Location, Location, Location

It worked. If Tuffy can come up with a blog post, so can I. Not that I’m competitive or anything.

A friend of mine is currently selling one house and buying another. This friend (call her Dorothy – ”There’s no place like home… there’s no place like home…”) put her place up for sale on a Friday. By Sunday, she had three offers, and had accepted one of them. The following Saturday, she found the house she wanted – a really cute little 1920s craftsman in North Tacoma. Offer made, and accepted. Sold one house and bought another in less than two weeks. Both transactions, knock wood, are proceeding smoothly. I’m still shaking my head.

My own experiences in the real estate market have always been considerably more painful than that, but I still like looking at the places people live. When I’m gawking at houses that I’m not going to buy, I don’t have to be practical. I won't have to scrub the bathrooms, or keep up the yard, or pay for heat, or deal with hundred-year-old plumbing, or make scary big house payments. I don’t care if the schools are terrible, and if it would mean the commute from hell, I won’t have to make it. I won’t have to deal with snow up to here in the winter, or black flies in the spring, or mosquitoes in the summer. Heck, I look at houses all the time that aren't anywhere close to being wheelchair accessible, but it's still fun to look.

People shape the places they live. Looking at a house, especially an old house, and speculating about the lives of the people who lived there is kind of like finding a seashell and wondering about the creature that created it.

In trying to find out about the people in my family, I find myself stalking places as well as people. After my mother’s forbears made the big leap across the ocean, they had apparently done about as much moving around as they were inclined to do for the next couple of centuries. They were farmers, mostly, and tended to put down roots. I spend a lot of time (virtually speaking) in 17th and 18th century Yamaska and St-François-du-Lac (Québec), in 19th century Provement/Lake Leelanau and Centerville and Kasson (Michigan), and in Toledo from 1870 to 1949. I can’t go there in person, but there are all kinds of resources on the ’net; local government websites, and libraries and historical societies, churches and cemeteries. And maps. So many maps. And maps are magic.

For example: How did my paternal grandfather in Racine, Wisconsin meet my grandmother in Chicago? It seemed like quite a stumper until my cousin (Tinker) suggested I look at a map. They’re right across the state line from each other. Duh. I’m not from around there, so I didn’t know that. I still don’t know the details, romance-wise, but location-wise, it’s not as unlikely as I thought it sounded.

Another example: In 1860, my gggreat-grandfather Maxime Payment, and his sister, my gggreat grandaunt Merceline, appear with their respective families in the U.S. Census of Ogdensburg, New York. Now, I knew they eventually wound up in Michigan, and I still don’t know why they left Canada, but New York? Turns out Ogdensburg is right across the river from the ancestral stomping ground in Québec. And getting from there to Michigan? Water all the way.

Over the course of the next decade or so, at least six of the siblings in this family, and their parents, claimed homesteads in Leelanau County, Michigan. They were spread over two townships, so it wasn’t until I looked at the whole map that I realized the Payments on the eastern edge of one Township were really close to the Payments on the western edge of the adjacent Township. Duh.

The 1851 plat (I love maps!) includes the surveyor’s description of the terrain, and the type of tree cover. It is a “township of rich farming lands – surface generally rolling – soil varies from sand to sandy loam; bottomed on clay and mixed with lime and coarse pebbles – soft and spongy – Principal timber sugar [maple] and beech with elm, ash, lynn (?), and on the ridges, hemlock. No waste land in the township.”

Maxime Payment took out a homestead patent on a 160 acre section in Township 28N 13W. His father, François Xavior, patriarch of this Payment clan, claimed an adjoining 40 acres.

Merceline and her husband, Julius Bow, settled on 120 acres in the next Township to the west, in “a valley of superior land.”

François Xavior (Frank) Payment took an L-shaped 160 acres nearby, including a “high hill giving a fine view of Bear Lake.”

Anastasie Payment and her husband John Deering claimed a 160 acre section of “level rich first-rate land.”

Mary Payment and her husband Thomas Deering (brother of Anastasie’s husband John), settled an adjacent 160 acre section.

