Do you see the little baby boy in the picture to your right? He's Martyn Lyle Loehrke, my youngest grandchild. His Mom is Beth, my youngest child. Tomorrow I hope I will be up by five a.m. so I can make it to the airport and get on that plane that leaves at seven a.m. I'm going to Portland, Oregon to see him and the rest of my family who live up there.
I've been looking forward to the trip for quite awhile. Both my daughters who live there are having birthdays next week. Beth will be 29 on the 29th, and Rachel will be... well, 42 on the 30th (of June). We'll be celebrating them together this year. This is the first year I have celebrated birthdays with either of them in a long, long time.
As I've mentioned in this blog in the past, we didn't celebrate birthdays very much when I was a youngster. I find the Thomas family does not make a huge deal out of anyone's birthday, but most every month all the birthdays are celebrated usually all at one time with potluck hosted by one or another of Jack's daughters, and of course birthday cake.
Two of Jack's six children live out of state, but all three of my children live either in Oregon or Georgia. Right now my son Jon is in Afghanistan, but his wife and six children are in Georgia. So it is a rare occasion that I get to be with my children, especially for their birthdays.
My first grandchild, Zeke Wittie, Rachel's firstborn, and then his sister, Stacie, were born in Anchorage, Alaska when I was about the same age Rachel is now. I got to be with them all the time. I babysat them, celebrated their first and second birthdays, maybe their third and fourth, right in my living room. They came over to "Grannie's house" all the time. However, later after their grandfather had a heart attack and died suddenly, Beth and I moved to San Diego. Some time after that, the Wittie family moved to Las Vegas, several hours drive from Grannie's house.
So Grannie and Beth would quite often visit them in Las Vegas, but sometimes they would come here. Either way, it was a long, hot, expensive drive, but worth it...
Zeke and Stacie have grown up now, and Stacie has Tucker and Raiden (the latter in utero still) who are my great grandsons. I wish I could visit them, but it is pretty much out of the question, as expensive as gas or airplane travel is these days.
I was thinking about a couple of times I visited with my grandparents in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Daddy (Lusk) came to get Mama, Jim and me in Pine Bluff and drove us to the old boarding house our Lusk grandparents owned. It was a huge old house with very high ceilings, a great foyer and big staircase. It was cold in the foyer but not in the side front room where our grandparents "lived." In the back it had a huge dining hall with a very long table that would seat... oh, probably twenty people. My grandmother cooked a huge Christmas dinner for all those people and served it elegantly.
The trouble was that Jim and I had a hard time finding something fun to do while we were there. There were no other children our age; our cousins who were there were in their late teens. It was difficult to relate to them. At one point we sneaked up the huge, beautiful stairs; our Grandfather had not wanted us to do that for fear we would disturb the tenants who lived up there. There was nothing interesting up there, though, just a long hallway with closed doors all the way back into the gloomy end of it. No fun at all. We went back down.
We tried sitting on the swing on the front porch, but that was... "sterile" too. Nothing was happening. It was cold, and, well, just "no fun." It was the first time I ever remember being "bored."
Thinking back on it, I wonder what my Grandmother thought. She wanted, I learned later, to have a relationship with us, to know us and spend time with us. But she didn't seem to know how to relate to us. I don't know; maybe she felt some strain in the atmosphere between Mama and Daddy (Lusk). It seemed to me that the whole atmosphere in the whole big house full of adults was, well, "strained." I think children pick up on those sorts of feelings among adults around them.
I never got to know my grandmother until many years later when I was twenty, married, and pregnant with my first child. Dave and I moved to Dallas, Texas where, after Grandfather's death, she had moved to live with her other son, Leroy. We lived there three months before returning to California. During that time I visited with her several times. She was in her eighties, frail, but very bright. She had been devastated when Mama had remarried and taken us "to the other side of the world" from her. I think she had always hoped her son would get back together with Mama, bring us near her where she could be a part of our lives.
Anyway, I tried to stay in contact with her until her death at age ninety-nine, even after we moved back to California and later to Alaska. I think I would have benefitted from a better relationship with my Grandmother, but that is hard to accomplish from a distance, especially without the media of today.
In this blog I have often mentioned how much the media available to all affects the children of this day and age, including my many grandchildren. On the up-side of that, though, is that it is much easier to stay connected with friends and family. I have unlimited long distance, and try to call all my children often, and grandchildren, too. (I wonder if they say, "Oh, no, it's Grannie..." when they hear the phone ring.) Skype is wonderful in that they can see me and know what I look like, not just a shaky old voice on the phone. (I'm smiling.)
I'm writing this blog so they will get to know their grandmother in ways that I didn't get to know mine.
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