Monday's great-grandfather was a heretic

Hello girls! It's Monday!

Carlyn - I am sorry for your puffy hair, but less sorry than I would be if you had continued to read The Book Thief. And don't try to pull the "Oh, I'm in grad school and I have so much work to do" line -- because it'll probably work. :)

Christina - Isn't it great to be a regular? The closest I've come to being a regular is at Ben Franklin's. I actually had one of the workers there ask me the other day how my show went last month, so that was nice.

On to the topic of the week!

So, as I said yesterday, and as I've mentioned before, my mother does a lot of genealogy, so much so that she has basically run out of her own family members, and my dad's family members, and so has started doing research on my uncle's family, an uncle related entirely by marriage.When my great-aunt was alive, Mom would drive up to see her at least once a month, both to check in and to get Aunt Muriel talking because she was the last of her generation, and so a generation's worth of stories would die with her.

So my mother is, in many ways, a collector of stories, and she's passed a lot of those stories down. Now, I could take this time to tell classic stories from my own childhood, such as the time I flooded my grandparents' bathroom with my cousin or the time I colored on the walls of a rented cabin with my cousin (actually, many of the most interesting stories from my childhood end with the phrase "with my cousin" -- and there's a reason), but rather than dwell on the embarrassing moments from when I was young, I think I'd rather share some tales of generations past.

To that end, I have two stories for you. One, the story of how my paternal grandparents met and married, and two, the story of how my maternal great-grandfather was a heretic.

Story one:

My paternal grandparents are 90 and 87 and have been married for 64 years, first of all. They are adorable and spry and like few 90 year olds you will meet. For example, for my grandmother's 90th birthday earlier this year, they took a cruise down the Danube River. Yes, that's in Europe. And my grandmother didn't want a lot of people to know because she felt it was extravagant.

But anyway, they've been married for 64 years and have 5 kids and 10 grandkids, and this past Christmas, we were told in wonderful detail the story of how they met.

They met in a Sunday school class in Indiana. My grandfather was in college post-WWII and my grandmother was working in a library in Fort Wayne. The class was about to begin when a member of the church brought a new student to the class last minute, a young lady named Emily, and to quote my grandfather, "she was a vision." She wore a bright yellow dress and white gloves, and it's the gloves that are the focal point of the story.

Grandpa was captivated, and for the next three weeks, he waited and waited for her return each Sunday to Sunday school, hoping that this week, the gloves would come off so he could see her bare hands. You see, he wanted to know whether or not he had a chance with her. But the gloves never came off, and so finally, he had to resort to tracking her down at the library where she worked during the week, where he could finally see that there was no ring. He immediately asked her out on a date.

Their first date was on August 3. On September 6, he proposed. And the next June, they were married. It's the kind of old-fashioned love story that makes me prematurely nostalgic.

Story Two:

This is one of my favorite family stories of all time, but I have to be careful the company I share it in, because many people would not find it funny.

When my great-grandfather on my mother's side was growing up, the Catholic priests would come to the town square periodically to do public baptisms. When they started to run low on holy water, they would pay the local boys a penny to run back to the church and fetch more. My great-grandfather was one of those boys.

Except that he very rarely felt like running all the way back to the church. So he would take the penny and the container, run back to his home, which was closer, and fill the container up with tap water and take that back to the priests.

Side note: I love hearing my mother the minister tell that story and laugh.

So those are two of my favorite family stories. What are yours?

Friday has a very small family

The roadtrip's going really well so far! On our way down to Texas we stopped in Indianapolis, Memphis, Dallas, and Austin. Corpus Christi is right on the Gulf of Mexico, so we just spent the day at the beach today. I was very good about applying sunscreen, but apparently the sun doesn't care about things like that and my back is still very burned. We're leaving for dinner at the marina very shortly, so I'll have to make this quick!

I have a very small family seeing as I'm an only child. It's just my mom, dad, our cat, and me out here in Michigan. All our extended family is out in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Ever since I was born we've been going out to New England twice a year (summer and Christmas) to visit all our family. Whereas I have no siblings, my mom has three sisters and my dad has a sister and a brother, so I do have cousins. Unfortunately, I'm not as close with my cousins as I'd like to be, due to the fact that we only see each other for about two weeks a year. I have four cousins on my mom's side, we're all within 8 or so years of each other, so when we were younger we didn't really have any problems playing together and we generally have things in common to talk about when we see each other now. On my dad's side of the family, however, all my cousins are about 40 years old with kids. My dad is the youngest of his siblings and was also the latest to have kids, so I'm the young one on that side. As I've gotten older we've had more to talk about, but we still don't have much in common. I don't think we'll really have much to talk about at length until I'm engaged and then when I have kids.

My parents and I really don't have many traditions. I suppose you could say it's a tradition that we go out to New England twice a year. My mom's side of the family has a cottage on a camp ground on the Connecticut river and I've gone there every year since I was born. That's definitely a tradition, now that I think about it. It's my favorite place to be in the world. I'm going to be spending two weeks there this summer instead of the usual two and I can't wait to get there. I'm finally taking some friends out there and they're going to see the places I've been talking about for the past 15 or so years that we've known each other. It's not just my mom and her sisters that go there, it's the whole side of the family: cousins, second cousins, etc. Our family's been going to camp, as everyone calls it, for oh.... five or more generations now? There are a few families on the camp ground who go back about five generations. It's a really nice place and I love that the same families have known each other and spent time together for a week each year for over 125 years.

