Family

A few weeks ago, it was my privilege to attend a reunion of the members of my mother's side of the family. My father's side was not represented as they were few, and have since passed, but my mother was one of six, one of which had 6, one of which had 4, one of which had twins, so there are tons of those folks around.

I thought of inserting a diagram here, but then realized that the paper is not near wide enough and it would become unwieldy.

My mother's (and my father's) family came from Pittsburgh and were for the most part tradespeople. I had bunches of cousins in the Pittsburgh area, and spent many a happy Summer in their company.  The times were different enough that I can recall walking down a hill in the city, catching a streetcar, changing to another streetcar to go somewhere, and on arrival walking a few blocks to a cousin's house - when I was 8 years old!  As I said, times were different, and nobody thought too much about a kid's riding streetcars to places in and out of the city for a day or so.  We had no cell phones or GPS's, and I did get lost a time or two, but there was always a friendly streetcar driver to un-lose me.  Times have changed, indeed.

We have had these reunions yearly, out in North Park outside the city of Pittsburgh, for at least 30 years, and I have been to most of them, traveling to see folks I saw perhaps yearly, but remembered as yesterday.   My memories of Pittsburgh were good enough that, when it came time for me to get engaged, I took my future wife to the home of some of my family and bought her rings from a high school classmate of my mother - friendship means something, and I had been a guest in his home growing up, too.  In fact, I once had a thing for one of his daughters - but that's another tale for another time & place....

In any event, over the years, most have left Pittsburgh - but many still gather there yearly - and my children have joined the crowd as time has gone along, looking forward to seeing these relatives and catching up on what the year has brought to us.

This year was a Big Deal in some respects - two cousins had been married for more than 50 years, and the last surviving sister of my mother has been married 60 years, so over 80 people came from California, Texas, Georgia, and many other states to join in a celebration.  One of my cousins' kids had married and moved to Australia - but he was there to help to celebrate his parent's 50 years of marriage (and he surprised them, too!)  Some other cousins and their kids have not been to a reunion for years, and it was wonderful to see them again.

Our family is important - a lot of who and what we are was formed in the homes of cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.  We seem to be unusual in that 80 of us can come together in one place and enjoy ourselves - we all talk to one another - some of us have differences but we all talk.  Many large families are distinguished by the fact that they don't get along - we seem to be different, but part of it could be that we are all spread so far apart.

I feel privileged to be able to join such a diverse group and feel immediately as if I belong, they they know me, and they like me anyhow. In this day and age, with things so polarizing as they tend to get, just to relax and be myself amongst all these people is a rare gift.

That it carries on with generations is also a rare gift - my kids and their kids like to go - they don't know everyone, but they know some, and as the family grows there is almost always someone there of a similar age to talk with, pal around with, play with, have lunch with, and just enjoy.

For the most part, spouses from outside the family also appear to enjoy the experience - I know they must, since they keep coming back, and they add to the joy and the diversity of experiences and opinions in the mix.

I wish that everyone could have the experience that we share at these reunions - we might be a whole lot nicer and more patient with each other.

I look forward already to next year, to see who will come, what experiences and tales will be shared and just how everyone will appear. I know that the odds are that some of us won't be back - age and infirmity conspire to keep us rather more local than we once were, but it is my intent, as long as I am able to attend this event each year - because it's good for me, for my family, and for the folk around us.

"Illegal Immigrant"

This is a term that really gets my goat.

Consider, if you will, that an immigrant is a person who gets here having followed a prescribed set of steps, during which process he learns about the nation, about its history, about its government, its language, customs - in short enough to blend in and assimilate.

When you put illegal in front of immigrant, suddenly it makes no sense - because immigrant is a legal thing to be and how does one become an illegal legal person?

It is just another attempt by so-called progressives to confuse us.  The proper term is "Illegal Alien" which makes sense, because we accept aliens too - provided they do a few things, like let us know they are here.

Illegal Aliens are Invaders.

Why not call them what they are?