Jules (Joseph) Payment established his homestead on the 160 acre section adjacent to that.

Superimposing the 1881 plat map on a contemporary satellite view of the same place (God I love technology!) and (roughly, because I don’t feel like messing with it at the moment) pasting the two township maps next to each other, you can still see the section lines marking the original land patents. Rose Hill Cemetery, where Merceline and Frank and their spouses are buried, is right across the road from Maxime Payment’s homestead. (Maxime, now called Michael, and Jules, now called Joseph, and their wives, are buried in the Saint Philip Neri Cemetery in Empire, a few miles away.) There’s still a clearing where the farmhouse is marked on the plat of Jules Payment’s homestead.

There’s no home there now.

Sunny-Side-Up in Seattle

Looks like we get eggs this weekend.

The "sunshine" icon on my desktop always makes me think of a sunny-side-up egg.

Crazy. On Monday morning, when I started this post, it was snowing.

wtf?

It was just the occasional flake and it didn't last long, but still, wtf? No snow all winter, and we get snow on the third day of spring? Does that seem right to you? OK, an hour later there was even a little blue sky and you could almost call it sunshine, like, oh wait, spring, yeah, sorry, my mistake, I'm with the program now…

Who knew that whining could exercise that much control over the weather? I'll have to remember that.

When it's supposed to be sunny the "sunshine" weather icon still looks to me like somebody's trying to fry an egg on my desktop. I think the association is left over from life in rural Michigan, long ago and far away. We had a big garden, and when we canned tomatoes we'd throw the tomato skins to the chickens, who seemed to enjoy them very much. A few days later, the hens, juiced to the gills on carotenoids, began laying eggs with the most amazing florescent orange yolks. Kind of like the sunshine icon, only maybe sunnier. It took some getting used to, but even now, dog's years later, I still think grocery store eggs look hopelessly pallid and a little sad.

Tuffy has been posting pictures on Facebook (even some videos, because even though she forgot her camera, she had her iPhone and holy crap I love modern technology!) of a sumo tournament in Osaka. Another case where it would be nice to have some words to go along with the pictures.

Last week, in the course of stalking Scarecrow's grandfather, I found out he was an inventor. His Abrasive Mounting for Grinding Devices was patented on August 30, 1932.

Scarecrow didn't know anything about it, and thought it was pretty cool. And I got to send the patent to Scarecrow's brother, Tinman, the engineer, who, as it happens, makes grinding devices himself. So that was fun. And technical drawings are all done on computer these days, but back then it was paper and ink and a straight edge, and the result was a work of art. So that was fun, too.

You never know what's going to turn up. I was just trying to find out when PD Bates died. Which, by the way, I still don't know.

Spring in Seattle

The first day of spring in Seattle. Gloomy, gray, drippy, chilly — pretty much like the last day of winter. I was about to give up on getting any snow at all this year (Scarecrow said we got a little, once, but I didn't see it), and now they're talking about snow tonight, maybe. wtf? It's even supposed to be windy, which we don't get much around here. I'm listening for the Thump that means a black cottonwood branch has landed on the roof, probably made a hole, which will probably leak. We really need to do something about the roof.

I can see a little bit of green on the trees in the park across the street. I know it's just moss.

But it's light enough to see it in the morning, so that's something.

Browsing around the news, I found this, which has nothing much to do with the first day of spring:

Biogen Idec advances blockbuster MS franchise on two key fronts

Now, I know nobody would be developing new drugs if there weren't money to be made. But holy crap. This is all so clearly about the buckets of money Biogen Idec is going to make in this incredibly lucrative market, and it's so great that a higher dosage works better, because they'll sell more of the drug and make even more money! In the final line they finally get around to mentioning the effect this might have on the lucky people who have the disease the drugs are meant to treat. This really makes me cranky.

But hey. It's the first day of spring, so that's something.

0% Irish

I'm reasonably certain that, even on St. Patrick's Day, my ancestry is about 0% Irish. Scarecrow has a little, but it's a ways back, and pretty thin. He plays some Irish tunes, but I don't think that counts. The whole idea of green beer has always struck me as a little odd.

