• In the upper left is my younger uncle who was at UVA. He was always more like a big brother to me. He’s a secret agent or something now (4realz IRL). He’s a
• Next to my uncle in the glasses and purple shirt with a sash/tie/ascot is my cousin. She’s the middle child in her family and has inherited the job of keeping her family together. I never spent much time with her because when I was visiting Pittsburgh she was a teenager doing teenager things. She spent a summer with us in Rockville and we hung out as much as a seventeen year old could hang out with an eight year old.
• Next to my cousin with the Angela Davis afro is my aunt. She died of cancer in 2003. She was my first best friend. She would take me on all kinds of adventures from the time I was about LMJ’s age. I remember riding in her green Pontiac Grand Am. I think I was five or six when she upgraded to a black on black Chrysler Cordoba. This was before Ricardo Montalban was pimping the rich Corinthian leather. She was a scientist with Litton Bionetics(?) before she blazed the Florida trail for all of us. The world was a much better place with her in it.
• Next to her is the HNIC, my Pops. There is a lot more of him now, and as amped up as he is, he’s seriously mellowed. He’s the American success story: growing up a black orphan in Cleveland, ultimately earning a masters degree from Pitt, working in politics until about 1980 when I guess he got burned out, tried real estate, smoked and stressed himself into lung cancer in 1985, made that lung cancer his personal bitch, gained about ten pounds, did the Lord’s work for a long time running the Feed The Hungry program at the cathedral like it was important, put up with an inordinate amount of quantum level bulls**t from the author. Ran a parking lot services business, got his kids out of college prepared for the real world, and has now retired into harassing his wife, spoiling his granddaughter, and occasionally hustling some pool – allegedly.
I’ll do the next row, at least, tomorrow. I don’t want this turning into a two thousand word post.
2 comments:
Yay! You're so good to me. I love your descriptions of your family--you capture details and still give the whole picture. I especially liked the description of your dad, but maybe that's because I know him!
You're getting so nostalgic.... must be the fatherhood thing. These are LMJ's people now too. A few decades from now she'll be describing you as the amped-up, newly mellowed pops....well, maybe not the mellow part!
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