June 22, 2007

• I thought once summer started I would be posting all the time.  It sure hasn’t worked out that way.  I have begun swimming laps at the city activity center again.  I find that I spend a lot of time pondering things there.  Swimming is such a solitary activity most of the time, especially swimming laps. 

  So last Sunday marked the end of an era in my family.  My father’s last sibling died at the age of 90.  He was a quiet, rather peaceful man in a family of noisy opinionated leaders.  I found myself mourning the loss of the whole generation.  The World War II veterans, survivors of the Great Depression and the parents of my generation.  Some of those old soldiers never did recover from their stints.  I know my father never did.  I can’t ask any more questions now or find out what it was like.  They are all gone.  But, you know, even when they were available, we didn’t ask, and they certainly didn’t want to answer.

  They were a remarkable family, my father’s brothers and sisters.  There were 8 of them, and together they accumulated 17 college degrees.  Most of them earned doctorates. Their mother had a teaching degree too, but their father only finished 4th grade.  They left their black dirt farm in central Texas and became attorneys, preachers, univeristy presidents and professors.  They were smart from their ma and hard-working (or good-looking) from their pa, as he used to say.  I wished I could have learned more. I wished I had known them better.  But I was a rebel and left home early.  I only went to a couple of reunions after I moved from Texas to Colorado. They didn’t understand me any more than I understood them.  Still, I wished it had been different.  I realize in retrospect that we probably would have liked each other if I had just had the courage to break through that generation gap. But I didn’t, and the time is gone.

  • 4:30 pm
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