I am somewhere between telling you exactly what I think with no holds barred and not saying a damn thing until I am asked.
And even then I don’t promise to speak or agree to anything.
Not saying this in a reverse psychology kind of way because I haven’t got the energy. Too much time this evening fixated on crap I want to put aside but can’t quite let go of yet.
Frustrated ‘cuz after months of it I sense a change in the air and hear it in the emails but I don’t have details so maybe it is nothing.
Maybe I lack perspective but then again maybe I don’t. Maybe the 183 emails of the past two days and the 500 the week before are a good indicator that multiple people think I know something.
And maybe I am frustrated navigating a path where I don’t know if I am better off trying to blaze a trail or keeping my head down and eyes open so I don’t trip.
Only a couple of days or so until my baby turns 16 and tries to forget that her grandfather died on her birthday.
Had he been conscious of the calendar I am certain he would have figured out how to wait a day or check out a day sooner.
But he wasn’t and he didn’t so I do my best to help my girl not feel badly about what she can’t control.
I couldn’t separate the days two years ago but last year I could and this year I shall again. They are two different moments and it is easy for me to do it.
The past few days this baby girl of mine has made me choke with laughter. She is funny and she thinks like I do.
Not in every way or about every thing, but her thought process in some areas is so familiar I can see it coming from a mile away.
Probably not what she wants to hear now, that she thinks like a 51 year-old almost middle aged man.
That is ok with me, it is a time for trying to figure out who you are. Same story with her older brother, I don’t need either one to be just like me.
There are interests and experiences I wish they had but for now those are just ideas and who knows what comes next.
****
As I reconnect with family we lost touch with I have encountered stories I haven’t heard in years. There are echoes from the past coming forward, fragments of memory of doing a family tree for school more than 40 years ago.
Flotsam and jetsam floating to the surface and in it I can hear Dad talking to Grandpa and maybe to Zaidy, my great-grandfather.
I definitely can see him sitting on a chair, dark sunglasses and a cane in his hand. This man who once fought with the police in Chicago and would get fired for trying to build a union for tailors.
Some of those stories I know very well because grandpa talked about his dad many times and I was lucky enough to have grandpa around until I was 37.
Dad told stories about his grandfather too so that filled in a few gaps too.
Zaidy was the oldest of all of the kids and I wonder if he knew all of his siblings, especially the younger ones who were born years after he left Lithuania.
If the few records I have are correct there might have been about 25 years between him and the youngest.
As far as we know the Nazis got her and whatever other family hadn’t left.
Would be nice to talk to any of the Wilner men about current circumstances but that is not an option so I guess I’ll have to keep my own counsel.
Watch out world, I am in that place.