I'm fond of corned beef and cabbage, though, and Scarecrow just boiled up a mess of it. (Is it still considered boiled if he does it in the pressure cooker?) Anyway, corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, the whole nine yards. With horseradish, which may or may not be traditional, but since I'm not Irish I don't figure it matters. And a Black Butte Porter.

Life is good.

Bareit Is Ready for His Close-Up

I dithered about posting a link to the video the King County Library System made about how people (being, specifically, Scarecrow and me) use their library. However illusory the veil of Internet anonymity might be, I still find myself clinging to it. KCLS will probably make the video available from their website at some point anyway, but that’s OK because, really, how many people will find it there? Then I figured, what the heck? How many people will find it here?

The whippets, who have never been to the library and can’t even read, pretty much stole the show anyway. As you can imagine, there’s no living with them now.

Edited 12 March 2013, to remove the link to the video on Scarecrow's Facebook page, which was apparently protected by Facebook's privacy controls. (Facebook has privacy controls? Who knew?) Anyway, I'll post a functional link if/when KCLS makes it available from their website. If you'd like a preview, it's here, in PC and Mac format:

http://cardinalmedia.com/cardshares/KCLS-Symphony/

Edited some more on 17 March 2013, because I noticed the above link wasn't actually a link. Duh. I know you know how to get there anyway, but I try to be considerate about things like that.

Too Many Choices

My usual problem with blogging is coming up with something to write about. Recently, however, my problem has been quite the opposite. I have a list of a dozen or so topics that I thought might be fun. I even scratched together some notes for a couple of them. Since I can't decide which one to do first, I haven't done any at all.

No, it doesn't make sense to me, either, but there it is.

Tuffy just added a couple of posts to her blog, too, so I feel like I need to get off my sorry butt. Not that we're competitive, or anything. In fact, the competition, such as it is, is totally one-sided. I don't think Tuffy is even aware of it. But still.

So I'm going to make up my mind. I'm just going to pick one, and do it. This doesn't count.

Brothers in Arms

Brothers in Arms. Literally. Or at least as literally as you're likely to get with something like that. During World War II, my dad and his brother, my uncle Willie, were both in the Army.

On July 14, 1944, Willie was someplace in the Pacific. He was 25 years old, and had been in the Army for a year and a half. My dad was 23. He had just finished basic training at Camp McCain, Mississippi, and would shortly be deployed to Germany.

This is the v-mail, complete with censor's stamp, that Willie sent to my dad. My brother found it 67 years later, when he was cleaning my dad's office after he died.

Dear Ez,
As I sit here, with my pen in one hand and the other busily engaged in warding off all manner of insect life, I wonder: If you and I will ever do any of those many things we planned to do. If our interests and desires will still be as similar as they always were. If you will be able to wear my clothes and I yours. If I will still remain in the category of the "wolf of all wolves." If Gordon will still be as cynical and disgusted with mankind. If Red will continue to collect the classics and make music his heart's ease in life. If that girl from the flower shop will be as appealing as ever. If the Trianon will still be a hangout on Wednesday night for the Spevaks'. If this damned war will cease and I can give up letter writing and my thoughts see their answers. As all bad things, so this – it ceases.
Your brud,
Wilfred

It's Working

If a picture is worth 1000 words, Tuffy’s latest photo essay put her 17,000 words ahead of me, blog-wise, so I guess I’d better get cracking. Not that we’re competitive or anything.

Nothing much going on around here lately, as far as I know. Not that anyone would tell me if there was.

I’ve been using some really cool online utilities to tidy up my family history database, a long-term project which is both extremely tedious, and very satisfying, in an OCD kind of way. And last weekend Scarecrow helped me scan some of the documents my brother unearthed in my mom and dad’s house, so I finally get to look at them. A few answers, and a lot of new questions.

I saw the video the library put together from the stuff they recorded the other day. It’s not as horrible as I had feared. Scarecrow looks presentable, and the whippets are pretty darned cute.

