Post 6.0.1.0 Grandma Saves Uncle from Her Own Prophecy

Post 6.0.0.0 had a mention of my Grandma L and "Uncle L and the laying on of hands."  This is a story she told.  She was proud of it.

My Uncle L, Grandma L's son, owned property in southern and northern California.  He still drives up and down the state, keeping up with them.  They're small houses, for the most part, that he rents out.  Over the years, the rents have paid off the mortgages.

Grandma lived in southern California.  Sometimes she'd ride along with Uncle when he went north.  It was a nice little trip and a way to spend time with him.

During one trip, her intuition triggered.  While at a highway rest stop, she became sure that his car was about to have big engine trouble.  It was going to happen far away from any town and would be a severe inconvenience and possibly leave them in an unsafe condition. 

She had, as mentioned in the previous post, "learned to pay attention" to her sudden intuitions.  She told Uncle and told him they should find a mechanic at the next town to look the car over and find out what was about to go.  Uncle just smiled and shook his head.  It was a long drive.  It was tiring even if you didn't slow it down further with crazy side trips. 

There wasn't anything that the car was doing that she could reasonably interpret as a sign that it was having trouble.  He wasn't about to go to a strange mechanic and tell him to find something wrong with the car to fix, when he didn't have anything he could tell him wasn't working. 

Grandma fretted.  Grandma was in a quandary, but she didn't put it like that.  That's my interpretation after listening to the story.  In the story as she told it, she was worried.  She could feel this mechanical failure coming with a sureness that could not be questioned.  But her warnings were being ignored.  What could she do to protect this person that she loved, who was going to have such trouble so soon?

Finally, she thought to pray about it, and it came to her.  Things could be healed by laying on hands.  She had heard that.  So that was what she'd do.  She gathered her certainty and her faith in healing by touch, and she laid her hands on the hood of the car.

She said she could feel the looming breakage, about to happen, just fade away in a glow of love and power.  Now she could relax.  Things would be all right.

And she told the story to show that she could bring that kind of power to bear.  She had saved Uncle L from that breakdown.  She was generous enough with her loved ones, that even though he had pooh-poohed her forecast, and hadn't been willing to do what it took to save himself from the failure, which could have caused an accident, you never knew.  Even then, she would go the extra mile and save him when he wouldn't save himself. 

She quite frankly told the story as evidence that her intuitions were right.  The story was proof.  She had had to call down the power of God to keep that car running.  And she had been beside herself before she had thought of it.  Proof positive.

We didn't know what to say.  Us kids kept quiet and I think Mom said something about being glad that they had had a safe trip.  We didn't hurry to leave.  My sister and I talked about it a little bit later. 

Oh, and the quandary comment I made earlier.  Even when I was hearing the story, I was thinking that the laying on hands bit was meant to be a clever way to keep from being proved wrong.  And once Uncle L refused to get the car looked at, she was going to be proved wrong.

Looking back now, I wonder if she was trying to get her story in before Uncle had a chance to say anything.  He never commented on it, though, unless he was there when she was repeating it.  His only comment even then was "Mom gets these ideas."  So if she had made up the 'healing,' after the trip in order to protect the sanctity of her intuition, it was unnecessary. 

Post 4.5.1.0 A Harmonic Convergence in Which Grandma Dies

In post 4.5.0.0 I mentioned that my mother found great significance in the fact that Grandma L died at about the same time that Dad had a heart attack.  For years she would confide to my sisters and me that "She was trying to take him with her.  She just couldn't let go."

And for years we didn't really know what to say about it beyond, "I don't think it works that way"  if we were feeling particularly pushy.  Usually we'd do the nod and smile and change the subject thing.

Considering that Grandma seldom talked about Dad, but Dad talked constantly about her, I'd say that it was a kindness not to suggest that perhaps she had it backwards.  About who wasn't letting go, not about who was trying to take whom into the beyond.

It would have been rude.  I mean, Dad had survived the heart attack and was following his diet and exercise program religiously, and, by the way, still complaining about Grandma L from time to time.
 
I finally figured out what to say to cut down on how often she would say it.  I may have convinced her that her version was less likely, but there's no way to tell.  What I told her was that, no, that didn't really sound like her.  What was more likely was that she had refused to be one-upped.  If there was a mystical bond between them and she had somehow sensed that he was having a heart attack, her reaction would have been 'Oh, hell no. I'M the sick one!"

Mom couldn't argue about that.  For the last few years Grandma L had been rocking her feeble and failing old lady who needs to be fussed over act.  She had, as they say in geriatric medical circles, lost homeostasis.  It happens to people as they get old.  Some stop feeling thirsty when they need to drink water and have to keep to a schedule to keep hydrated.