I'm really tired of having to wait through the Spanish questions on ATM's to get to the language used here.  I think speaking other languges is neat and useful - I've learned several myself - but here we use English.

I also have that folks talk about me in other languages assuming I'm too stupid or ill-educated to know what they're doing.  When I do know, I call them something obscene in their own language as I leave the room - when I don't, I attempt to join the conversation using one of the languages I have learned. It is truly amazing how quickly hispanics have their English improve when I start talking to them in low German.  I can usually remember enough Spanish from almost 55 years ago to put together a good sentence stating that I don't like speaking Spanish when nothing else works.

Folks that come here should come here to be here - not to recreate there - if there was really so great, then whythehell did you leave?

New York

I haven't written here for some time, and probably should sleep on this one before I get yelled at, but somehow this time I just can't keep my big mouth (fat fingers?) shut (in my pockets?)

New York now makes gay marriage legal.

I have a problem with the word "gay" as used here - the word used to have a meaning, something like happy or joyous - now it no longer means just that, and I have to be careful where and how I say it lest I be misunderstood.  Words mean things, or anyhow they did when I was young, naive and stupid.

So let's make it clear for old idjits like me - New York has now changed its law to make marriage between two persons of the same sex legal.  Or anyhow, they are calling the social uniting of two people of the same sex a marriage.

"Marriage" just joined "Gay" in the list of words that no longer has meaning.  For thousands of years I knew what it meant - now I am no longer sure.

I asked a dear friend why another word could not have been chosen to indicate a state like matrimony, but different in that it did not join two people of opposite sexes, could not have a reasonable expectation of procreation, and was an evolutionary dead end within one generation.

What I got was resoundingly denounced as old, meanspirited, sexist, prejudiced, and even probably wishing to keep people of color enslaved.  All this for asking a question....

And I don't see any parallel at all with the old issue of miscegenation - after all, the union involved a man and a woman - the so-called race issue was one trumped up to keep a minority convinced it was a minority in terms of value (about which I'll have more to say later....)

Two men cannot reproduce without the intervention of a third party who is not a man.  Does this mean that two homosexual men should become the object of a woman's polyandrous affections?  I thought the idea was to keep the women out of the males' lives - but they can't reproduce without a woman, so they are going against themselves - where's the fun in that? And how can someone who would scorn the 97% of the population as "Breeders" lower himself/herself (itself?) to couple with a person so obviously inferior or disgusting?

Then I thought about two women having the same problem - in order to reproduce, there has to be a man somewhere - leading to the spectre of a polygynous relationship for the man - when the two women involved want nothing at all to do with men; they have to involve a man or the "race" dies out within one generation.

There was an article in Town Hall this morning, Marriage Cannot Be Redefined that caused me to start to think about this again, and stirred in me the realization that it's a game, and the only end to the game has no words having anything like a meaning we all know.  Kinda like the Red Queen (in "Alice") - "A word means what I choose it to mean, no more and no less!" - except in the case of gay marriage, there are as many red queens as there are marriages, so the word is reduced to a state of meaninglessness.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that, for me anyhow, there is an intrinsic wrongness in allowing 3% of the population to cause a word that had meaning to the other 97% suddenly to become meaningless to that other 97% of the population.  We invent new words all the time - why not here?

The distortion is such that it makes noise in my head - almost as if I had a pet cat, which died, so I got a pet skunk, but insisted on calling it a cat even though a deep breath would convince anyone that it was not a cat - except for myself who is sure that it is a cat - it has four legs, claws and a tail - must be a cat, right?

Call the simile ridiculous if it pleases you, but think about it - is it any less strange than calling a marriage "the same" as what used to be a marriage when it now is supposed not to care about the sex of either partner?

I'll probably have more to mutter about this; right now what I see before us is madness - a tower of Babel, if you will, brought to us by the so-called Progressive People, who will not rest until every word we have ever relied upon to have meaning and to help us make decisions is rendered devoid of meaning.

I have spoken (written?)!