a hundred years
Writing nonsense, whatever's in mind to say at the moment, is to me a great thing about blogging. And refraining from offering it as a forum for discussion has been important: I like to say what I will and let it go, not interested in explaining or defending, and if what I write brings on ugly comments I simply take it down, suspend it and delete the link to it.
It's not a diary. Although I do enjoy and appreciate YouTube presentations of the daily diaries of German soldiers, sometimes including SS officers, from World War Two, writing a daily diary never appealed to me, especially after I got slammed when caught reading the juicy diary of a cousin some seventy-five years ago, and realized how vulnerable the written record of a diary can make one.
Nor have I liked the idea of journaling a stream of consciousness, especially that someone might come across and read even long after. Having seen how hurtful it can be, destroying trust, to someone if their privacy and dignity are violated, personal privacy is a monumental value to me, even though, as Marcus Aurelius wrote, after we're gone it makes no difference at all to us what anyone discovers or thinks or says about us, we are beyond being offended, flattered, or embarrassed, and all interest in us disappears within a generation or so anyway.
For example, my paternal grandmother's father, a man named Godfrey, in the 19th century simply abandoned the family and absconded off to Texas, married a second wife and had more children: who cares these days? My grandmother's mother later obtained a legal divorce and married a man named Coley, with whom she also had more children. These gossips and scandals, with distant half-cousins, some legitimate, some who probably do not know they are illegitimate descendants of a bigamist, evaporate within a generation or two and nobody's name is mud.
So, who cares? Although my own life's history has places where my devotion to someone has been shattered by news that came to me long years after their death. They do not know, and what I know will die with me.
Wandering, I'm wandering, okay? This is what I'm talking about, my nonsense. Gina, my sister, who was our family genealogist, once wrote a carefully researched history of our mother's family, the Gentry clan, and the McClammy clan on mama's mother's side (it could be McClammie, but I don't think so). It still brings me near tears when I think to email or phone Gina with a question, and it all floods back that she's dead and beyond my ever again asking her anything or meeting her at Hunt's for oysters.
An interesting, then scandalous but now humorous tidbit that Gina included in that family history volume was about something that happened one day back in the 1920s - - see we're talking a hundred years ago now, all is forgotten and no longer matters - - after our grandfather Walter Gentry bought a car, first a Maxwell then Chrysler cars when Walter P Chrysler bought out Maxwell. One morning, our grandmother Mamie McClammy Gentry, a strong willed woman to be reckoned with and not messed with, put her foot down and said, "Walt, I'll drop you at your office, I'm taking the car today." Daddy Walt was appalled, because she had never driven a car; but she said it and did it. So that became a new routine.
Anyway, one day Mamoo as we grandchildren called her, loaded the five children into the car, a mid-1920s, light blue Chrysler seven-passenger open touring car, with the jump seats for the extra kids, and drove downtown toward Daddy Walt's office, maybe taking him his lunch, IDK. Driving south on Palafox, they spotted him walking along with his clerk, a young woman. Whereupon Mamie swerved the car up onto the sidewalk and knocked the couple down.
Mama remembered and told it seventy and eighty years later. It makes a great old family tale a hundred years on, but when Mama read Gina's written report of it, she was uncomfortable unto furious and made Gina take it out of her family history book.
Not sure, but I think my copy has the little anecdote anyway. For memories told decades after everyone has died, Time erases vulnerabilities. .
We all have our privacies to hold close. If you say you don't, your nose will grow longer, Pinocchio! No matter, our memeories die with us; and if they don't, if people tell later, we'll never know the difference.
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Today, take the incredible Kurobota ham, now thawed, out of the refrigerator, into the oven to bring it up to serving temperature, and have the first slice. Actually, Linda likes the outside, I'll take the first inside slice. I'm thinking of a warm ham sandwich for noon dinner. Dark whole wheat seed bread, gobs of mayonnaise, a thick, warm slice of pink ham, or a pile of very thin slices. A mug of coffee club hot & black to go with, eh?
Chrysler a hundred years later.
RSF&PTL
T88&c