i was pleased to discover that i am allergic to oklahoma. i was blowing my nose the whole time i was there, until the minute i stepped on the plane to come back.
my grandma lavished us with gifts. she got my dad a bottle of honey, and gave me a pair of booties.
my uncle died unexpectedly in december, but i learned two new things about him. he met my aunt in a mcdonald's. and since he was the epitome of a used car salesman, and an actual used car salesman, i was not at all surprised to learn he hit on someone at a mcdonald's. and for their first anniversary, he bought his bride a duck gun.
i took a picture of one of my dad's childhood creations. it has been sitting on a shelf since he made it around the age of 11. he made a house of toothpicks. if you're picturing something lame, you shouldn't be.
the "party" was just dinner at a restaurant, but it was still fun. my aunt got him a certificate for a free massage. his response: "so that's...really going to happen?" and my dad got him a book about the air and space smithsonian, and a dvd that gives a tour of it. my grandpa was in the air force. but i love that the exact same present could be given to an 8 year old boy, and he'd be just as thrilled.
as soon as we got back to their house, my grandpa disappeared to his work room and watched a dvd of his birthday party. my grandpa looooves making dvds. i'm hoping he does the same thing he did for my grandma's 90th party. he sent me a dvd of the party... and then a few months later, sent it to me again.
do you love my family yet? do you wish they were your family?
some distant cousin i don't know gave my grandma a box of pictures of the family. old pictures. faded pictures. yellow, black, and white pictures. they're amazing. taken by what i assume was the first kind of camera that people ever owned personally. my grandma actually said she has one of the original cameras in her attic. it's a box camera. anyway, i was mesmerized by these pictures. when i imagine people living early in the 20th century, i imagine them being bored or something. with nothing to do. which is ridiculous, i know. but i have no real concept of that part of history. but these pictures captured beautiful moments in time. people building houses. people having fun. girls climbing in trees in their dresses. (because they couldn't wear pants!) siblings having fights. children learning how to walk. grandmothers smiling about...who knows what. people living.
i like learning about my own history.
i stole two pictures. they had duplicates in the box! and my grandma gave me one wallet-sized picture of my dad in elementary school.
of course i tried to take pictures of some of the best pictures, and of course the quality is poor. very poor.
my dad said a few words at the party. he quoted some verse in philippians about considering other people better than yourself, and said he put a picture of his parents in his Bible next to that verse. because they have always lived life that way. they are really cool people. i didn't appreciate them when i was younger. and because of how they've spent their life caring for others, they now have people caring for them. they've gotten kind of feeble lately. they're 91 and 90, you know. but i've found out in the past couple of years that they have amazing neighbors. their neighbors mow their lawn for them, and buy groceries for them. this is kind of morbid to say, but i hope they cling to life until august 21st. that's their 70th wedding anniversary. and i really want to celebrate that.
and, in closing:
i slept in the living room on their sofa bed. i am fairly certain i woke up in the middle of the night and saw my grandma sitting in the chair next to the couch, watching me and my sister sleep. i got up at 4am, so it was before then. the middle of the night. i don't think i was sufficiently disturbed by this at the time. but i think it really happened, because not long after i heard her frying bacon in the kitchen. before 4am! and when i did finally wake up for good, it was gone.
who knows what else would happened if i had been there longer than a day.
1 comment:
1. were you there when grandma was trying to steal the pictures she wanted to keep? she's actually supposed to just write names on the backs of the ones she recognizes then give the pictures back to that cousin. but she keeps trying to just steal them instead. hilarious.
2. at 2 a.m. grandma came in the living room to answer the phone when jamie called, so you probably really did see her at that point hahahah.
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