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I see how it is
November 27th, 2003
Just learned that my Grandfather Lee also passed away today. He was 97, so he had a good run of it. He also has been in the throes of dementia for the past two years, which must have been especially grueling for Dad, who visited him near everday.
George Timothy Lee, Senior was a farmer, a Methodist minister, a cars salesman for Chrysler during the depression, the father of seven suriving children and grandfather to many more. He made it to great-great-grandfather before passing away.
The two things I’ll remember most was how he used to entertain me and my brother Andy by dislodging his partial dentures and then popping them back in with a fascinating serires of sounds and how when he visited us in New Jersey my mother had to go to extra lengths to find a restaurant that didn’t even serve alcohol so he could treat us to dinner out as he insisted. He was that strict a Methodist.
I swear the next post will be about an abundance of good food, drunken intellectual arguments about popular television and the cuteness of Sydney Quinn.
But right now it’s time for the bourbon and Tom Waits…
Filed under Home & Hearth |4 Responses to “I see how it is”
I just spent my Thanksgiving with a crowd of strangers, all of whom welcomed me with immense cheer and hospitality. I was doused with cranberry sauce and red wine and four thousand platinum-haired children and dogs and candles and conversations about cultural isolationism in public schools on Indian reservations and blue teapots.
The friend of the family who brought me warned that we’d be staying all evening, because the family patriarch was a great friend of hers and is likely less than a year away from dying of pancreatic cancer.
He’s a beautiful, slender man in his mid-sixties who moseyed about in big beige corduroys and spoke in calm, honeyed tones about how much he despises the Bush administration.
It was the most poignant kind of chaos…
My father and I actually talked for a bit on how we could mark and remember people’s deaths and fuerals by the events surrounding said deaths–birthdays, holidays and weddings.
Thanksgiving is a big one for death, also rememberance and meaningful gathering of clan. Guess that’s why I never associate it with Pilgrims and Indians and more think of it as the feast marking Fall into Winter.
as it is and should be, really. We do the shoddiest job of covering up our pagan festivals.
Thank goodness, yes.
T’ain’t no wonder to me that certain celebrations get adopted and recycled and others simply fall away.