I promise to type in another one or two of my early fiction tales soon. Meanwhile, going through some old papers and greeting cards, I found a few more verses that never made it into either Walking Down My Shadows or Mother-Daughter Lines, the first properly published and the other just printed and comb-bound to give some to family and a few friends. It is special since after my mom's death, I found quite a few verses she had written before her marriage and a very few afterwards. In many cases we wrote about similar subjects although each in our own way, style and the context of our times--she was growing up in the 1930s where I was in the 1950s and 1960s. I was much more prolific than she was and continued to write a lot after my marriage which she did not. I found that sad but to some degree I understand.
In between getting all wrapped up in the Iditarod and some of the things that happened on that event this year, I was reading some journals of Mom's and also my youngest brother. If I hoped to find some answers or sense within the tangled and often distressing pattern of our family's life, I didn't accomplish that. But the common threads did convince me that I am not either misguided and misunderstanding nor alone in my perceptions and pain. There is no repairing what is past; all I can hope is that all of us worked through some complex karma and learned lessons cut deeply into our souls with painful and difficult events so that our next lives will be better for it.
I am sure I mentioned before that my youngest brother, Alex, sixteen years my junior, who lived at home with our parents after having open heart surgery late in 1978 until our Dad died in a peculiar accident in 1989. Thus he got a very late start on his life as an adult. He struggled to adjust from a life experience level of about eighteen at the age of thirty jumping into the 'real world'. but plowed on through his AA degree to a BA and finally a JD, completing law school at Arizona State in Tempe. I might add that he had excellent grades throughout that whole process.
Sadly he had just gotten established in his chosen profession as an attorney and finally bought a home when he died from an aneurysm at the age of forty-six. A vessel swelled and burst, very near the site of his surgery where he had a stint put in due to an underdeveloped aorta. Like me, he suffered always from low self esteem and lack of confidence but he did not find a mate and partner who helped him get rid of a good part of that as I did. I am so thankful for my husband who worked so hard to pull me out of my own self-defeating image. Life is often unfair. Alex was a brilliant legal writer and scholar and would have made a good judge someday or instructor/mentor had he lived that long.
Here is a picture of me with Alex when he was about a year old. He was a Taurus too, barely, born on May 17. This was in the spring of 1960.
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