Mom is behind on the Harry Potter reading, so I was reading some of it out loud to her, and we had stopped to discuss names at one point.
Mom: ...and of course, "Dumbledore" is Anglo-Saxon for "Bumblebee."
Me: [blank look] really...?
Mom: Oh, sorry, I thought everyone knew that.
She evidently reads different books than the rest of us. :-)
I got my very own "Pa clock" yesterday. Around Christmas time Pa let me choose from a number of different clocks he had recently gotten at an auction, and I chose Cogsworth here. Pa just finished fixing and restoring it and delivered it yesterday. It's about a hundred years old, and German. A lovely little clock, and I like the color of the wood and the design. But my favorite thing about it is the chime on the hours. It's very mellow, and sort of comforting. 
All my life, clocks have been associated with Pa, and he's always had a "clock room" full of them in various stages of (dis)repair. Always fun to listen to that room around the changing of the hours. This picture, with Pa and Lacey in the clock room, is one of my favorites.
I got back last night from a few days up in Portland visiting Lacey. She and John have a lovely apartment that I particularly liked (among many other reasons) because it's chock full of happy plants. I made an official count at once point, and came up with 70 distinct plants, just indoors and not counting everything they've got growing in the community garden nearby. By the time I left, it had already increased to 71, because it turns out that Lacey can't even walk into a music store without someone there giving her a plant to take home with her. It all made me want to start getting more greenery around my apartment. I've currently got a wandering jew and a spider plant, both doing decently well, but I've got a lot of space on my balcony that I'm not doing anything with, so it would be fun to get some stuff growing out there. I think Lacey inherited both of Mom's green thumbs, but I'll see what I can do.
Other fun stuff from the weekend:
We had a family trip up to Riddle, Oregon this weekend. Uncle Jim had been keeping Grandma Jackie and Grandpa Marsh's ashes for three months and three years, respectively, and it was time to get everyone together with the two of them one more time. Jackie was a Riddle before she was a Waldon, and it was her family who founded the tiny (pop. 145) town of Riddle several generations previously. The cemetery there is full of Riddle headstones, and Jackie and Marsh's was waiting for them, next to Jude and Bob's, her father and brother. Jim brought the shovels, and we dug them a cozy little space, sang and prayed a bit, and said goodbye. We've had a Celebration of Life for each of them already, so this last little bit with just the family around was a good way to complete things. Those of us who weren't able to get up to Oregon were there in spirit.
The rest of the trip, though brief, was also good. I was glad to get to spend a lot of time with Dad (and a bit with Lacey) on the drives up and down. The whole family had dinner Saturday night at Wiley's World in Ashland, which I highly recommend to anyone who happens to be around there. The highlight there was the marionberry cobbler, made with berries from a bush right behind the restaurant, with homemade ice cream. Everything was fantastic, though, and I was waddling my way out when we were done. We also went to the Oregon Cabaret Theatre to see a show called Return to Planet Lisa. Lisa Koch has a pretty funny music/comedy act, which she performs in a variety of different personas. And Riddle even made an appearance in a song (to the tune of My Favorite Things) about small southern Oregon towns no one has heard of. That amused me.
If you look up "packrat" in the dictionary, you'll find a picture of my Grandma Jackie. Her two-bedroom apartment was stuffed to the gills, basically just leaving linear paths to move around in, with no actual space. Now that she's gone, my dad's family gets to go through and figure out what to do with it all. I spent all weekend and also yesterday evening up there, along with Dad, all of his siblings, and varying numbers of cousins. So at any given time there were usually 6-9 of us trying to maneuver around in this little space, preferrably without breaking anything.
A lot of the stuff, of course, is getting divvied up between family members, based on either sentimental or practical desires. Even more of it is getting donated to the local hospice thrift shop. We started by filling the bed of a pickup truck with garbage bags filled with clothes. There's still another batch of those to go, too, I think. And then the books. After we had each taken a box or a few for ourselves, and Aprill and Lamar had gotten several boxes of books on Christianity for their church's library, there were still 34 boxes left to get donated. Then a few more of music and videos and such. Plus trinkets, figurines and knicknacks up the wazoo (the raccoons alone took up a box of their own). And there was plenty of pure junk as well. I lost track of how many boxes of stuff I threw away. And even after all of this, there's probably still more stuff in that apartment than I own myself, but progress is definitely visible.