Grandma had lost the feeling of hunger.  She used it to play for sympathy over "not being able to eat."  It wasn't that she couldn't eat, it was that she didn't feel particularly hungry.  So she would go to the regular restaurant that she and T usually went to, where the waitresses all knew them as regulars, and she'd make a big deal over only ordering toast and not being able to eat more than half of the order.  And then she'd brag about the way that the waitresses twittered over her and how sweet they were and how much she appreciated it.

Which brag was a hint that she'd appreciate you fussing over her and telling her how worried you were about her.  My sisters and I had learned young not to rise such obvious bait.  When she tried it on my younger sister, she told her about the homeostasis thing, and how it wasn't at all dangerous, and how if she didn't want to track what she was eating she could buy this stuff called Ensure.

So when I told Mom that she just didn't want to lose her place as the sick one, it too obviously played to something that Mom had seen and occasionally huffed about for years.  And she didn't have to let go of the mystic connection idea, which was too big a part of her worldview.  I don't think I heard Mom say that Grandma was trying to kill Dad again after I'd proposed it as an alternative three or four times.

Post 4.5.0.0 Grandma's Wills - In Which I am Cynical

When my Grandma L died, my Uncle L (not the same L name) was the only family member in the same town, so he was expected to handle things.  My father might have traveled the 800 plus miles to do his bit, but he had had a heart attack and been rushed to the hospital several hours before Uncle L called with the news. It was one of those freaky coincidence things that only my mother thought had meaning.

One of the things that Uncle Lonny got to do was determine what she meant to go to whom.  That was complicated by the fact that she had, over the years, written many holographic wills, but none of them witnessed and, of course, no lawyer written or registered versions.

Uncle L included about three of them with the letter he sent with his proposed distribution list.  I found more later when I inherited several boxes of her correspondence when my Aunt D died. They all focused on how much she LOVED her children with ALL MY HEART and how she wanted them to HAVE EVERYTHING.  They all included instructions on how they were supposed to take care of each other, and other homilies, because they were now the only way for her love to reach them.  

I don't think she actually said that it would STAB HER HEART if they didn't froth with love in her name, but after reading a few of them I started to assume that it was implied.  I also started thinking a few other cynical things.  

I'm sure it says something about my outlook, but I'm reading these things, and it looks like she would write them at the drop of an excuse (such as taking a car trip out of town, which might be the last car trip she ever took and if so she would never see her darlings again) and then she'd leave them sitting around for her young, then teenaged, then grown children to find.  Call me crazy, but damn if they didn't start sounding like a way to brag about how loving and generous she was, what with giving her darlings EVERYTHING and ACHING over thoughts of them going on without her generous self to look after them and leave them wills and things.

And just as I was getting to be embarrassed at how dismissive I was being of what may have been genuine emotion, it dawns on be that this is the world's cheapest way to be generous.  She's giving EVERYTHING and mountains of love and exclamation marks and CAPITALS and underlines and squiggly underlines and she's doing it for the price of a couple of pieces of paper and a little ink.  OK, to be fair, some of them ran four pages.

So, yes, I still sometimes feel a little guilty about it, but mostly I've decided that it was a racket.  She did it to feel good.  She may have hoped that her kids would feel good, too, but she was not all that good at gauging how someone was really going to react to something she decided to do or say.  Maybe that was why she was always watching closely whenever she decided to go on about caring for you so much or how WONDERFUL it would be to do something she was wanting to do with you.  She was always watching expectantly for your reaction and you knew that there was always one reaction that she wanted from you and it was never the reaction that you were actually having.

Which reminds me that I need to get a will written.  That's an actual will, with a lawyer involved and actual property listed and stuff.  Not having one, or not having one that's up to date, is not a kindness to those left behind.  Oh, and different locations have different rules for what makes a holographic will legal.  You need to check that before you decide to write your own.  

Grandma did care about her kids and grandkids and other relatives.  And I have to remember that I probably wouldn't be half so likely to be cynical about something she had done if I hadn't been raised with a constant litany of complaints about her from my Dad.  

Dad felt that it was important for children to know their relatives, and she lived nearly across the street, so we saw her a lot.  But he also felt that we should be warned about her lack of judgment and . . . . well, I'll leave it at that for now.  When I had kids I also warned them about her lack of judgment.  I told them that if they were alone with her, they were probably the most responsible person in the room.  So if she suggested doing something, they should think hard about whether I would want them to do it or not and to tell her no, Mother doesn't let us do that.

I don't think it ever came up.  They're good kids.  They deserve to have a proper will when the time comes.  And I'm not going to ask the lawyer to add how much I love them.  I'll mention that from time to time while I'm actually here.

post 4.1.1.1 Dad's Memories and Seizures

Dad was in counseling and he ended up having seizures.

There is a lot of family history and family story in that.  History is things that happened.  He did use his veteran's benefit to have sessions with what he called a psychiatrist.  I was in fourth grade or younger when it happened, so how it was set up and what the degree of the person counseling him was, I have no idea.

