Baby Steps

So I'm trying to think of an object lesson. 

Because object lessons illustrate things. 

Things I want to convey. 

Remember when I went to Mt. Carmel to reconcile and reconnect with my past and my people? 

And remember when I said it's very hard to write about it? 

I didn't mean hard painful--over that part--I meant hard complicated! 

See my dad's family had an extremely complex family dynamic.  With very little food available to cope with that dynamic.

You get me?  

Manipulation, guilt and endless projects are so much easier to take when you've got Cheetos and Ding Dongs and Oreos to shove into your pie hole.  

And there's nothing like a Code Red Mountain Dew to take the edge off religious zeal.

I used to have food issues, btw.  (And I still have religious zeal issues.) 

It would take mounds and mounds of words to make you feel what I felt, and help you understand what I understand. About Psychology.

Let me just say that my dad was the favorite.  Everybody lubbed his guts.  Especially his sisters and his brothers and his mother and father. They missed his guts excessively when he died. Insomuch that they did feel that they were the only ones who missed his guts. And they did clutch and cling mightily to the memory of his guts.  Or at least to their memory of his guts, minus our memory of his guts. 

In other words, they didn't know about half the crap we went through. 

Just keepin'  it real. 

But it wasn't all crap. Family dynamics can be hilarious.

For instance, while I was in Mt. Carmel a few weeks ago, one of my dad's sisters mentioned that she had a couple of boxes she'd been saving--boxes full of my dad's stuff that she felt ready to turn over to me and my siblings to distribute amongst ourselves. 

Imagine my excitement! 

I don't have anything of my dad's (unless you count my extremely charm-your-socks-personality and the cowlick motif going on in my hair.)  


"Do you want some help carrying it down," I asked, anxious to see the treasures.


"No, I can get it," she said.  And she could. She really, really could.

She returned with these two boxes:


Photos are scaled to actual size. 

It's a reel to reel tape entitled The Road to Bethany.

And a check book box full of a tiny magazine cut outs, a poem, and a list of funeral arrangements.

Not sure how I'm going to divide it amongst the seven of us children.

At least I have first pick of the Jesus pictures.