A Marmot Moment

Talk about What I Should've Said… I stewed for ridiculous length of time, trying to think of a title for my groundhog's day post. I didn't come up with what I was after until this morning, a day late and a dollar short, as usual. I guess I could've gone back and changed it, but that seems like cheating, somehow.

I do that a lot. I don't mean cheating; I mean not being able to find a word when I want to use it. Long before I had any other symptoms that were clearly MS-related, I had trouble coming up with words. I'd mentally construct a sentence intending to use a particular word, but when I got there, the word was nowhere to be found. It was the weirdest thing.

When I mentioned it to various neurologists, they'd look at me like I'd grown two heads. I've since learned that it's a fairly common cognitive problem among people with MS. So it's not just me.

You'd think it would've really cramped my style as a writer, but fortunately technical documentation for network software uses a pretty limited vocabulary. For anything else, I could usually come up with the word I was after eventually. It just may not happen until the next day. You skip that bit and come back to it later. It could be a bit awkward in conversation, but manageable otherwise. Not a huge problem, as problems go.

But it still pisses me off.

Marmot Madness

Meat's in the cupboard and butter's in the churn,
Meat's in the cupboard and butter's in the churn,
If that ain't groundhog, I'll be durned.
Old groundhog

As a result of the ADHD I seem to have acquired upon my retirement from my day job, a casual interest in Candlemas took me off on an investigation of, among other really interesting things, wildlife weather prediction, the presentation of Jesus at the Temple, activity patterns of Marmota monax, purification of the Virgin Mary, the meaning of  'Imbolc', the relative advantages of beeswax vs. tallow candles, and old-timey music. I don't know how this always happens.

Marmots are really cool little creatures, though. I don't know why they're called woodchucks, but whistle-pig or land-beaver conjures up quite a picture, doesn't it? Back in my biologist days, I remember being (fleetingly) envious of people whose research subject was diurnal, and active right out in the open. You could just sit there and watch them. Would that be cool, or what? Of course, taking a blood sample from a nocturnal, secretive, 1 ounce deer mouse was a lot easier than wrestling with an unhappy 13 pound ground squirrel with incisors like, well, like a rodent. I'm doing it again, aren't I?

Anyway, here we are. Halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. Forty-five days, 5 hours, 30 minutes, and 30 seconds (and counting) till spring. As much as I like marmots, their take on today's weather won't get it here any quicker. It'll get here when it gets here. In 45 days, and change.

Little piece of cornbread layin' on the shelf,
Little piece of cornbread layin' on the shelf,
If you want to hear more you can sing it yourself,
Old groundhog.

Rogue's Gallery

Finally.

This was one of those projects that just took forever. OK, not forever, maybe, but 13 years. At least. Depending on when you start counting. Getting things hung on the wall doesn’t sound like a big project, but we just never seemed to get it together.

It’s not art, really. Photos, mostly. Family photos, although neither my family nor Scarecrow’s is what you’d consider particularly decorative. Some of them are just snapshots, and not particularly good snapshots, at that. Still, coming up with stuff to hang was the easy part.

You think, just by chance, that the occasional image would be a standard size 4 x 6, 5 x 7, or 8 x 10, but no. Custom mats and frames can be expensive. In fact, standard size mats and frames can add up pretty quickly. And there are so many choices! Too many.

But what the heck. This is not art. It’s not a museum. Let’s just do it.

I scavenged eBay for frames unloaded at estate sales, and got about what you'd expect. Nothing matches anything else. Well, a couple do, but that was purely by accident. Scarecrow loaded the frames with our stuff (in some cases replacing pictures of people who are far more decorative than our relatives, but hanging pictures of people we don't know just wouldn’t be the same, would it?) and hung them on the wall.

My dad's family, mostly.

My mom's family.

Products of the Milburn Wagon Works in Toledo Ohio, where my gggrandfather, ggrandfather, and ggrand uncle worked.

Scarecrow's family. The empty frame is a placeholder for a picture of Scarecrow's mom in her wedding dress. He keeps promising to ask his brother, Tin Man, about it

It’s been 13 years, but it’s finally starting to look like we’ve moved in.

