Y Teulu.  The Family.



Some of the Thomas Clan in Cedar District, south of Nanaimo.

      

    Perhaps the reason I enjoy the author Stephen King is that, hidden behind a lot of fictional horror, he hides many truths. One of his short stories, the name of which escapes me (many memories escape me these days...and that will play into this long tale many times), Mr. King discusses time.  Time is a funny thing; it's perception, not reality.


Y brodyr

   

     As a child, time drags. Everything is forever and the minutes, hours, days, and months ooze by like spring mud down a meandering creek.  I remember returning to school each year, dressed in the obligatory new back-to-school jeans ( or corduroys back then) and hand-me-down T-shirts, and feeling like it had been "forever" since I had seen any of my school mates.  It was like they had become strangers despite the fact it had been just eight short weeks.    

      We all dreamt of growing up and becoming adults with all the freedom that comes with adulthood. And we were all going to live forever.  We  always had time. 

    Then adulthood comes and life starts racing by.  Graduations, jobs, careers, lovers,  marriages, births, mortgages, taxes, deadlines, car payments, and everything else that, apparently, define adulthood.  You are once and forever 28 years of age and the world is your pearl.



Do you recognize them?  Ormond, Kelvin and Bryce H

  

 Then somehow the day comes that you are 58 or 68 and you have no idea where those years disappeared to. I guess the years went wherever my black hair went, to be replaced with bare scalp and grey stubble...the same place that belly came from, no doubt.

    And suddenly you stop counting up and start counting down.  All of us get a to point that we can see the horizon and know, just on the other side of that horizon, is the great unknown.

    The world is not flat, but life certainly is: there is an edge that each of us reach and beyond that edge is just a black abyss.

    Unfortunately, at the end, when the end is just over there, time slows down and starts dragging like our childhood summer.

     Except now that endless summer is filled with painful joints, failing hearts, swollen prostates and burgeoning cancers. The days are tracked by doctor's appointments and hours are marked by which drug come with or without food. And pain is ever present.

   Counting down....what I call "Waiting for Godot"; standing around making pointless small talk waiting for the arrival of the important and expected party guest, Death (I hear he likes peanut butter and vaguely looks like Brad Pitt). Tick tick tick.

    My realization of how short my days are came at a family funeral of my cousin Amy  Olive Fleming. 

    Amy had been a force of nature, a mover and a shaker. For the majority of her life she had lived in Nanaimo, really just two hours away from my current home.  I had never really made the slightest effort to visit with her.  I had passed on the chance to get to know somebody who was truly special within her own community. I hadn't made any time for Amy.

    It was only after the funeral, as I sat around chatting with the few cousins left, that I realized that each of us remembered a few crumbs of our family's history, but none of us knew any real details.

    And our children, the next generation,  have no knowledge of where they came from at all.  In the modern world, apparently, chickens don't come from eggs; they just appear spontaneously without any progenitors at all.

    Banksy, the famous urban artist, once quipped "Each of us die twice: once when we stop breathing and once again when our name is said for the last time"

    If we don't at least try to remember their names, our ancestors are, at last, truly dead.  

    We all have to remember that what comes around, goes around.  Forgetting your past gives your decedents license to erase your existence too.

      It's all about a legacy.  Big or small, we want to leave something lasting behind. Our legacy.

    This blog is about the family as I remember it.  My memory is by no means what it once was and I have always had the policy of never letting the absolute truth get in the way of a good story.  Some of my tales here will be barely more than stories and I sure as hell am not apologetic about that.

    Nobody appreciates boring.

    Teulu is the word for "family" in Cymraeg, or Welsh Celtic, hence the name of the "blog".


A span of three generations from three families.

The labels are courtesy of Kelvin Orr








  


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