10 days before I go
on vacation. 10 days before I get to
spend some time with my cousins from the East Coast. The right side of the country. I will get up at 3:45AM on the morning of the
23rd and be ready to catch the Super Shuttle to the airport. My first flight is the weakest link in the
whole trip. It is a leg to Las Vegas and
when I went this time last year my flight was cancelled because of terrific
wind surrounding Vegas. I swore I wouldn’t
do that again but here I am, next year doing the same thing. My memory, God bless it. It needs a lot more than God’s
blessings. It needs a complete overhaul.
Hah! But other than that I will be in DC
at 530 PM EST and will be sitting down for chow with my cousins that
night. Halina Dabrowski is who I’ll be
staying with. David King, her by law
now, husband and their 3 boys, Noah, Joe and Matthew. At least I think that’s where I’m
staying. They’re supposed to be tearing
down their house and building a new one.
I hope it’s still in their old house.
Dave’s boys are the 5th generation to live in that house which
I think is super cool, especially being a military brat.
One year I was staying there and I had my own bedroom upstairs. I was petting the cat and decided to take
pictures with my phone. So I’m holding
the camera/phone with one hand and petting Blueberry with the other hand. No big deal.
Later I go to look at the pictures and you can clearly see a ghost
streaming through 3 of the pictures. Now
I thought that was uber super cool. Not
only 5 generations but a ghost to boot.
I will post those pictures as soon as I can find them again. Even the ghosts like me there!
It’s good for me to go back east at least once a year to
visit family. For a while I would visit
my sister in New Hampshire and her sons.
That’s was very fulfilling and that started about 1992. We didn’t live together as kids, she came out
for summers when I was very little and I think that all stopped when I was
10. I didn’t see her again until I was
17 and a full blown drug addict. As she
was too. With all relationships immersed
in that milieu we eventually had a falling out and our relations were
strained. But I didn’t think much of us
being together anyway, I was just too young and narcissistic to understand how important
family could and should be to me. My
cousins at that time to me were mere rumors.
Although they did come up and visit, one at a time when I lived in
Maine. But I didn’t give them two cents
of my time. I was fascinated with the
concept of cousins but I had never grown up with them so it was alien and
completely foreign to me. I met them or
rather they told me they remember meeting me.
And so it went as a resident of Maine, drugs, alcohol, a regular Maniac
existence.
Now years later in 2000 I get a letter in the mail about my
cousins, on my dad’s side, having a reunion and I’m invited. My cousin, Scott Shirley, the only other male
on that side of the family with Shirley as a last name, had died the year
previous due to a heart attack! He was
only 44! That set me on a path to
running and being aware of my health. It was also the reason that wanted to start a tradition of reunions. I
never even met the man but I felt a small tug of loss. The family I only knew about and had never
really seen was getting smaller. At
first I was grousing that I didn’t have the dough to go back but my wife, Nan, boohooed
me and reminded me of all the times I regretted not having cousins growing up
that I was going to go no matter what.
It was in Pennsylvania where her family was from so we would make it a
family trip. So I saved up my pennies
and we bought tickets and I was on my way to Shanksville, PA for a
Shirley/Weaver family reunion.
I didn’t know what to expect as I had never been to a
family reunion because I didn’t have one!
Now previously to this I did meet my one set of cousins on my Mom’s
side. I created that situation on my
own. I called my uncle because his number
was in information. It was the first time
I talked to him (around 93 or 94 or 92) and he welcomed me with open arms to
his home anytime I was back east. They
lived in Cape Cod, MA. So I flew out to
New Hampshire to my sister, Assiah’s house, and we made the trip south to meet
my relatives. I had 2 cousins, Kelly and
Danny and we were the first cousins that they had met too. It was weird, incredible, fascinating and
fun. We have an aunt but due to crazy
Hoyer family dynamics, neither of our families were allowed to present
ourselves to them. That is an extra 5
or 6 cousins that are still unknown to me. My mom kept us away pretty effectively from
any outside family no matter what family they were from. So it was a trip to remember. I had cousins. And now I was going to meet a glut of them in
PA. I was a little nervous. I had Nan, Ry and Hannah with me so I brought
my team for strength.
Wow. We met at my
Uncle Ted’s house in Shanksville. He has
a property by one of 10,000 man made lakes and we set up camp outside of his “beach”
house. He had been married to my dad’s sister
(long since passed) and his family was the Lowry’s. 4 kids.
My Aunt Sara and Uncle Jim showed up.
My dad’s oldest surviving sister and she had 4 daughters, the Musolf’s. Aunt Frannie and Uncle Spike, the Dabrowski’s. There were a tribe of 8 cousins! Then my cousin Candace and Sheryl
Stebbins. Another of my dad’s sisters
that had passed. I found out it was rare
but we also had 2 of my cousins from my long dead Uncle John, my dad’s oldest
brother, Anne and Libby. We had several
picnic tables, and lots of and lots of cousins, aunts and uncles. Now these people all grew up with each other
all through their life so they were very familiar. But my family was the odd one out. They had heard of us but never knew us
personally. I had a digital camera, we
didn’t have smart phones then but I took a lot of pictures and made sure I
wrote name after name to each picture. That
night I went through the pics and tried to remember the names I learned that
day. I was mesmerized. I was surrounded by my family, familiar
family that took to me as one of their own.
I was not a stranger. I felt a
small regret that I didn’t grow up as they did but it was short lived as I was
there now, with all of them. There must
have been at least 30 people that were my first cousins. I think the accurate count was 21. Then they
had kids as I did and that made the family tree that much bigger. 3 generations of Shirley’s, Weaver’s (my grandmother’s
name) walking around with such ease.
Didn’t they know how huge this was too me! I had aunt’s and uncle’s too and my dad among
them. I think this was the year he came
and it would be his last year.
Uncle Tom was there too.
He was my dad’s older brother and he had had 2 children but they as well
as his wife were all dead. I would have
loved to have met those cousins as they were part of the family of cousins that
grew up and spent time with each other every summer as kids. I could feel how they were missed. Scott and Maura. Maura was the first of the cousins to
die. In a horrific car accident when she
was merely 23. Funeral number 1. I think that was back in the early 80’s. Scott died in 1999 of the aforementioned
heart attack. Their mother had died in
1955 of cancer otherwise there might have been more of them. Uncle Tom was the “funny”
one of that generation. He seemed to
take a great liking to me and was key in organizing my dad’s place in the
family cemetery when my dad died in 2002.
He was a huge help and a kind man.
I miss him as well as I miss all of my relatives that I got to meet in
that year. My Aunt Sara is the only one
of her generation that is still living and she is well into her 90’s. We’re an old family, my grandfather, whom I never
met was born in 1885! He died exactly 10
years before I was born. My dad was 12
at the time. By the time I got caught up
in the family scene a lot of deaths had taken place but I found a lot of life
in the joy of meeting my family at last.
So in 10 days I get to charge my batteries and visit and spend such
valuable time with my family. I am
blessed and don’t take a minute of that time for granted at all. Life is precious and finding gifts as I have
has made it blessedly more so.
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