Thanksgiving on the Way

I still haven't gotten into the habit of updating the blog every time the laptop is powered up. Writing is not a disciplined, habitual exercise for me; this explains why I don't keep a diary. It generally requires a significant event to inspire my thoughts, and a significant amount of free time in which to put those thoughts together into some semblance of rationality.

And, after all, most of the people who visit this blog are not interested in my pontifications; they're just checking to see if anything interesting has happened to the family, if there are any new pictures to look at, in the same way they browse through the news websites during breakfast to catch up on world events. That's not a bad thing; it's just the way things are these days when all the information in the world is at your fingertips. So if we manage to entertain someone for a few minutes with a new picture of the kids or a cute story of our lame attempts at keeping our house in repair, the blog has served its purpose.

There are many blogs out there which are updated far more frequently, have far more entertaining content, and are far more worth your valuable time. Is this medium of communication effective for our purposes, then? Perhaps, considering the alternatives. The telephone has never been my favorite instrument; my hand cramps at the thought of putting pen to paper; and there would be no point to writing this blog for the people with whom I converse on a daily basis face-to-face because they already know what is going on around here.

And truthfully, most of the time there is nothing of compelling mutual interest to share. We go about our quiet lives day to day, adhering to our routine, getting our homework done, trying to keep the house in good order, looking forward to the weekends so that we can have a little time to relax from the daily grind.

When something out-of-the-ordinary occurs, or a remarkably potent thought strikes me -- one worth an hour or two of devoted concentration -- it might inspire me to sit and write about it. Or if I happen to catch a particularly interesting picture of a family member which might be of general interest. But it's not like I'm discussing philosophy or the latest technology or politics or religion or any of the topics which drive the truly interesting websites.

Truthfully, there are many subjects on which I could write a thousand words or more, but they are of little interest to anyone reading this site (unless you really enjoy old geeks talking about "the good old days"). And I don't have time to go to all the forums on all the other websites to become involved in discussions with people who have managed to gather huge numbers of readers.

Every minute spent on this blog is a minute not spent with my family. And if there is one thought that is always lingering in the backwoods of my mind, it is the awareness of the passage of time, the shortness of life, and the rapidity through which my children are passing through this phase of it. They are growing so quickly. Some days I'm afraid to close my eyes because when they reopen, my children will have grown up and moved away.

The funeral down in Indiana only brought this feeling more into focus.

I didn't know Uncle Lee very well. We didn't spend much time in Indiana in my youth, and even if we had, most of my time would've been spent in the company of my cousins rather than my aunts and uncles. Nor was much of my young adulthood spent there, since I chose to move to the west coast right out of the gate (and was promptly sent to the east coast). To the best of my knowledge, though, Uncle Lee was always funny and happy and jolly and content. Certainly his health was never the best, at least during the time I knew him. Yet he was family, one of those icons that aunts and uncles become to their young nieces and nephews, those mysterious adults who sit around the Big Person table at reunions talking about boring adult things that don't make any sense, laughing at jokes that aren't funny, eating things that are yucky and drinking coffee (which was always the Adult Beverage).

Looking around at the people attending the funeral, it wasn't really the death of my Uncle that I mourned so much as it was the aging of all the rest of us; all my cousins grown up with children (and in some cases grandchildren) of their own, some of the faces lined, some of the hair gray, some of the bellies sticking out in a way that revealed far too little playtime and too much sitting. After having lived in the Northwest for nearly twenty years, it was a shock to come back to the Midwest and attend the annual reunion back in 2004. Everyone had changed so much. Many names were forgotten. Many aunts and uncles who had once been in the prime of their lives were now aged and fragile. And that was four years ago. Time marches on. Aging continues to enfeeble us all.

Someone once remarked that youth is the process of looking around to see who's ahead, while old age is the process of looking around to see who's left. We have entered into that phase of our lives where we will start to see more and more of our cherished icons passing through the veil, and the reality of the phrase you can't go home again will be made even more real.

That is, after all, why we go back to visit our relatives and friends again, isn't it? We seek to rekindle those emotions of closeness and friendship which we came to know so many years ago, and we remind one another of our common heritage, our common memories, our shared experiences -- those special times which first bound our hearts together in mutual love and admiration.

Yet we are frustrated time and time again by the fact that we cannot truly go back and relive those days when we had all the time in the world, when afternoons stretched out like eternity before us, when our major concerns were deciding which games to play and which desserts to select, when our parents and grandparents were all out in the other room talking boring adult talk while we were rolling around like idiots on the front lawn. Instead we have those horrid adult thoughts going around in our heads, wondering what our children are up to, checking our internal clock to determine how much time we have left to visit, knowing we'll have to stop soon and pack up our things and get in our cars and head back home, knowing it will be a long time before we are able to get back together again -- and wondering what will have changed by then, wondering who might not be able to attend the next one.

If there is anything that I treasure about Uncle Lee, it is his legacy, his children. They are wonderful, with wonderful families, and they are all blessed with a great sense of humor which is right in line with my own so that we can share and laugh at many of the same outlandish things. Both Jeff and Joyce have always been able to keep me laughing; one of my favorite childhood memories is listening to them recite songs from MAD magazine (which naturally stuck in my head) and laughing so hard my sides ached.

This is the kind of legacy I want to pass down to my own children, the joy of laughter and the willingness to be silly whenever possible. This is why there are lots of silly songs and silly movies in our library; we all have our favorite funny quotes from Monty Python and Bob and Ray and Bill Cosby, our favorite songs from Weird Al, our favorite clips from Bugs Bunny and Buster Keaton. And we have our favorite funny family stories from years gone by, when the kids (or the parents) had done something silly they would never live down, and indeed we bring it out every once in a while and laugh at it all over again.

Which brings me to Brother Kel.

Brother Kel came up with Mom and Dad for the funeral, and then they all decided to come up a little further north to visit for a day with us, and I cannot begin to tell you how pleased we were to have them here, not so much because we enjoyed their company - which we did - but because it gave the children an opportunity to get to know brother Kel a bit more. And brother Kel has been a legend around here for a very long time.

By this, I mean that he has been a name and a face on a website, or a name and a description in a story, but not a real person in the minds of the children. Most of them could not remember the last time they'd seen him. But when they finally did, he was everything they had hoped he would be: funny, silly, happy, playful and very tall. The girls especially took to him almost immediately; they could tell he is someone they could talk to, even at their young age. He treated them with great kindness and respect, willingly went along with their silly games and teasing playfulness, and even let them sit on his lap!

So the legend became reality, and the reality was even better than the legend could ever be; so now they look forward to the next time they get to see him. Of course, they're still intensely curious to see Uncle Craig again, who is another legend around here due to his famous silly videos (which we'd like to see more of). But we might have to wait a bit longer to see him, since we haven't been able to get out to Colorado lately.

Now Thanksgiving is almost upon us again, and we're making plans to spend Thursday with friends from church, and Friday down at Aunt Susan's; and before you know it, Christmas will be upon us, and then the end of one year and the beginning of another.

Where does the time go??