About Your Favorite Uncle Shalom

Somewhere during the blur of time following my father’s death I decided to get into genealogy.

Call it a mix of curiosity and grief.

It was a chance to try to focus on some of the stories I had been told and to bring dad and everyone else who was gone back for a bit.

So I threw myself into it and built a tree that covered multiple generations and began to uncover stories and people I knew nothing about and those I did.

Got letters from people who thought they might be related that started with things like “About your favorite Uncle Shalom” and laughed because it wasn’t anyone I knew.

But it came after finding out about a grandmother who was married to someone other than my grandfather and learning about the aunt who gave up a baby.

It came after finding family we had thought lost in Israel and England and so I recognized some of these people might truly be related.

Maybe there is an Uncle Shalom somewhere in the tree that I haven’t uncovered yet.

After all my Zaide’s father got remarried and had more kids and I can’t tell you what happened to all.

There is no doubt the Nazis took some of them, but as I have learned they didn’t get all.

Movie Nights On The Couch

Caught The Notebook one night around this time of year many moons ago. Memory of the evening popped into my head a short while back.

Thought back on it because I heard someone say something about renting a movie from Blockbuster and tried to remember the last time I did that.

It feels like it happened the same year as The Notebook but then again, I am 98 percent certain it did not. Haven’t figured out why I associate the two, but I figure it will come to me.

Probably in the middle of the night or on a conference call the moment will distract me from whatever it is I am supposed to be focused upon.

That is how these things go.

I sometimes wonder if I have given myself A.D.D. and then I think about how strongly I can focus on certain things and stop wondering about it.

Lately my physical health has been of bigger interest because I am tired of not feeling 100 percent and certain physical impacts the mental. Fix one and the other improves…always.

Final Words

This particular post will be short so that I have time to focus elsewhere.

Going on gut instinct in a few areas and trusting that to lead me through the rapids and over the falls.

Some people have this funny idea that some things are eternal when it ought to be clear they are not at all.

When the extended silence comes you ought to take notice because if you aren’t deafened by it you haven’t paid attention and maybe that is how you earned it.

Such a peculiar time of transition and change. A collective reckoning as we walk through the storm knowing that who we are when we come out the other side will be different.

Will that be good, bad or in between?

Don’t know, have to wait to find out.