out that she got those pictures from somebody else she'd encountered on ancestry.com, my mother's cousin.  I'd heard her name, but my mother hasn't seen her since both women were very young: the families weren't close.  This cousin of Mom's must be in her early 80s now but seems very sharp.  After a few email exchanges, she asked for my address, and told me that she was going through her mother's things (her mother and my grandfather were siblings) and wanted to mail me some pictures.  They arrived the other day, along with some funeral Mass cards and a wonderful newspaper clipping from 1956 about my grandfather's boatbuilding business, which included a picture of him that I've never seen before.

My grandfather died when I was six, so I don't remember him well and had only ever seen a few pictures of him.  I was in my early twenties when my grandmother passed away, and we were very close, but she was in her mid-sixties when I was born, so I just wasn't around when she was a young(er) woman.  Imagine my joy at being presented with a pile of family pictures of my grandparents when they were about the age that I am now!!

I scanned these two in immediately to share with the family.  The three girls in both pictures are my mother (the youngest) and my two aunts.  They are joined in both pictures by my grandparents, and in the picture on the left also by my great-grandmother, the victim of the intrigue after her husband's death.  It sounds like she was one hell of a strong and resilient woman, and I'm sorry I never had a chance to meet her.  I've heard a lot about her over the years.

So, in a nutshell, a website connected me with a second cousin in California who connected me to a first cousin in Michigan who sent me pictures taken sixty some-odd years ago in Pennsylvania, which I have now shared with my parents in Oregon and my aunts in Ohio and California, all without leaving my home office!!  I love technology.

Enough Already

My head is a swirling mass of negativity these days and the urgent-but-not-important variety of stressors are just sucking the damned life out of me.  I'm tired of living in my own skull right now, if that makes sense. This isn't my normal MO or the way I want to be and I need to make some changes.

There needs to be some positive for balance.  Going to focus on that.  Every day, two simple things to start with.  One: a kindness I do for somebody. Doesn't have to be a big one, but a kindness, to get me out of my own head and more focused on others. Two, stopping to formally recognize something good I see while going about my day.  

Today, I let a lady with only a few items in her cart cut in front of me in the checkout line at the grocery store. We had a nice chat about her rescue pup and mine. 

Today, I happened to catch a sweet moment between Thing One and one of his campers. This little boy might be 5...a round-cheeked blond cherub.  He was so excited to see Thing One that he ran up and hugged him around the knees, since that's all he could reach on my tall lanky son!  My grinchlike heart grew three sizes watching that. 

Let's see what smiles the universe sends my way tomorrow. 

I Just Don't Get It. Any Of It.

Doom and gloom alert.  Be warned.

I should further preface this by reminding y'all that I mostly didn't grow up in the US.  I'm an American citizen, was born here, spent summers here, but lived in varying places overseas from the ages of 2-18 the rest of the time because of Dad's job.  This had a lot of long term effects on my life, some good and some bad, but one consequence is that I usually wasn't anywhere in the vicinity when any close family or friends died.  Mom and Dad generally went back to the States for whatever (rare) funeral services needed attending and left my brother and I behind wherever we were living so that we wouldn't miss school. I attended the funerals of both my grandmothers in my early twenties, but that was about it.

Fast forward to my life here, and my introduction to the concept of the viewing.  It may well be a normal American thing, and I'm sure if you grow up with it, it is normal, but to me it seems so barbaric and cruel for the bereaved to have to stand in front of their deceased loved one's body (for the love of God) and make small talk for hours on end, I can't even process it.  That actually gets to me me more than the custom of kneeling in front of the coffined deceased to pray, which threw me for a loop the first time I came across it as well.  I'm sure my lack of exposure to death is the root of my issues on both counts.

Having all these thoughts because I went to the wake for my friend's husband on Friday.  Not the first time I've been to a viewing for someone who died by their own hand, sadly, but the first for someone I knew well personally, and the first goddamned one with an open goddamned casket so I am looking at him at the same time I am looking at his bleak-eyed wife and kids and siblings and then kneeling mere inches from him saying the Hail Mary over his coffin because it's the only prayer coming to mind in the shock of the moment and he was a Notre Dame alum like me anyway, so it's appropriate in a weird sort of way and all I want to do is scream, "WHY????"  I probably won't ever know and that's ok.  It's none of my business.   But Jesus.  How does a family even begin to pick up the pieces and move on after something like that?

The line of mourners extended out the funeral home door and down the block, anyway.  I hope that brought the family some comfort.

May His Soul Rest In Peace

The husband of a dear college friend was hit and killed by a train this week.  Most likely suicide.  They have three children who are relatively close in ages to mine.  To say that I am in shock would be the understatement of the century and I cannot even begin to process how my friend is functioning right now.  Sweet Jesus, what horrible news.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
And let perpetual light shine upon them.
May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

Proud Of My Boy

Thing One started his first job this week, the one I helped him to apply for.  He's a junior counselor at our town's Summer Recreation camp.  It's an unpaid position (the policy for younger teens--he's barely 14--is that the first year is volunteer, they are paid after that) and he's been assigned to help out with the kindergarten/first grade group.  He is having the time of his life!!  Yesterday, the kids spent their entire recess chasing him around the playground...apparently they were the humans and he was the evil monster they were trying to catch.  When he got into the car, he commented that he couldn't believe that next year he'll actually be paid to have that much fun!  The other counselors in his group are a college-aged girl and an adult woman, so I have a feeling that the kids (especially the boys) in his group are loving having a young male counselor.  

The camp director texted me last night. "I can't say enough good things about (Thing One.)  He is so amazing with the kids and they all look up to him!"  When I went in to pick up my other two today, the art teacher came over and told me how conscientious he is with the kids and that he's really good about seeing what needs to be done and doing it without being told.  Made my day, I don't mind admitting it.   

He's not getting paid, so money isn't the motivation.  He just loves little kids and is great with them.  Always has been.  His favorite cousin is the youngest...those two have been inseparable for years.  The director said that she initially wasn't sure about putting a teenaged boy with the youngest group of kids and I told her she couldn't have placed him better if she'd tried!

When he was a little kid, his favorite counselor was an older boy named Rob, who set a great example for him.  I emailed Rob's dad last night and asked him to please let Rob know that Thing One is paying it forward.  :)