Re-Connections

Last night we picked up Tom and drove to Sammamish, an eastern suburb, for dinner with my cousin Steve and his family. What a wonderful evening!

My mother was close to her sister Arlene and our families spent a lot of time together when we were young. My cousins Don and Steve are six and ten years younger than I respectively which is a fairly large gap when you are young, so it has been fun to re-connect with both of them in recent years. My cousins lived in St. Louis during much of their childhood and eventually all of them ended up in California. A job with Microsoft eventually brought Steve to Seattle.

The fun last night was getting to know their son, Scott, who is a high school senior. It was fun looking at old pictures and sharing remembrances of our grandparents and other relatives. It was fun figuring out all the relationships.....if Tom is the son of Steve's cousin, they must be first cousins once removed....and so forth. It was fun seeing the family genes in action - there is a strong, strong strain of people who like to write and read, people who like photography, people who like scientific "stuff", people who are musical. Fascinating!

What I want to write about today, however, is my Uncle Herb. Herb is Steve's dad who will soon turn 90. Aside from some difficulty with his feet, he is in wonderful shape physically and mentally. On the way back to Seattle Tom wondered aloud what Herb had done throughout his life to bring him to such a healthy old age. I commented that Herb is the consummate calm person. He had a horrible work history through no fault of his own. His wife, my aunt Arlene, was the absolute love of his life but had a manic-depressive streak and things could be somewhat dramatic at times. Herb just calmly said "How about that!" to just about anything that happened and was sort of in the background of my childhood memories.

Since my aunt died two years ago, I have been in sporadic contact with Herb and have come to appreciate some incredible gifts Herb has....gifts I never knew about.

1. His truly romantic love for Arlene Looking at Steve's computer monitor last night, we saw many pictures of Arlene posing in rather sexy (for the 40's) poses on the beach, on vacations, on their front porch. With each picture Herb commented, "She was so beautiful.", "Look how happy she looks", "I sure miss her", and so forth. After 57 years of marriage and two years of widowhood, he still talks like a newlywed. That's inspiring.

2. The war As I child I didn't even know Herb had been in the service. Like so many other men of his age whom I have known, he never talked about war experiences, just returned home and resumed life. Until earlier this year, I didn't know that Herb was administrative assistant to Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay. Herb said good-bye to Tibbets and stayed in the office on a Pacific island while Tibbets went off to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. They reconnected at a fifty year reunion a few years ago. That's amazing!

3. His talent From my father's point of view as a very steady worker for the same company for his entire career, Herb's many accounting type jobs were always somewhat dismissed by my family. Little did I know that Herb worked those jobs to feed his family, but is an artist at heart. I never knew he had taken classes at the Art Institute. I never knew how he could draw. Last night he brought his drawings to show - some old and some new ones of people he has met at his assisted-living residence. Incredible likenesses. As I observe Kevin begin a career as a musician and Nancy and Tom develop their writing talents, it is humbling to think of people such as Herb who--because of the economic realities of the times in which they lived---could not follow their dreams and develop their real talents. That's sad!