real-time post

Well. So, we went from "A white Christmas is rather unlikely this year" (when I arrived up here on the 19th) to "We might have one" (a couple days out) to waking up Christmas Eve to a couple inches of snow.

Still, I got what I wanted: My mom and I got out to the 7:30 pm service, even though the roads were not great (and even though she, being overtired and concerned over a problem my father had a couple days before, had smashed one of the side mirrors on the car, and because it's an adjustable mirror AND it's an old car, it was hard to replace - in fact, the one the autoparts store sent to their mechanic shop was not the right one, and so the receptionist/co-owner there is having to try to track down the right one for that make/model), we got out and back safely.

Christmas was good. Quiet, but good. I enjoyed Christmas dinner with a good bit more cheer this year than last, considering that (a) my mother wasn't injured this year and (b) I didn't have to cook it and clean up after it ALL myself.

Other than that, we've been stuck in a lot: snowy, extremely cold, my father has a few lingering health issues (he is out right now at a doctor's appointment) and so my mom doesn't like to be gone too long. And I don't like driving in snow much, and I especially don't like driving with a smashed driver's-side side mirror (my mom claims it doesn't bother her, she uses the rear-view one more, but I guess years of interstate driving down to Sherman has trained me to rely heavily on the side mirrors). (There's still a mirror THERE, but you can't really see well in it so you can't rely on it).

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One thing I've been doing is sort of desultorily reading through my (paternal) grandfather's memoirs, which one of my uncles has been editing/typing up from the holograph form. He described my grandfather as "somewhat eccentric" and I guess I agree at this point (a few days ago, when I was not so far it, I would have merely said "interesting," but...)

My grandfather was born in 1895 (Yes, my family is demographically odd; it turns out my grandfather didn't father his oldest child until he was 40: I think my grandmother must have been a *good* bit younger than him even though I never thought about it). Both my parents were late-in-life babies for their parents, and I guess I was a late-in-life baby for my times. (My mom was in her early 30s; she once remarked she was irritated by the OB referring to her as a "geriatric primagravida")

Reading my granddad's writing is interesting. I  never knew him well; I was eight when he died and I think he probably didn't know how to take small children (I don't, either). I mostly remember him as a very old man with a shock of white hair and a raspy laugh, and he smelled like pipe tobacco. (Even to this day the smell of pipe tobacco reminds me of my paternal grandparents' house). But there was so much more there. I now kind of wish he could come back for a few days so I could talk to him as an adult - but then again, I'm not sure he'd know what to make of my generation, or (based on some things he's said) a woman who is effectively a professional and independent.

(Then again: quite a shocking number of his relatives, and the people he grew up around, never married. I guess that was more common in the lower-middle class years back, when the idea of "how would I support a kid" was a bigger concern, and of course no reliable birth control - even if my granddad's faith (and that of his milieu) would have condoned its use)

He was definitely a romantic. I don't mean the Casanova kind of romantic (though he did seem to have more than his share of innocent crushes as a schoolboy), but the kind of romantic that looks at the world, thinks, "this could be better than it is" and feels somewhat disillusioned that it is not.

In fact, a lot of the disillusionment I've felt in recent years - the idea that things of the mind (and perhaps even the heart, or the soul) are devalued in our culture, that the only kind of love that's seen as mattering is the carnal kind, with love-of-your-offspring perhaps a close second, that the kind of people who "get ahead" tend to have slipperier morals than what I would strictly approve of.....and all of that seems like vintage Granddad, based on things he's written.

And it makes me wonder. How much of personality is genetic? Could I have inherited some of his tendency to be over-fond of books, easily falling into crushes but easily disillusioned out of them when the object of my affection turns out to have feet of clay, longing for a world where people are more left alone to whatever intellectual pursuit they are called by, rather than pressed to "wake up, you've got to make money."

I don't think it's memetic. My dad seems not to have the romantic streak my grandfather had - I suspect he takes after the more-practical German side of the family. He certainly LOOKS more like his mother's side of the family (as do I: a lot of people on my granddad's side were quite handsome, but with leaner faces and sharper features than either my father or I have).

He was VERY Irish - that sort of stereotypical Irish romanticism, I guess, comes out in his writing (I suspect he played it up as a "thing," just as I joke about my mania for being on time for things being part of my Prussian ancestry). And he was VERY Roman Catholic. (Which is amusing, because some other bits of family history - for example, that they owned land at a time of British occupation of Ireland - suggests the family was not *always* Catholic, and perhaps wasn't for much of their time in Ireland. But then again, there's they saying "no zealot like a convert," though the conversion apparently happened in his grandparents' generation at the latest). But...he does seem very much a man of his time and place (the lower-middle-class or perhaps even working-class Irish boroughs of Chicago).

