Under Glass and Over the Years

 

A three by five-foot sheet of glass covers my desk.  Little plastic footers hold it up and off the wooden desk top. In the millimeter or two of vacant space between the clear melted sand and the polished dead tree reside some visual reminders of the decades I have lived. 

From 1980s Detroit there is a shot of me in a velour robe with a knife in my teeth.  From the two thousand aughts there is a photo of my eldest son and I sitting in a jail cell as part of a Cub Scout police station exploration.  On the left side there is a photo from 1967 of an Asher Family picnic.  My Uncle Tommy is smiling. I stand nearby fat and awkward.

 

My children’s accomplishments are documented with hockey pictures and music programs.  Concert and event tickets stretch laid out include a 1976 Grateful Dead stub to a 1989 ticket for the Northumberland ferry to Prince Edward Island. Scattered in are homemade cards made by the kids and also those little cards you pick up at the funerals of people who left this orb way too early. And finally, there is a picture of a stout Teaneck man in a Playboy bunny costume with black fishnet stockings from 1977.

 

There is a photo of my father coupled with a snippet of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Noble Prize acceptance speech.  ‘Tis a great quote:

 

“There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song – but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.”

 

What is missing are the photos of my father’s family and world. There are no photos of the live oak tree in Longs SC that anchors my many memories of my grandmother, Miss Effie and her son Bill. Bill lived with Miss Effie under that tree for all but a few months of his life. The photo adjacent to this is dad, Uncle AV and me (looking like a serial killer in waiting).

 

There are no pictures of Dad’s half-brothers or step siblings on my desktop.  Our family’s annual treks down to Horry County were ritual, but related memorabilia is notably absent from my life’s collage. Until two days ago I hadn’t actually had a conversation with anyone from that side of my family in thirty years. I had no addresses snail mail or e-mail for any of my cousins.  Given the time that had passed I assumed the aunts and uncles had passed but I had no trail to follow.

 

Back in May 2021 I got a message on LinkedIn from my cousin Kay, my dad’s brother’s AV’s daughter.  In the day we had celebrated Easter in Longs a number of times together. So very cool she sought me out.  So random she found me on that platform.  Years ago, I set up a profile there but I have barely looked at LinkedIn in the past decade.  But she found me there and reached out.  Texts and e-mails followed and I sent off a note trying to set up a phone call but it didn’t happen.  My to do list had “Call Kay” as the third item right after lose weight and read more for the last 9 months. 

 

And then just a few days ago she found an e-mail I had sent back last year which due to the vagaries of e-mail’s magic, she had not read. Once she found it, she got back to me again.  We went back and forth a few times over e-mail and texts and set up a phone call.  So, Tuesday night we connected and we talked.  

 

And talked and talked. We ran through the memories of people we knew in common and the experiences we had shared down ‘neath my grandmother’s live oak tree. Being a southern family, we talked about people with names like Belva and Hancie.  I told her the tale of my afternoon with my Uncle Vance, his friend Johnnie (Walker) and his bright red Monte Carlo. We talked about places like Loris, Sunset Beach, Conway and Red Bluff. We caught up on people’s successes and fates. We talked for two hours plus.

 

Our lives have been different but we are kin.  I have often thought about Kay over the years because she seemed like she would travel a similar educational path as I did. I wondered what had become of her and what her life was like.  On Tuesday a window into our respective lives opened for each other. Two hours barely scratched the surface but it was a start. She may not be on a photo under the glass atop my desk but she and her folks will be in my memories as long as my brain cells keep working.  It was good to talk.

 

We didn’t talk music so I didn’t get to tell her about the song that always triggers memories of my grandmother and her home.  So here it is.