What I Should've Said

I can never think of the thing I should’ve said when I should’ve said it. Only when the moment is long past – when the conversation has moved on to other things, or when I wake up at 3 AM – do I finally come up with what I really should’ve said. Sometimes it’s days or weeks later. Years, sometimes. Decades, even.

I’m not after the clever comeback, here; I’ve never been a master of Quick Wit and Retort, and my expectations are not unreasonable. I just mean what I would like to have said if I could think a little faster and was a little better at putting thoughts into words. Pathetic, really, for someone who has always made a living, one way or another, with words, but there it is.

Just now, for example, I’m finally coming up with what I should’ve said last Friday. Like I said, quick wit is not one of my strengths.

What happened was this: Scarecrow reconnected on Facebook with a woman who went to the same high school in Florida. Turns out she’s now in the Seattle area, and works in Community Relations and Marketing for our local library. Scarecrow pipes up with how great a resource the library is for me/us. Turns out they’re putting together a series of videos about the library, and she wondered if they might talk to us about it.

There are many reasons for me not to do this:

• I generally don’t like to make a deal of being disabled
• I definitely don’t do “courageous” or “inspirational”
• I don’t much like having my picture taken
• I’m uncomfortable being the center of attention

And most importantly:

• When you’re talking, it’s always a first draft

On the other hand, this is the library we’re talking about. If there’s something I can do to help, I’m in. So OK.

So. Last Friday the library lady (I’ll call her Spike) comes to our house with a director, a tech/camera/sound guy, an assistant tech/camera/sound guy, and a whole bunch of equipment. Everybody was very nice, and fortunately they were all dog people, because the whippets were going ballistic. (We always say they normally have better manners, but I don’t think anyone ever believes us. Which is just as well, because they don’t.) The tech guys fixed us up with cool wireless mics, pointed the cameras our way, and we talked about the library and stuff. Although I felt like a total moron, I thought Scarecrow actually sounded pretty good, and overall it was not as agonizing as I had feared. Part of the reason was that they probably spent as much time taking pictures of the dogs as they did of us, and the dogs expressed themselves more coherently.

I’ve had a week to cringe at some of the stupider things I said. Although I don’t get to do the editing myself, I can only hope that the worst bits vanish forever into pixel never-never-land.

I can spend the next decade working out What I Should’ve Said.

I Shouldn't Be Enjoying This so Much

In June 2009, I finally conceded that MS had kicked my butt, and retired from my day job. I’d heard the stories about people who, when suddenly confronted with so much unstructured time, acquired bad habits. Chewing slippers, recreational barking, peeing in the house, and similar. Having known for several months that the inevitable was not far off, but determined not to succumb to such vices, I’d been preparing a list of things I could do after I retired. Some were things I needed to get done, but had just never managed to finish. Others were things I enjoyed doing, but that my day job didn’t seem to leave time for. All were things I could do from my power chair, no hands required, with no (or minimal) assistance. The list was longer than you’d think, although I can’t tell you what was on it. I didn’t ever refer to it much. I just went looking for it, just now, just for grins, but couldn’t find it (although I got sidetracked, and then got sidetracked from the sidetrack, and so just spent several hours doing things that were totally unrelated to whatever it was I set out to do. This happens a lot.). In the 3 1/2 years since I retired, I’m pretty sure I haven’t checked anything off of that list.

The shameful truth is that I rather enjoy having absolutely nothing to do. Total indolence really suits me.

My mother always said, “You expect to be waited on hand and foot.” Now I am, literally, waited on hand and foot, and although I hate it, I’m afraid I don’t hate it is much as I ought to. I suspect this makes me a bad person, but I’m not sure what I can do about it.

A whole day with no commitments, nothing I have to do, far from inducing apprehension or anxiety, is something I look forward to. A good thing, because most days are like that.

What do I do all day? Good question. I’m not sure. A little of this, a little of that. Whatever I start, it doesn’t take long before I get sidetracked, and then get sidetracked from the sidetrack. Then I look up, and it’s getting dark. Yeah, I know it’s January, and this is Seattle, so that could be right after lunch. But still. What can I say? I’m easily entertained.

