I don't do much blogging these days ... but was reminded, today, that I used to. Just once in a while, though. A friend sent me a copy of this old one I (unnecessarily, of course) offered up some 2+ years ago. I gave it a read again. Thought it wasn't so bad. So I'll throw it into the mix and give it a breath of fresh air this morning. It's just a bunch of words, finally. But they're all true and, as such, matter. Somehow.

I sit around a lot. This is a situation that can't exactly be helped but, aside from blisters on my butt, sitting just BEGS for thinking too much. Today I got to thinking about that unnecessarily short-in-letters but long-on-pit-stops word: LOVE. At the moment it would be awfully handy to have someone I love (and who hopefully loved me back) on the premises, but it got me thinking even deeper. I was reflecting on my family members, past and present, whose forays into that cataclysmic adventure called 'love' got me into these socks and eyeglasses that I'm wearing. So to speak, as time progressed they did, anyway. What an amazing bunch! No wonder the waters, as I perceive them, are muddy. Yet interesting as Hell!

- My maternal grandparents were an interesting start. My Grandmother, who died long before I was born, is said to have contracted some ghastly thing while trudging through a flood to free the horses that were trapped in the barn and sure to drown. Her life ended in 1929, details unknown (aside from toxic water and such). Her husband, my Grandpa, was a lazy oaf I've been told. All I knew of him was that he was EXTREMELY casual to be around when I was a kid. In a crowded parking lot and he had to pee? Well, what else to do but unashamedly take care of it right there in front of half the population? Pretty crude vernacular on that one, too (but, I came to learn, people who urinate without an ounce of modesty rarely watch their language). He married his second wife - who I knew as my "real" Grandmother - soon after the first wife died. My living Grandma was some 15 years his junior, facially deformed, basically the scourge of the mountain where they lived. A rape victim left with a bastard child, totally uneducated, impossible to be understood by most [I never once, though, had trouble with her speech ~ I didn't know for the longest time that there was anything unusual about what was called a "hare lip" or that it was particularly odd that a person had absolutely no roof in their mouth and no teeth]. But my Grandpa was happy to marry her/make an "honest woman" out of her (he also needed someone to help him raise his four motherless children at the time, too, make no mistake). May I also say that that woman, Miss Opal, was the most genuinely kind and real human I've ever met. 15 kids and a husband who never worked a day in his life never dimmed the light within her.
Note: the first Grandmother, we detectives found out later, died in a sanitorium. No horses or West Virginia heroism after all. And the hospital wasn't the sort of place where one went to get over tuberculosis or something. But we never said anything. The legend sounded much more digestable.

- Then there's my Dad's parents. Couldn't be more different than the other ones! My Grandfather there, who died in 1939, was a well-bred slave "owner" from Kentucky - of course he didn't own them anymore, but his family thought they still did. At about 45 years old he met this roaring 20's Flapper gal - wild, willful, drop-dead gorgeous and, yes, half his age AND from a family of salt-of-the-Earth coal miners. The stories were just too juicy for words on that marriage. Grandpa, who had easily married both out of his class and had the gall to do it with a wildcat who chased him with hot irons and threw hammers at him regularly, drank A WHOLE LOT. It finally killed him. Livers enlarged to the size of the county you live in usually do that. Grandma wasn't finished yet, though. As time passed and raising two children alone got on her nerves she flipped the coin and took up with the delivery boy who was app. 20 years HER junior, just to balance things out in reverse. That marriage lasted long enough for me to remember. A match made in Heaven indeed. One Thanksgiving the extended family had gathered at Grandma Bernice's house and, being quite a good cook, it was a feast. While serving, she set places for us all with much goodness and light but when she got to her husband's chair she politely placed his plate of food onto the floor next to his chair. I believe there was a comment regarding "all the dogs should eat together" or something equally cordial. Lucky for him he divorced her finally and went on to a much more sensible coupling but, and I have to say it, my Grandma was a dear to me and my brother. We loved her endlessly and I mean it. That could have changed, though, had she fed us on the floor and/or chased us with activated appliances. She didn't. She loved us, after all.

So, anyway, as I sat and thought about it, maybe it is just less complicated and better that I have no one to help me up and down the steps or listen to me whine about my sore rear end. Perhaps Tina Turner was right! What's Love Got To Do With It? And then I remembered all that I had learned from these rather odd assemblages of emotions, tantrums, catfights and unrelenting passion (no matter what the source of it was to begin with or ended up to be). Love has EVERYTHING to do with it. Now, granted, it wouldn't make my body parts any more co-operative or my stairs more mountable. But it surely would, and I know it, make the days a whole lot more interesting were I in love in my house. And, from the perspective of rescued horses, freed slaves, The Charleston (and prohibition), what some might call the 'Boo Radley' of Elizabeth, West Virginia and even that (nice, albeit too tolerant) guy who was really nothing like a dog at all I learned that, even on its worst day, love is as permanent, in some ways, and essential as anything we can ever touch. And, I think, it's why we live.

Either that or it kills us *sigh*. But, and I know this for 100% certain, better killed by love or lightning than to just drift off without a few memorable gunshots. Or is that a few unforgettable heartbeats? Whatever it is, it sure seems like a decidedly peculiar (and perfect) bliss to me.

*Yowza! That was too long. Sorry 'bout that. But, I reckon, no one said you had to read all of it. As mentioned: I've got time a-plenty to type up crap like this...

posted by Gatsby722 at Oct 12 06, 10:51 PM