The very sentimental stuff is getting handled more carefully, of course. The evolving method is to pick an item type (e.g. pictures on the walls) and then have people take turns choosing what they want to take, working through a hierarchy of siblings by age, and then into the second generation (mine) when the first has the most important stuff, and occasionally into the third, since Kathy's granddaughter Jessie was there last night as well. Anything left over after that is up for grabs until it gets packed away.
Anyway, it's been a really interesting few days. I think it's been good to have so much of the family together and working on a big project together like this. There's a huge mix of personality types in the group, but on some level there's definitely something that we all "get" about Jackie and her passing. We can all miss her and love her while still laughing at her eccentricities and her ability to just "keep on giving." So it's been good.
Grandma Jackie passed away this morning. For 16 years various doctors have been telling her that her time was nearly up, but she just kept trucking along, traveling the world, being active in her church community, and just generally loving everyone who came within reach. When she had an accident last month and was hospitalized for a week, though, even she started admitting it was probably the beginning of the end. But she was ready, and was happy with her life, and it gave the family all time to get together and prepare. On Monday I was up visiting her and got a chance to record her talking about her life, and about Grandpa Marsh, and her brother Bob, and the places she had traveled, and other memories. Dad said it was one of the last few real conversations anyone got to have with her, since she spent the last few days heavily medicated and just generally fading out. So I feel very blessed to have gotten to do that. She died this morning with Aunt Pat, and I think it was all pretty easy and peaceful.
As I've thought about all this, both today and in anticipation over the last few weeks, I've realized that Grandma Jackie was not only a good role model for living, but also a good role model for dying. That sounds odd to say, but I think it's an important thing that isn't thought about often enough. She lived her life (and more of it than anyone had expected) doing everything she thought was important and meaningful, and she was happy with it, and at peace, and ready for the transition. She made sure to get visits from everyone she could towards the end, and she had her children with her in shifts constantly for the last few weeks. Uncle Jim and Lacey also both made it down from Oregon just the other day, and I was up again last night with Lacey, Aprill & Lamar, Dad and all three of his siblings, so it was a really good gathering. We all got to spend some time with each other and with Jackie, and to talk to her. She wasn't really able to respond much, but I think it was really good for her to have so much family love around her during the final stages. I couldn't have asked for things to have gone much better than that.
I'm heading up to Rossmoor tonight to be with family, and I'll probably be up there most of the weekend.
Here's a better picture of great grandpa Walker, where you can actually see him. I got this one when I inherited his old banjo guitar nine years ago. Good picture. Let's not have any more "seed of Google" type posts about it this time, though. That was just weird.
I spent a lot of the day with Monee yesterday, and one of the things we did was to look through some of her old photos of her parents in the 1920s and '30s. I scanned a few of my favorites, which you can see on the Flickr photos above. The two of my great grandmother Mabel Reesey Walker Herdman in particular fascinate me. There's something a little mysterious and impish about her face that I love. You can tell that in spite off the old-fashioned formality of the pictures, she's still got some zing in her. I'm not sure why I like the picture of my great grandfather, Thomas Walker, so much, especially since you can't even see his face very well. But I like it nonetheless.
Mabel and Tom both kept diaries during the time of their (secret) courtship and subsequent elopement, and we've got transcripts of them both written out with each person's entry from each day side by side, along with Mabel's commentary on it from a taped interview with my uncle Paul years later. Fascinating stuff. It's really making me want to get more into the family history and dig up old stories and photos and things to share, like uncle Jim does on the Waldon side.
