An afternoon with cousins

I spent last weekend in the 1950s and other long ago times. I am at a stopping point in my quest to discover where I came from and decided to share my findings with two of my cousins who had expressed an interest.
One cousin, Tim, is only a few years younger than I. We grew up together and shared many experiences such as jumping out of the hay mow without breaking our necks. The other one, Lee, came along when I was 15 or 16. I had never even seen him until his father’s funeral a couple of years ago.
We met at a buffet in Richmond and took over a back corner of the restaurant. One cousin was late because he didn’t get out of church on time. This is the one who works hardest at being the black sheep of the family; or should I say, one of the many black sheep in the family.
Tim and I compared memories until Lee roared up on a motorcycle the color of a brilliant blue summer sky. He brought documents to share and we expressed shock at their contents; marveling at the printed proof of how dysfunctional our family can be.
He was surprised at some of my findings, such as that of a distant ancestor who had died in Andersonville prison during the Civil War. When asked what had caused him to be in prison, the other two of us simultaneously replied, “He got caught and was a prisoner of war.”
We were sidetracked often and the afternoon evaporated faster than a shallow puddle on a sunny August day. We parted with promises to share any additional information we might discover.
Lee wanted me to check out a Civil War medal that he found in our grandmother’s barn. It wasn’t until after I had promised to try that I remembered that a lot of stuff in that barn was already there when we moved in. The medal could have belonged to anybody. I will do my best to check it out anyway.
He also requested a copy of the documentation I received from another relative about a trunk brought over from Germany by an ancient ancestor of ours. The trunk now resides in a museum in Richmond, Indiana. If we hadn’t been meeting on a Sunday I would have suggested that we all head over to the other side of town and find out if the artifact was still there.
It seems that every year that passes brings me closer and closer to being the oldest in the family. In my immediate family only my mother is older. All the aunts, uncles and grandparents are dead. By default I have become the one who knows the stories behind the skeletons in the closet. I choose to share those stories in hopes that the ugliness that put them there will be diffused by the harsh light of day.
I admit that I gloss over some of the nastier parts of our history. We accept some things as being normal for the time period in which they occurred while acknowledging that such things are unacceptable in today’s world.
Still, we cherish our shadowy memories. We put down on paper what we remember about our parents, uncles and grandparents. We compare pictures of eighth-grade graduation certificates and the log cabin where my grandmother and many of her siblings were born. We do our best to piece together our common past so that we can say this is who we are and where we came from.
I wish I had cared about all this while my grandparents were alive but at the time it seemed irrelevant. Back then I thought skeletons belonged in the closet and that real life was far more interesting than stories about people who died before I was born.
Now I think that those stories are clues as to why things happen as they do. That ancient history helped shape my values and my view of how the world should be just as your history has shaped you.[[In-content Ad]]