It only came to my awareness when he had to have someone from work pick him up because his license had been taken away.  It was an older man from work that he liked and admired, which was a really rare thing.  To hear him talk, most of the people he worked with were shirking idiots who gave him a hard time.  One guy he disliked enough to call him The Weasel when he talked.  

Story is what importance, what cause and effect people assign to the things that happen.  My Dad had seizures.  That happened.  He had to take two pills several times a day for the rest of his life.  He had to wait until he was seizure free for a year before he got his license back.  And stress did seem to be a trigger, so I fully believe that going to the vet hospital and getting psychiatric care, and digging up a lot of painful childhood memories, triggered his first one and possibly others.

I do not believe that Grandma gave him seizures.  I also don't believe that Mom's nursing training gave her quite as much authority as she always assumed.  She was an LVN from the very beginning of that program.  According to my sister, a person with comparable training these days would be called a nurse's aid.  

Yes, I believe that Grandma and Aunt D visited in the hospital and said he wasn't having anything like seizures while he was having one on the bed.  And I believe that the ones he would have in his sleep were subtle enough that someone else might have missed them.  I'm even willing to believe that they were being willfully ignorant because they didn't want to have to deal with Dad having a seizure problem.  

I also believe that building a house across the street from the mother that he was trying to distance himself from wasn't the best idea that Dad ever had.  But that's hindsight.  He probably hadn't realized that as a new husband and father, he would be distancing himself from his mother, or that she'd be resisting that very natural process.  Maybe he did need to have counseling to realize that she was a little nuts.  

I'm sure that this post had a point in the beginning.  But I'm going to stop now, rather than try to wrap things up.  Partly, the software isn't letting me scroll to the top of the doc easily and partly I want to think about things a little.  

post 6.2.0.0 She Had Him Committed

She had him committed.

'she' is uncle Chris's third wife. There was an undercurrent of disapproval when his sisters discussed it, as if having a third wife was a sign, right there, that he was not showing good judgement in the ordering of his life. As a child I just accepted the disapproval. It fit in with my dad's disapproval of Chris, so it was familiar.

Later, it dawned on me that one of the disapproves had been married three times, the third marriage being a bad enough idea that it could be annulled. And she had been bad enough at being married that she had gone on to just live with a series of at least two men instead of marrying. That last in the fifties when that sort of thing just wasn't done.

Very later, I learned that both of the disapproving sisters were pregnant when they first married. Or maybe didn't marry, in the case of Aunt M. (Not Great Aunt M - she was sensitive about her age, too, and just aunt was simpler.) Just recently, I learned that grandma had an ongoing thing for servicemen.

But back to uncle Chris's third wife. She was a Mormon, which was an excuse to disapprove, right there. That was the expected thing in those times. That was one thing to disapprove of.

He converted to make her happy. Or she demanded that he convert. Or something. That was another thing to disapprove of. The idea being that you were supposed to be dedicated to your brand of religion and switching was a sign that you didn't show proper reverence or devotion, or that you could be led by your pecker or were pussy whipped, although they didn't actually say the last two out loud, at least not with me around.

A third point of complaint was that he kept asking for genealogy information. I'm not sure if the main reason that was offensive was that it would go to the Mormon genealogy files, when they weren't Mormon; or if he was presuming to ask for the information when they weren't talking to him; or if he was demanding the information instead of asking nicely; or if he asked and then started nagging when it didn't come fast enough; or some combination of the above.

I don't remember any complaints about the Mormons baptizing dead ancestors in absentia, but that could just mean that the small child that I was at the time didn't understand the concept enough to take it in. It's not like I was paying particular attention to the disapproval of arguing or commiserating adults around me. They were always disapproving about something.

But back to the third wife.

After he converted for her, and after he annoyed his relatives for her, and after (insert trombone sound to represent the speech of adults a la peanuts), she went and had him committed in a mental asylum and divorced him while he was in it. I remember a certain smugness which seemed to imply that someone from the abused family that he had turned his back on had had to get him sprung. Not that I remember specifics. I couldn't even tell you third wife's name.

Of, course, by the time they were discussing this around me, he had been sprung and divorced for a long time and they only referred to her as Chris's third wife. I'm pretty sure they didn't remember her name by then.

post 6.1.0.0 Grandma and the Birthday Card

This is the story about Uncle Chris and Grandma L and the birthday card. I can't tell it though, without thinking about my father and hid constant comments about both of them. When he spoke of his relatives, he always spoke with contempt and warning. I won't talk about that here. But it comforts me to know that you know that the whole time I'm writing this, I'm hearing his disapproving voice in the back of my mind.

Uncle Chris was a difficult person. I never met him, and I remember no stories of bad behavior. But every relative he had had all but stopped speaking to him. that was helped by the fact that he lived in another state.