Lacey's running around California for a couple weeks, getting in visiting time with everyone, and she spent the Labor Day weekend with me and Mom in Palo Alto. She is strewing homemade jam about as she goes, as well, and I must say the spiced peach is incredible (especially since you almost have to slice it as much as spread it). Strawberry-rhubarb was a very close second, though. Also, we got a big yummy Walla Walla onion at the farmers market and made toasted cheese, onion and tomato sandwiches. Wonderful stuff. Anyway, Lacey's blogging up a storm about her trip, and my writing is not feeling particularly voluminous today, so I'll leave the rest of the stories to her.
Cristie and Paul came up last night and we all went to Swing Central together. I've been meaning to start doing more swing dancing lately, so it was fun to do that and see them both. They took the drop-in beginning class and I watched Kevin and Carla's intermediate lesson. I'm definitely thining about signing up for the next series when it starts. Lots of cool stuff to learn there.
One odd thing about the dance was that during the whole time (except the lessons) there was a projector showing videos of the U.S. Open competition on the wall, without sound. A couple times, everyone even stopped dancing entirely to watch a particular couple or group. But the sound was off, of course, because of the music that was playing for us to dance to. So it was absolutely bizarre to watch choreographies to the wrong music. Sometimes things would seem to line up in phrases and almost work, which in a way was almost more confusing, because then it just seemed like a not-so-good choreography, rather than something that was clearly mismatched. Weird.
I found a set of photographs from what Dad called a "pre-Olympic tour" in Mexico. He said his college team travelled around the country racing against a lot of the local and regional teams, and they also got to run the first official race on the real Olympic track. Very cool. Hopefully I'll get to hear more about it when I see Dad on Christmas. I'm not sure what event this was that he won.
I spent a little while this evening going through a bag full of old birthday cards and similar things from when Dad was age 0-5. Most weren't anything very interesting or worth keeping, but some I kind of liked. I'm particularly taken by how many little tiny cards there were. I like miniature things, and you don't see cards this size these days.
I haven't managed to work myself up to tackling all the various newspaper clippings yet, but a couple did catch my eye. One was the family photograph shown to the left. The other was a Sermon of the Week, which was "condensed from one written and delivered" by Dad, when he was 16. Neat.
I went through the two boxes of Dad's old running trophies tonight. A lot of them were broken, and there was also a separate collection of broken people from the tops of various other trophies. Some still looked good, though. And there were a few amusing ones, like this one, which seems to be Richard Nixon jogging on a treadmill, scratching his armpit and making a face like a fish that wants to be fed. Then there's this one, which looks like a combination combination gramophone-compass-speedometer-pen holder of some sort. Interesting. I was disappointed that not many of them said what even he actually won (though a couple were marked "2 mile run"). Still, it was fun to see everything, 25 trophies or pieces in all.
The pack-rat tendencies in my family are really far too extreme. A couple months ago, Uncle Jim delivered to me four boxes and one bag that had been in the care of my aunts. It seems that these contain nearly everything that ever happened to my dad during his high school and college years, at least in terms of athletics and academics. There are two boxes just of trophies and awards from his track and field competitions. There are also two more boxes of scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings, photos and report cards. The bag contains a few things from earlier years as well, like a stack of birthday cards (some from when he was two years old), a baby book, a bit of schoolwork, and more report cards. Scattered throughout are some more random things, like a paperback copy of Revolution at Berkeley, and an entire binder of Pan American World Airways Teacher magazines.
So anyway, this has all come to me, in a kind of implied apprenticeship to Uncle Jim, the family historian. I'm in the process now of simply figuring out what to do with it all. Tonight I opened everything for the first time, just to see what all is in there and get an idea of what I'll be facing. It looks like it will be interesting to go through piece by piece, but I'm also going to need to somehow archive it all so that it can be safely gotten rid of without upsetting Grandma Jackie (Dad doesn't care what happens to it, and I'm certainly not going to keep it all in my room forever). I'll probably just photograph all the trophies, which should be the easiest part. Scanning in all the photos will probably take a while. When it comes to the hundreds of newspaper articles, I think there's going to have to be some significant selecting and editing involved. I'm not sure what I'll do with the slides. But whatever I do, it'll be a bit of a project for a while.
