Listing Off the Ancestral Dead, partially.

There's never been any ambiguity about death 
in my family. It's actually one of our 
saving graces--even tho it doesn't 
seem to save much. 

Let's see: I think Grandma Violet was 
the first to go. 1988. I was 5. 
Mom picked me up from Kindergarten 
and we drove to see Aunt Laura (she 
worked at the Bank) and Mom explained it as 
Grandma went to Heaven, but Mom 
didn't want Anti-Secretkeeper Little Richard 
(Me.) to the break the news to Aunt Laura, 
which I did. With quite a good deal 
of animation. 

Five years later, I guess I was in Fifth Grade, 
maybe Fourth? I was slow & mischievous 
from the Beginning: I know I've brought 
much of this on myself...and no Grandpa Bob 
to scold me--and I think he would've been 
the one to: He drove a tank in World War Two; 
he grew up in Brooklyn, but also purchased 
 land 
in some then-foreign place called Kent Lakes, New York. 
He didn't live there. 
He built a house there. 
They say he was a functioning alcoholic, whatever 
that means for someone born during Prohibition, 
lived in the Great Depression, then 
drove a fucking tank during World War Two. 
He died about age 70, I think. 
(Laura got the house and Cousin Bobby 
moved out fast when he was 17 and 
me and my then/friends moved in around 
2001 or there were always, usually, too many 
people there and the house steadily falling apart... 
I went to Nevada & Illinois (complete other 
bullshit story) in 2004--and there went all the 
other people in the house, which Laura finally 
sold for pennies to live in one of the many ugly 
trailers in Dover Plains, New York (which actually 
burned down in 2013) (before Laura finally passed 
away in 2020... My mom's now septuagenarian...) 

And there are more (my dad, for instance, in 2014) 
but I don't want this to become tedious. 
Let's call it a day and say Tomorrow's Another. 

Mahalo. 





**** 

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