He did, however, send Grandma birthday cards, and Christmas cards, I suppose. One year he sent Grandma a joke birthday card. Now you have to know that Grandma was touchy about her age. She never spoke of it. She hated any sign of or reference to growing old. And the punch line of the birthday card was a crack about how old she was getting.

Oh, she was livid. She couldn't stand or sit still when she was talking about it. She'd bustle about, fluffing out like a threatened hen and greaching for things to tidy or crumbs to smooth off the table onto the floor while she complained.  Of course, since she enjoyed drama, she enjoyed being livid and offended and her performance of complaining bitterly about his transgression became polished over the weeks and months that she presented the role.

She was going to get him back. He wasn't sensitive about his age. Of course a man wouldn't be. But they made lots of cards and she had time to read them all and find the exact one to get his goat. She was going to show him.

Then he died before his next birthday.

She was offended. She went on and on as if that had been his plan all along. It just wasn't fair that he did that to her - robbed her of her chance to get even.

I'm pretty sure it never occurred to her that it might sound strange to anyone else. Her brother died and not only is she not sad, she's complaining about how it's inconveniencing her.

Post 6.0.0.0 Beware of People Filling in Your Family Tree

Uncle Chris

I'm reading an article on why Romney's Mormonism should be taken into account when deciding whether or not to vote for him.  The article, by Nathan Nebeker, contributor to the Business Insider's political blog, says:  " . . . public knowledge of Mormonism is limited to some superficial cultural impressions, with an underlying feeling of vague suspicion.

My mind being an associative jumping monkey, I immediately think of my own family's suspicions regarding Mormonism and then I think of Uncle Chris.  The monkey keeps jumping to Grandma L and her sisters, my Great Aunts, and their closed ranks around 'don't tell Uncle Chris' when I started asking questions about my family for a high school biology assignment.  (Further monkey jumps:  the birthday card, the sewing machine, she had him committed, an image of Grandma's dining room, and 'damn, they're almost all dead now.)

The assignment was to trace three heritable traits through three generations.  I think I had eye color, hair color, and something else - maybe height.  But Grandma pulled out a genealogy that a second or third cousin had researched.  She had sent Grandma a copy because she had been so helpful and supportive. And Grandma was relative proud and jumped at the chance to talk about them, about her mother especially.  That was OK.  I was happy to overdo assignments.

The cousin lived in Iowa and we all lived in southern California.  With Grandma helping out with information about her (Grandma's) mother and other relatives of that generation, and offering to do the leg work to get the basics on everyone in California, Cousin got enough information about us collaterals to keep her from asking anyone else and maybe finding out a few things about Grandma and her kids and grandkids that she didn't want the relatives back in Iowa to know. 

I had to ask my parents about a couple of things and found out about a couple of folks no longer in contact with anyone (except maybe Grandma - she had an odd penchant for finding excuses to keep contacts with people secret from each other) due to divorce, annulment, non-payment of child support, and such. 

Oddly, if she'd just left those people out of the charts, instead of trying to shoehorn them in where they obviously didn't belong, I'd never have asked what the heck was going on.  Grandma had a habit of being clever like that, and of telling us about her being clever.  (His big feet will step on your toys - microwaving the book - they're pin-on curls - it was my sewing machine, he was just making a few payments on it because they were borrowing it)  She never seemed to consider that bragging about the effective lie she thought of telling to get her way could possibly cause anyone to perhaps not take the advice and information she was always promoting as gospel. 

The genealogy was the first experience with her misinformation that stood out in my mind.  After that, I noticed when she did it, noticed it as deliberate misinformation instead of, say, an odd way of thinking or a bad idea or a quick urge that shouldn't have been followed immediately, but thought over some more.  She did have an established MO of providing bad information, and different bad information to different people.  She did think it was clever.  She approved of it.  She bragged about it when she thought it went well.  What a clever girl. 

She bragged/declaimed about how accurate her gut feelings were and how she had learned not to discount her impulses.  She saw her whims as mystic revelations from the future.  But the lesson of follow your urge was supported by one single story, and that was a case of either mother's intuition (which is not mystic, nor from the future) or a simple coincidence.  From that, all her urges became sacred.  Her urges forestalled danger and should be acknowledged and appreciated for the gift that they were instead of dismissed or opposed or mislabeled as meddling or manipulation.

 - She and her sisters had a habit of declaiming in competition with each other

- arguments about family favorites. 

- gossiping just like a grown up

 - Uncle Lonny and laying on of hands

 - how old were we when Uncle Lonny had his accident?  Cause Mom said that they stopped drinking after that.  And if they were drinking, maybe Dad had more than an emotional and convenience reason to keep us sequestered from them. 

727 words  plus about 1100 last night.  That puts me over the daily quota.