Looking at my almost entirely empty calendar, I see nothing until… let's see… Friday.

Perfect.

PFM

The other morning I was chatting with Tuffy online. It's not like we've never done that before. When she was still living at home, it wasn't unusual to get an IM from the next room down the hall. And I know when we're on the phone or on Skype we're doing the same thing at the same time. But for some reason it just struck me as extremely cool that I'm in Seattle and she's in Japan and we're typing back-and-forth. I don't know why. It just did. The wonders of technology. PFM.

Anyway, she said her birthday/solstice present was on her desk when she got to work on Monday. As I may have confessed before, on festive occasions, my family is resigned to receiving gifts that I want myself. Tuffy tumbled to this early. She must've been four the year Stellaluna was published. I read it to her several times when we were in the library or at a bookstore. It's a charming story, the illustrations are wonderful, and I really like bats. So, come solstice, I got her a copy. "Mom!" she said, when she opened it. "Stellaluna! Your favorite!"

Busted.

I've still got it, too. Right there on the bookshelf, next to Sheep in a Jeep. And Sheep in a Shop. And Sheep on a Ship.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. Using holidays as an excuse to inflict stuff I want on members of my family. Like the year Scarecrow got a grill for Father's Day. And the time he got an espresso machine for his birthday, even though he doesn't really drink coffee. (Hey, he's a guy, right? It plugs in, and it's got buttons and knobs, and it makes noise. What's not to like?) So Tuffy probably wasn't particularly surprised to find that I got her a camera. It's true that she'd been whining about the crummy picture quality from her iPhone, but the real reason for the camera is that I want to see pictures of Japan.

I haven't seen any output from the new camera yet. What's the holdup, I wonder? Anyway, she took this with her phone; I stole it off her Facebook page. We haven't had any snow in Seattle yet this year, but apparently it has snowed a couple of times in Nagahama. Tuffy is still enough of a Seattle kid to run outside with her camera (or, apparently, her phone) every time it snows. We left Michigan when she was five, so I guess she doesn't remember what it's like for snow to be a regular deal.

The F**kit List

Seems like everybody feels the need to make lists this time of year. The 10 Best ___ in 2012. The 25 Worst ___ in 2012. The 100 Most ___ in 2012. And of course those nasty lists of New Year's resolutions.

A couple of weeks ago, Huffington Post ran a piece called "The F**kit List". This promising title sucked me into one of those self-help, feel-better-about-yourself kind of articles that I never read, just on general principle, but it got me thinking.

What if I kept a list of things I do, or might once have done, or felt I should have done, but have come to suspect are no longer worth the effort? Some are probably things I never should've started doing in the first place. I won't miss doing them, and nobody will notice if I don't. Those are easy. But what about things I used to like to do, and I thought were worthwhile, that now take more effort than they used to? In some cases, much more effort. In other cases, I can no longer do them at all, but still wish I could, or still feel like I should. Which of those should I continue to struggle with, and which should be relegated to my F**kit List?

The first item on my F**kit List: Christmas cards.

Even though I don't celebrate Christmas, the end-of-the-year celebration used to be a really big deal around here. Even before Tuffy was born, there was sewing, shopping, baking, digging out the boxes of decorations and lights and putting them up inside and out; it was a really big deal. I used to like to send cards, lots of cards, made them by hand, included a personal, hand-written note with each one, the whole 9 yards. Crazy.

As it got harder and harder to do, I couldn't bring myself to just scribble a signature on a store-bought card and print out an address label from my meticulously maintained database. I wouldn't include a generic "holiday letter". I wouldn't send out fewer cards. No, apparently if I couldn't do it right, I wouldn't do it at all. 

I don't remember when I last mailed out real physical Christmas cards in envelopes with stamps. It's been long enough that the only ones I get are from my insurance guy and the dentist, whose secretary adds a personal, hand-written note wondering why it's been so long since I've been in for an appointment.

I regret losing touch with the people I only heard from once a year. In some cases they're people I like a lot, but our paths no longer cross on a regular basis. Even if it's only the sketchiest outline, even if it's just knowing they're still living in the same place, I miss hearing what they've been up to the previous year. I liked letting them know that I'd been thinking about them. But you know what? I could no longer do it, and I'm tired of feeling bad about it. So it goes on the F**kit List.