On the other side of the family, I have a cassette tape from Monee that I want to transcribe, and maybe get into a digital format at some point. It's Uncle Paul talking with Great-Grandma Herdman about Monee's father's "courtship diary." Should be interesting. I'd also like to read some of Great-Grandma Herdman's diaries, if we can ever borrow them from the cousins currently in possession of them. But that's a project for another time.
Mom and Pa came down for a visit today and we all went on a field trip to the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, where they currently have a rare books exhibit. We showed up right at 11:00 when the doors opened, to "beat the crowds," but luckily not everyone gets as excited about old books as we do, so we actually had the exhibit to ourselves. Lots of neat things there, like a first edition (1721) of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting. I wish we could have actually flipped through the books and read them. We wandered around the rest of the museum too, of course, through an Egyptian tomb replica, past actual mummies and a rare original statue of Cleopatra VII, and eventually outside to a nice fountain where we had our picnic. A fun tri-generational outing all around.
Happy yesterday to everyone!
Lacey and I spent the first part of the day at Dad and Betty Lue's new house with various Waldon-side relatives. (Dad and Betty Lue moved in last week and, as expected, they seem to have been there forever.) The gift exchange was the highly amusing part, of course, though there were some rather odd presents involved this year. I ended up with 3/4 of a set of four wine glasses (I don't drink wine) and a package of Hanukkah candles (doubly ironic, since Hanukkah is almost over). They're pretty candles, at least. And I'm very glad to have gotten them since they were an act of mercy from my cousin Pam, trading me for the jar of olive tapenade I had gotten. I don't know what tapenade is, but I don't like olives in general and these particular olives looked like several people had already not enjoyed them much, either. Blech. Jaime won the prize for most presents opened because he kept getting things that were very much not rowdy-six-year-old-boy presents (he seemed to gravitate towards delicate glass objects). So adults, on their turn, would relieve him of such presents, allowing him to open more. That kept him a lot happier than anything he actually got, I think. Anyway, lots of fun there.
We spent the rest of the day at Monee and Pa's house, making an unprecedented two days in a row with the entire batch of Waldon-Boone cousins visiting together. That was great. I think the most fun story to tell of the evening, though, would have to have been Pa receiving his iPod. Faced with the open box, he decided the most efficient way to get the iPod out was to upturn the packaging and dump it all unceremoniously onto his lap, styrofoam, manuals and all. This crime against beautiful product and packaging design sent Paul and Greg into absolute conniptions. They took it all away from him and proceeded to lovingly reassemble everything from their memories of opening their own iPods. Then they gave it back and walked him through it, making sure he savored every bit of the presentation. Either way, he definitely liked it....
Curtis (to me): "Do you have an iPod?"
Me: "No... but I'm starting to want one."
Pa: "Ooh! Ask me if I have an iPod!"
Curtis: "Do you have an iPod?"
Pa (beaming): "YES!!!"
Finding old family treasures is always fun, and I got a few on Saturday. The first was Great Grandpa Boone's shape note book, that Monee and Pa found and gave to me. It was published in 1899, and has inscriptions in it from the original owner and also from Grandpa Boone when he got it. This isn't the actual copy that he used, but a similar one sent to him by McPherson College in 1991. (He had attended McPherson and donated a lot of money over the years, and my grandparents, I think, asked the college if they could find a copy and send it to him.) It has several of his favorite songs marked in it, though, and one that was a favorite of his father's. Glancing through it so far, I haven't found any songs that I recognize from the Sacred Harp, which is what most shape note people today sing from. But I did find one song that's on Testimony's CD, Echoes. That was kind of neat.
Another neat thing was a newspaper article Monee and Pa dug up somewhere and put in one of the photo albums. It was from 1961 or so, and had a picture of them having just won a "Best Dancers" award in their dance class. Very cool. (By the way — thanks for the dancing genes!)
