What to do with Gavin ?
That was my problem this morning as I looked up my sister Pat Shure in the worn green book, our long-time family phone directory.
Kids, friends, relatives and a few forgotten people with old area codes. Addresses are crossed out and new ones added as people move about. Gavin Scott is there.
He’s a close friend and I call on him for advice and a laugh. But I can’t call him on the phone because Gavin is dead. Died suddenly a few years ago in his sleep. To say Gavin, a roommate in college and soul mate in life and death, failed to take care of himself would be an understatement. But he took wonderful care of his friends.
I had not seen Gavin for many years before he retired to his home in Quebec. We found one another, he after a life abroad as a foreign correspondent for Time, and myself bouncing from newspaper to newspaper in the state. Since we were both 18 I’d admired his amazing ability as a reporter and his way with friends.
“Hey, Billy boy, “ he called out when we were reunited on his simple porch. It was like he had never left and we were working stories at college, raising hell and drinking far too much, far too often. A cigarette was still in his mouth. Hale he was not, hearty though, just aglow. Gavin had always been small of stature but large in heart.
So what to do now with Gavin’s name in the green book ? He has been dead a while, and I guess he won’t be callable again. Erase it, call the number to see if he’s home by some miracle, or cross it out, indicating his departure? I never crossed him out before when he left. Instead I left the number there, awaiting his return.
They say as long as you remember the dead, they stay alive. Now, since he is still my best friend, what would bring me to fiddle with his listing at all ?
And how about the others ? They are in the green book, silent and uncallable in this world. As we grow older our address book becomes, how to say, out of date, just like our clothes.
I’ve left Gavin and the others in the book. I go through it from time to time looking for them, especially Gavin. I won’t need his number to have a chat.
I think I remember George Carlin saying, vis-a-vis the same dilemma, that 6 months is long enough to wait. Old enough now that I know more dead people than living ones, I understand the reluctance to remove names from my address list. I don't have a green or black book but have lists on computers and, hardest of all to delete, names and numbers on speed dial.
George discoursing on how we relate to the dead on You Tube -- no doubt knowing that would be the only place I would hear it -- gave me permission.
Posted by: Albaz on January 6, 2011 6:22 PMNice. That's the choice I've made also.
I also have kept all the old addresses of my wife and myself and my living siblings in my book. It's good for the old memory maker.
Posted by: Jim H. on January 6, 2011 11:28 PMOne thing I'd ask you old timers to do is to get your DNA test done. I'm the last male in my male side of the lineage so I'm the only one in the family to have been able to give up the genetic code that I could leave for my ancestors from tjhe female line to look at in the male line. I don't plan to have any more kids that's for sure. The male line is pretty clean with government spies and government blackmailers and other "reputable" people in it. Except for the lunatic from the early 1800s who for all I know was also a government spy and had to go into hiding by posing as a lunatic. Supposedly the records of my DNA are at the University of Arizona I believe (which wasn't a problem state when I had the test done but supposedly are kept "secret"). But somehow they traced me back to a relative who was declared a lunatic in the early 1800s who by census records and the like traces me back to the 1700s and a famous, at least in our line, of more than half a dozen brothers that carry my "real" name. I think the one I have the DNA link to got labeled a lunatic intentionally to avoid debtor's prison but that's a guess. Politics being what it was in those days, not much different than today if you read enough history, maybe he got driven crazy by the politicians in his day which sometimes I feel myself (like politics is driving me crazy). My cousin has been driving all over the country tying all this together with the other lines in the family.
I found out all kinds of things, like the ax murderer who killed my great- grandfather's sister on my father's mother's side over allegations of money theft in an estate (the money theft part turned out not to be true but the great gramdfathers sister and my great grandfather lauded it over some other relatives and acted like they had made out like bandits even though they didn't get a dime more than they were entitled -chalk the ax murder up to that I guess. (it was alleged they stole part an estate but with women dying in child birth in those days estates got complicated). My dad had already told me about one of my great grandfather's on my fathers side who owned the local livery stable, Ford dealership and had numerous tenant farmers. He would order mules from Chicago and the minute they got off the train he would start popping them with a whip - he was teaching my dad this skill which turned my Dad off to the old man forever. The only good thing he did was, when my Dad got out of the service and was drawing his 52/20, he layed into him and said "no one in this family has ever taken a dime from the government" and put him on a log truck which lasted two weeks, so my father went off to college and got an engineering degree on the GI bill - my father later found out his grandfather was getting rich off government subsididies and had been taking government money since Roosevelt if not before).
Back to the mule story. His explanation was that farmers wanted a lively mule and once he got the mules to behave in the correct Pavlovian manner, when a farmer showed up to buy a mule at his livery stable, the whip was popped not on the mule but the mules would jump and carry like a trained Pavlovian dog, so he had them fooled and got a higher price. He was not a horse thief but maybe what he did was worse. But he had 21 children, some of who died in child birth, two wives and didn't allow anyone to eat at the table until he had finished first. Sometimes he would lay his glass eye on the table while he ate. Made for plenty of cheap labor though, but all the money is gone, farming having gone to the big dogs now.
Well, anyway, Bill, you've got the males in your family so it's not really necessary but one day some relative might get a kick out of reading about the great and not so great relatives in your family line.
But one thing puzzles me. How did they get the DNA from those corpses laying in the ground for years? Is grave robbing still going on.
You might want to put these details about me in your address book. Just in case I have some of the genetics of my less illustrious kin. At least the disreputable ones didn't come from the male line. As far as I know, except for quite a number of the women who never married on the male line, they worked for the government and thus were fine upstanding citizens.
But as far as I know I'm an established upright citizen. No horse thieves have yet been found.
Posted by: Buck on January 10, 2011 7:59 AM