So, to all my blogger buddies: Whatever you celebrate this time of year, celebrate the heck out of it. Although I rarely leave comments on your blogs, it's usually because I can't think of anything useful to say, not because I don't care how things are going with you.

Even if I didn't send a Christmas card.

Winter Solstice

Well it's rise up, Jock, and sing your song,

For the summer is short and the winter long.

Let's all join hands and form a chain

'Til the leaves of springtime bloom again.*

Tomorrow will be four seconds longer than today! 88 days, 13 hours, 21 minutes, and 17 seconds till spring! Bring in the holly and the ivy! Hang the mistletoe! Decorate the evergreen! Light the candles! Fire up the Yule log! Happy Winter solstice!

*Rise Up Jock (Bob Pegg), recorded by Nowell Sing When Clear

Because Japan

Just about this time 23 years ago, I met my daughter for the first time. In some ways she was immediately familiar. The shape of her head, her pointy little elbows, her feet, were as recognizable from the outside as they had become on the inside. That was reassuring, because I was still trying to accept the fact that my life  had just changed in a way that I could never undo. You'd think that would've happened sometime in the previous nine months, but no. It wasn't until I was confronted with the physical reality of her that I realized I was no longer me. I was us.

I don't know how much influence I might've had on the person she eventually became. It didn't surprise me that she was relentlessly verbal, or that she was a reader from the time she could hold a book. What choice did she have? We had no TV. For fun, we went to the library.

She grew up in a house full of dogs; her earliest reflex was pushing a big black nose out of her face. But she doesn't love dogs. I don't think she even likes them all that much. She never once asked for a pony. She didn't collect bugs, or small animals. She never wanted to be a vet. Or a biologist. That was a surprise. Not a disappointment – but a surprise.

Scarecrow wrestled in his youth, but gender aside, it never occurred to me that this child would be a wrestler. This was totally unlike anything I ever did; I could barely stand to watch. In eight years, it never got any easier.

Why Japan? I don't know where she came by her fascination with things Asian. She started taking Mandarin Chinese in high school, but really, there weren't that many choices. When she needed another year of foreign language in college, she switched to Japanese because it fit into her schedule better. Once she heard about the JET Programme, the prospect of going to Japan was never far from her mind. The application process took almost a year. Still, somehow, it was a surprise to watch her drag her bag through the door of the airport on her way to Japan. It was totally unlike anything I ever did.

In the past five months, she has been learning about life in a place I will never go. For all her facility with words, sometimes there's just no way to describe her adventures in a way I can understand. "Because Japan," she says. There's no explanation. That's just the way it is.

I get that.

Happy birthday, Tuffy. Happy birthday!

Not Today

Sometimes I open up a text editor to start on a blog post without having any idea what I might write about; just hoping inspiration will happen. Sometimes it does. Usually not.

I feel like whatever I write here ought to tie into MS, somehow. That was, after all, my original excuse for starting this blog. But lately, I haven't much wanted to read about MS, and I sure has heck don't want to write about it. If that's denial, so be it. (Really? Gimme a break!)

I feel kind of bad about turning this into a blog about my family history, although I don't know why that should be. I don't expect my family to be of interest to anybody besides me (and a second cousin of Scarecrow's who shares my obsession with stalking dead people), but nobody is compelled to read about it. If I'm worried about boring my adoring readers, I really need to get over myself.

Tuffy's blog is not turning out to be the source of inspiration I had hoped it might be. Her most recent post went up before I resurrected this blog from oblivion, so it hasn't been the source of much competition, friendly or otherwise. Not that motivating me to run off at the keyboard should be her top priority.

What does that leave? The whippets usually become blog fodder when they've done something odious. They haven't lately, as far as I'm aware, besides inflicting a bit more damage on Scarecrow's left slipper, which was already pretty well chewed. On balance, that's probably good.