The last treasure was a video of Grandpa Boone at age 100, reciting the "Vacation Time" poem which was apparently a bit of a signature piece for him, though I don't think I had ever heard it from him myself. It was a somewhat amusing poem, but the best part was to see him recite it. It really felt like he was telling a story, and it just happened to be rhyming as it went along. He stalled somewhere in the middle, not remembering if there were more verses or not, but once he got going again, he was really into it. He put about as much energy into it as you could imagine a 100-year-old man doing, and it was really neat. It was also nice just to see him again, even just in a video. He died when I was in high school, and I had only seen photos of him since then. It brought back lots of memories to see him and hear his voice again.
Yesterday we had a family congregation up at Rossmoor for Monee's 75th birthday party. We actually had all the cousins together for the first time in ages, so that was definitely fun. There was also a great deal of hilarity, dressing up, looking at cool old photos, and eating (my goodness, there was a lot of food). Photos are here.
Well, it's been quite a weekend. A very interesting combination of fun stuph and not-so-fun stuph, such that I'm not quite sure what to make of it overall. Oh well, I'll just start at the beginning.
I drove up to Mom's on Friday night and we picked up Lacey at the airport. That was actually kind of funny, because Lacey and I were both standing in the crowd, turning around, looking for the most likely place to find each other. We were literally about 5 feet apart and didn't know it. Then we both turned and at the same time did an absolutely beautiful, classic double-take. It was great.
On Saturday, Pa and Monee came over, too, so Pa and I opened fRed up to see if we could see any little parts holding up signs saying "Fix me!" No such luck, though we did see a hose that had come detached. Thinking we had found the Villainous Part, we hooked it back up and started the car. It didn't make a lick of difference. Sigh. So the job was declared Beyond Us.
On an even more unpleasant car topic, we also found that fRed had been broken into sometime Friday night. He was parked out on the street and someone had managed to pry a window loose from its fitting, unlock the door and get in. They went through the glove compartment, ash tray, and trunk, but it doesn't seem like they took anything. They didn't find the place where I keep my spare change (not in the ash tray), and for some reason they decided they didn't want my CD player, which was just sitting on the floor. So I guess I lucked out. Still rather disturbing, though.
I came back home Saturday evening (fRed still runs, he just doesn't idle right anymore) and went to the contra dance. Driving with Fergus was immensely fun, even though Lewis wasn't there. They had a good banjo/guitar player sitting in for him, though. They also invited me to play his banjo in a set with them and that was quite fun. We did a few jigs, ending with one of my favorites, that's straight but sounds crooked (the B-part alternates 6/8 and 9/8, but evens out to 8-bars of a regular jig).
Today I managed to find a shop open on Sundays and took fRed in. So far the official diagnosis is Wonkiness of the Carburetor. They guy who comes in tomorrow is supposed to be able to figure it out, and hopefully I'll get it back sometime during the day. That will be a bit tricky, what with taking public transportation to work and then trying to get to the shop before they close, but I'll work it out somehow.
I got a ride to shape note this afternoon, so I still got to sing a bit. I'm rather tired now, though. It's been a long couple of days. Quiet night tonight.
The visit last night was much fun, as always. I wish Greg and Shaleece didn't live so far away, so we could see them more often. We also got to meet Shaleece's mom, who's quite a kick as well. Curtis taught us a new card game he had invented, called Compression, which I thought was very cool. (Not only the game itself which was good, but also just the fact that he would bother to sit down and create one at all.) I only got called Greg once, amazingly enough. I was quite impressed. (Mom avoided the problem entirely by calling me "honey" all night, which is sort of cheating.)
Greg also told me about BookCrossing.com, which I want to check out sometime. It sounds like sort of a catch-and-release program for books. It could be a really neat thing if you've got enough people in an area doing it.
Oh, and here's something else that came up last night that I want to know more about. I read something once where the author mentioned in passing that there was scientific evidence of some sort that there had once been only a single human language in existence. Shaleece has heard the same thing, too, but we don't know what that evidence is or where it came from. Anyone ever heard about this? It's got me kind of curious, mostly because I want to know how they figure out something like that. I'll have to try to look it up sometime. Not now, though. Time to go to work.