He was involved tangentially with WWI - he was a pilot in training for the Air Corps (he refers to it as the Air Force but I *think* in those days it was still the Army Air Corps). He was at Love Field for much of his training, and it's sort of uncanny to me to think that, literally 100 years ago, my grandfather was walking around in Dallas and Fort Worth, not THAT far from where I live now. (I have only been to Love Field once in my life....when I was interviewing for my current position). But I recognize the street names from Dallas traffic reports....

My grandfather seems to have been quite an intellectual as a young man. I knew he had wanted to be a writer - I once linked a poem he wrote, called "To the Steger" - and he did work for a number of years for the Chicago Tribune (in fact, I think that was the longest and most-steady type of employment he had). But in his youth he was fascinated by the wireless (then a new thing - he writes about Marconi) and he was also very much into the Classics. He writes at length about his time at St. Ignatius, which I guess was both a high school and college in Chicago, run by Jesuits. He writes  of his love of the Eclogues  and other Latin poetry, and boasts a bit at his skill at taking rough English translations and putting them into meter (iambic pentameter - and yes, I'm impressed, my few experiments with writing poetry, I found getting the meter right very hard).

He also notes something I find somewhat unsettling: he wanted to become a Jesuit priest. In fact, several times in his memoirs he notes that. What kept him from asking to be recommended to go through the discernment process? One of his crushes - an unrequited love for a tomboyish girl named Sis, whom he idealized and dreamed of marrying (until she apparently broke off contact with him in the early 1920s).

And it makes me wonder: If Granddad had taken orders - he wouldn't BE my Granddad. My father and his brothers wouldn't exist. **I** wouldn't exist, at least not in the particular form I am now. And it does make me wonder - years and years ago, I think I wasn't even in high school yet, my mom made the offhand joke that "If your dad hadn't disliked Harvard and transferred back to the University of Michigan, you'd probably be an Eastern 'chick.'" But it did kind of make me think: WOULD I be an "Eastern chick," or would I just not exist? Or would my mom have gone on to marry, I don't know, some farmer's son and I would be a Michigan girl with different interests and different attitudes? And I find myself thinking about that again, after reading about Granddad's longing to have been a priest.

(Though I suspect some of it may have been the romantic image of the teaching priests at his high school; he might have found himself unsuitable when going through discernment - just as happened to one of my cousins, who may well now wind up getting married HIMSELF, seeing as he's taken up again with an old girlfriend)

But what I wonder is this: would I have still been here somehow - maybe through my grandmother having married someone else, but still having had the man who became my dad? Are we each, in some way, pre-ordained to exist, because we're "supposed" to be here - and so, even if my dad HAD liked Harvard*, somehow, in some form, there'd be someone with my particular outlook on life and whatever talents I may have? I admit to me that thought is somewhat comforting: that I'm somehow meant to be here, I have a purpose I am hopefully fulfilling, and it's not all just random. (Or, as the slightly-silly poster in the kids' Sunday school room at my church says: "I must be somebody 'cos God doesn't make junk")

Then again, it's possible we are all more or less just happy  accidents (perhaps in some cases, not such happy accidents; I look at people like the various tyrants of this world, and the grasping politicians, and the debased individuals who would exploit children or vulnerable young women, and I think: surely that is not their purpose in life, as much as I joke about "if you can't be a good example, be a terrible warning." Though on the third hand: we have free will and perhaps even the basest tyrant was someone who had a higher purpose at one point, but they chose selfishness instead?)

At any rate: meant to be or happy accident, I'm glad my grandfather met and fell in love with the stolid German girl he wound up marrying, and that my dad came along (and that he didn't like Harvard, and so, transferred to Michigan, so he could meet and eventually marry my mom). But it is weird and interesting reading my grandfather's memoirs.

(*I think he went there to please HIS dad, who, I admit, seems a bit of an intellectual snob in that way. I see it in myself - another way, perhaps, that I'm like my Granddad despite having barely known him - the valuing of things like degrees and liking the "prestige" of a "meaningful" school and all that. Though Harvard now is not what Harvard was then, I think....and at any rate, my dad wound up at what used to be called "The Harvard of the West," and he went to a freshman mixer, where he met my mom, and they started dating, and then some years later, when they were both accepted to the same grad school, decided to get married so they could save on rent.....and then, ten or so years later, I came along...)