April 13
Meet the cousins!
1965
Report cards today - Urg!! I got, well, here's a comparison:
Average: 1st marking period 89 2/3, 2nd marking period 89, 3rd marking period 88 1/6
FINISH THE SEQUENCE
Ain't it awful.
You bet!
1973
Met my great-aunt Vee and 4 of my second cousins today for lunch. Vee must be in her late 70s…she’s my grandfather’s brother Fred’s wife. The oldest daughter, June, is a bout fifty, and the youngest, Nancy, is 30-ish and 9 1/2 months pregnant. Then there’s La Fern and Donette, both in their 40s. Donette is really nice; reminds me of NR a lot. We had a nice time. Aunt Vee and Donette were at our end of the table, and the other three were down at the other end, talking mostly among each other.
I talked a while with Cousin Patty tonight…she’s really neat. She’s going to Mexico on Sunday and I envy her so…wow…I wish I could go back and visit. She’s 16, wondering what she wants to go into and positive she ‘ll wait until she has a career to get married. Sounds familiar. She’s awfully sweet and very smart and sharp. I wonder what she thinks of her grown-up cousin who’s married.
This is a nice area, not as flat as Nebraska and not as hilly as Central New York, but with stretches of space such as I have never seen since Mexico.
Cornfields and farm houses!
Tomorrow it’s off to Omaha.. only one hour away by plane!
Comment 2023
Except for Cousins Patty and Nancy, it was the last time I saw any of them. The next time I saw Pat and Nancy was in 1993, at a family reunion, where I also met their children. It was also the last time I saw either them, though Pat is a Facebook friend and I saw her on Zoom last year. (Does that count?)
That’s my mother’s side of the family in a nutshell: large but scattered and not close. Grandfather Henry and his brother Fred (Gottfried) came from Russia together as teenagers. Between them, they produced fourteen children (my mom was the third of eight). By the 1970s, Mom’s siblings were all still living, but most had moved to the west coast. Only one sister lived in the east, and she is the last survivor now, at 91. (You will meet her tomorrow).
The women in the family kept in touch through a round robin letter that had been started two generations earlier when my great-grandmother had left her family in Germany. (Not sure if round robin letters were a German thing, a female thing, or both.) Every few months Mom would get a thick envelope containing a letter from each sister, including one she had written the last time the envelope had arrived. She would read all the letters and replace her old letter with a new one, then send it on its way to the next person on the list. (The addresses were all on an index card, in the order to be sent.) Woe betide the sister who held the letter too long! The only excuse for hanging on was waiting for an imminent birth, and even then it better not stay in once place for more than a week. As the oldest female in my generation, I joined the round robin eventually. As my mother’s generation died, my cousins were added to the list. Eventually, it was replaced - sort of - by Facebook. But it’s not the same as a handwritten letter.
And those names! Vee (for Vonda), La Fern, Donette.
Tell me you are from the midwest without telling me you are from the midwest. My mother wanted to name me Nanette, after her godmother and her favorite cousin, Donette. My father intervened, thank heaven.
I found one last photo from that lunch. That’s me on the left, with a granny glasses and the super short haircut.
1980
A very good day, and a very good weekend. No laying about, just work and good play. I have now written 2 of 13 or 14 chapters. They’re only rough drafts, but I feel started now. The next chapter will be the methods one, then I take a break to do my seminar. Then chapter by chapter until I’m done!! By the end of May for that first draft. Then the abstract and a final draft.
Comment 2024
It says something that when I first read this, I thought, ‘What book is this?” and was already to just chalk it up as one more unfinished work.
It was my dissertation. Defended in August of that year.
1998
Thinking about what I will eat this weekend. I am driving a bunch of young folks to a weekend con in Bethlehem, PA and staying in a nearby hotel. What should I take? Water, tea, juice. muffins or bread. fruit. I can take myself out for dinner. But the rest of the time I would like to use as a solitary retreat.
It’s like this. Next month I turn 49. Last year I lost my mother, next year my oldest child leaves for college. I need to understand this moment, to see how to weather it or savor it, to find myself all over again. A motherless daughter, with a daughter nearly past mothering. I need to do this for myself and for Kiddo 1.