Hail and Farewell

Good morning!

We are leaving tomorrow for yet another automobile jaunt, this time towards the mountains, through the mountains and over towards Iowa.

There in Iowa we hope to see our grandchildren. They are off to camps, to work, to school...but we hope for a glimpse of each this summer on what may be our last car trip over there.

I often think of our grandchildren and wonder what we are to them.  In most ways, they will perceive us as ghosts to whom they are granted a glimpse every year, via our endeavors, before their reality closes down and school begins and their lives go on without us. I guess that is OK.

I think a lot now about the mechanics of families, the value of presence and co-habiting, the significance of an absent parent and how the absent one continues on down the years with almost as much strength (though negative strength) as the ones who are there.  None of the grandkids will ever consciously miss the time they did not spend with us, I guess.  But the holes will remain and endure into their next generation. I know that because I and my sisters 2 and 3 all married men who lost a father or mother at an early age.  Absence is a black hole of unfulfilled presence.  Men or women who remarry hoping to fill it for themselves or their children are, in my opinion, valiant. They are affirming life if nothing else.

Absent grandparents could only have been missed by people who had grandparents.  The values of knowing their grandparents are literally incalculable by kids who have not known theirs.  I myself had two sets of living grandparents, one set of whom we were not permitted to know intimately, one set of whom we knew very well.  When I was in my later forties or early fifties, those missing grandparents obtruded themselves into my consciousness with a shock.  A trip off the narrow path of my life, a different job, new friends, and particularly one new friend jolted my un-lived life and my unknown grandparents into reality for me.  A whole new part of myself began to develop.  For that is the reality of a missing parent or grandparent...a part of one's inner self that never gets a chance to grow and produce.  Because one doesn't miss what one has not known. Interesting.

Well, this is off the track of the farewell note. I hasten to tell my panting readers that I'll be posting whenever I can. I wanted to do a review of the film, The Ghost Writer, by Roman Polanski, but unless I can come on tonight and throw it in, it will have to wait.  Hasta la vista, readers, and love from YAZZYBEL