Anyway, sorry I couldn't write for longer, but it's time to go out to dinner now!

Monday's family makes chocolate. You want to be my friend now, don't you?

Hello, girls! I hope you all had a good Father’s Day, or a good Sunday, whichever is more applicable to you. :)

Alexandra: Hooray for Disney World honeymoons! My boyfriend and I have abstractly discussed going to the Harry Potter theme park for our hypothetical honeymoon if we both haven’t been by the time it becomes non-hypothetical.

Carlyn: Favorite culture? Hmmm . . . probably British. I like exploring the differences.

Casey: I feel as if every bit of creativity got sucked out of me with Alice, and it’s going to take time to regenerate, so I’m going to leave punishment ideas in the hands of others. I think what I would come up with would be more odd and nonsensical than punishing.

Christina: Road trips are fun. I’m supposedly going on one this summer (maybe. We’ll see.). Have fun in Texas!

And now for the topic of the week. Family.

I’ve touched on family in the past, in my introduction and in talking about Kate and my cousin’s wedding this summer, but family has always been a big part of my life, and so I certainly don’t mind expanding on what you already know.

I’m very lucky, as I come from a close and friendly family. We have our minor inner disputes, of course, but on the whole, we all get along with each other pretty well. My dad has one brother and three sisters, and even though we’re spread out across the country, we’ve always made a point of keeping in regular communication. Three times a year, at least four branches of the family gather together, either in the summer (say, for a wedding) or at Christmas or at Thanksgiving, and we have a lot of time-honored traditions. We sing, a lot, first of all. There are 22 of us when we all get together, and we’re almost all pretty musical. My uncle plays the guitar and my older brother plays the piano, and my cousins will occasionally accompany on flute or trumpet or drum or ukelele. And we sing. We sing Christmas carols at Christmas, and Golden Age showtunes during the summer. The only holiday we don’t get much singing in is Thanksgiving, because we’re all busy doing something else during Thanksgiving.

See, three generations ago, my great-grandmother decided she want to learn how to hand-dip chocolates. So she experimented on her own, but she couldn’t figure out why her chocolate ended up grey or streaked. So she went to a local chocolate shop and got a job and learned the secret of dipping chocolate. She learned how to make fudges and creams and caramels, and that’s how she and her family got through the Depression. They made and sold candy. Then, once the Depression had ended, my great-grandmother decided she would pass on what she had learned to her family, but that she would never again sell the chocolates. Instead, she gave them away as gifts.

And to this day, that’s what we do. Every Thanksgiving, three branches of the family gather at my grandparents’ in Bowling Green and make upwards of 200 pounds of homemade, hand-dipped chocolates. We’re up to 23 flavors, including nine kinds of fudge, six kinds of creams, four kinds of caramels, plus toffee, truffles, and nougat. It’s a week-long process, but it’s one of my favorite times of the year. I’m a fourth-generation dipper, and I help dip just about everything. If you’re interested, here is a YouTube video on the process that my brother put together a couple years ago:

So that’s my extended family, but my immediate family is pretty awesome, too. Leaving Kate out of the picture for now, My immediate family consists of my mom (a Methodist minister), my dad (a theatre PhD/college adjunct/children’s theatre instructor and director), my older brother Matthew (a Music Ed grad student), and my younger brother Jeffrey (a junior theatre major at BGSU). I am almost four years younger than Matthew and almost three years older than Jeffrey.

When my brothers and I were little, we were constantly at each others’ throat, particularly Matthew and I. Everything was a competition, everything was a battle for dominance, and the times when we could coexist peacefully were few and far between. Then he graduated high school, moved out to college, and became one of my best friends. We’re incredibly close now, which is kinda mind-boggling, especially when you consider that he once hit me in the head with a golf club (I can already hear the protesting, so I’ll add the caveat: accidently. He accidently hit me in the head with a golf club. But still).

Similarly, Jeffrey and I have gotten closer since I graduated high school, and he followed me to my school and major, so I’ve plenty of sisterly wisdom to depart, which he is super grateful for, I know.

And my mom and dad are great, as I’ve said before. They’ve always been very accepting, very supportive, and very understanding of whatever we’ve chosen to do. I like that I can talk to my parents, because I know not everyone can. I’m very lucky in my family, and believe me, I’m well aware of it!  So even though trying to get us together to do anything is like trying to get a herd of cats to walk in a parade, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Well, except maybe Jeffrey, if I got a good enough offer . . .

I look forward to hearing about your families!

Also, please let me know what you'd like to talk about in the future! It's likely just Alice aftermath, but my creative well is running dry -- so let's throw some topics out there for consideration!

Week 15: Family time!

So, it's Father's Day today, and I've spent the past week with my family, so let's let our minds dwell on that this week. Let's talk about family. Take it any direction you want, really. And feel free to suggest some themes you'd like to write on -- my creativity is starting to run out!