When I used to write in a paper journal, with a really nice fountain pen, the excuse to pick up a really nice pen was reason enough to come up with something to write. Sometimes it was a note about the weather, and any birds I might have seen during the day. Sometimes that got me started on other things. Sometimes not. Tuffy has my pens now. They don't seem to be working for her.

Maybe something will happen tomorrow.

Lucky Me

Sparky left this morning. It was a good visit. He's a good guy, and I always enjoy his company. The dogs accepted him as a member of the pack (as long as he didn't wear his hat – Bareit didn't like the hat). They pretty much abandoned Scarecrow and me, preferring to hang with Sparky. They even slept on his bed most of the night (well, he could've shut the door, couldn't he?). They're moping around by the front door now, waiting for him to come back. I guess if you're looking for a devoted, one-man dog, you wouldn't choose a whippet anyway.

Although I'm sorry to see him go, I can't wait to dig into the pile of stuff he excavated from the sediment that had accumulated on the floor of my dad's office over the years.

Shuffling through it once, quickly, with Sparky, I saw some pretty cool stuff:

• a receipt for ladies lingerie, which my dad sold door-to-door after he graduated from high school; 
• the invoice for my dad's first car, a used Studebaker, for which he paid $75 and put $5 down; 
• v-mail between my dad and his brother when they were in the service during WWII; 
• a picture of my aunt and uncle at their wedding, with a guy who I'm pretty sure is my grandfather; 
• a copy of an application my dad submitted for a fellowship, with a whole bunch of information on it that I didn't know.

And Sparky says there's more where that came from.

This will keep me busy for now.

Family Matters

My very favorite brother is coming up tomorrow from Southern California for a visit. Sparky is my only brother – my only sibling, for that matter – but even if that were not the case I'm pretty sure he would still be my favorite. He's a good guy. I'm looking forward to spending some time with him.

It should be easier to get him up here, now that his oldest son (Arkman) recently took a job in our neck of the woods. Fortunately, Arkman still has zero furniture, so Sparky will be staying with us, this time at least.  It'll be fun!

Sparky has agreed to fill any empty space in his luggage with family papers or photos or whatever other detritus he might have run across in his excavations of the house where mom and dad lived (apparently without ever throwing anything away) for almost 60 years. Who knows what kind of stuff might turn up?

You never know what you'll find. After trying, off and on for a couple of years, to find out when my paternal grandmother arrived in this country, I had pretty much given up. I knew she came from a shtetl near Bobruisk in what was then the Russian Empire, and that she was traveling with at least one sister. I knew she was born sometime around 1890, although my dad always said she lied about her age. I knew her surname was common in the area she came from – the local equivalent of "Smith" – and that it could be spelled about 8,967 different ways. I knew (I thought) the girls' given names, although it turned out I really didn't. I thought she came here before 1906, because my father said she would call my grandfather a greenhorn because she had been here longer than he had. I looked every place I could think of, or at least every place I could find on the Internet, but couldn't find documentation of any of this. So I pretty much gave up and went on to other things. Then, a month or so ago, out of the blue, I ran across this:

It is the passenger manifest of the S.S. Lituania, sailing from Libau in Russia on 26 October, 1911. On line 12 is Riwe Gorelik. It says she's 21 years old, so she would have been born around 1890. On line 13 is Sore Gorelik, age 23. Both young women gave their occupation as tailoress. They said they were unable to read or write. They were Jews, from a Russian town called Pariczi in Minsk. Their nearest relative was their mother, Liebe Gorelik, in Pariczi. Their final destination was Chicago, Illinois.

Riwe Gorelik is my grandmother, Eva. Sore Gorelik is my great-aunt Sophie.

So you never know what might turn up, or where you might find it. I just wish I could show this to my dad. He spent a lot of time looking for it, and would've been happy to finally see it. I'll show it to Sparky and he'll think it's cool, but it won't be the same.

This is the three of us, captured in my mother's inimitable photographic style, sometime around 1954.

One more thing: On line 15 of the manifest is Basse Gorelik, a 19-year-old from Kcsedrin, which is a village near Pariczi. No relation, I don't think. Gorelik was a really common name in those parts.