Give me land, lots of land......

There were no starry skies that night, nor blue skies the next day. In fact, the day of the funeral it poured solidly and consistently the entire day. I believe the weather cleared finally around nine pm and by eleven we could see the moon. By that time there was little solace it could offer.

I will take a break here from narrating events and describe my kin in detail. I have posted the photographs previously, please refer to them if interested. My mother, 64, was the eldest of three sisters, separated in age by around eight years. She was twelve years older than her sudden;y deceased brother. That means when I gathered the earliest memories of my uncle, thirty years ago, when I was around five years old, he was only twenty-two. My grandmother (my mother's mother) is in her mid-eighties. Her husband, my grandfather,was older than she by eight or so years He died in 1982, when he was seventy-two or so. My grandmother is younger than my father by about 4 years.

My mother's next younger sister is known as Jo, Aunt Jo, though her full first name is something else. She was the unattractive sister, the middle child, the wild one. She once turned a car over in the ditch while drag racing. Apparently my grandmother never favored her. Like the youngest sister, Jo went and studied nursing, but somewhere met a truck driver and married him. She was the first to wed. Her husband, a gruff, apparently humorless man, is named Dave. As the family in nearest proximity to us as kids, we saw them most frequently. They lived and raised their kids in kansas, about an hour's drive from the town of Manhattan.

Jo and her husband made their living in a variety of ways. During the fall and winter, Jo drove a school bus while Dave toured the country in the cab of an eighteen-wheeler. During the summer, they and their children were migrant harvesters. They leased trucks, combines and other vehicles and took them around to farmers who didn't have such motorized tools themselves. They would reap and thresh and bail field after field year after year. I was slightly jealous of this. Though it meant my cousins had less relaxing summers than I, it also meant they got driver permits when they were thirteen or fourteen so they could help in the work. My mother, in a similar fashion, can still back up a twenty-ton truck in a perfectly straight line, as one is required to do to follow behind the combine while it spits out its threshed grain into the truckbed. I always looked down and felt distinctly apart from my aunt and uncle and cousins. On one hand, they seemed like hicks with thick country accents. On the other hand, we seemed to them to be living in a scary, exotic urban habitat (we had gay people, for instance.)

Upon reflection, I never gave Jo and Dave enough credit for their now obvious intelligence, and for the closeness of their family. Their children, my cousins, are very smart, independent minded and world-wise. The youngest daughter, Travis, is my age within a month. She married at the age of nineteen, which I thought was a sure sign of the path her life would take. Her husband was in the military then and she moved to Germany with him. Now he is a policeman in a small town in Kansas while she sells insurance. But she is well aware of the limitations of small towns and understands just where she is. She loves big cities regardless of where she prefers to settle down. I know it was her husband who was not comfortable living in Houston and preferred a return to Kansas. She has a son who is nearly twelve or thirteen.

Her sister, Tonya, is the eldest in the family being the same age as my sister, Jodi, who is thirty-eight this year. Tonya married right after finishing college. Her husband, Dave, was a school teacher and a skilled cabinetmaker. Apparently he is also a bit of an entrepeneur and has started up a number of reasonably successful businesses. Tonya teaches history in high school, but is moving more towards counseling full-time. She takes annual trips with students to Europe and parts of the U.S. and seemed most frustrated with living in a small town. But she gets out enough and recognizes the good points of raising her own son in such a situation.

The middle sibling is Tyler. He is my brother's age, thirty-seven or so, and the two are closer than I have been with any of them. He always seemed to me to be a stern, bossy, an relatively unknowable person. To some extent he remains so now. He studied mortuary science in college. My deceased uncle, in typical humorous fashion, gave him a shovel as a graduation present. Tyler moved to Houston to work in a funeral home. There, he came out of the closet as gay. This was a shock to the family, though my Mom, as usual, said something like "I always wondered..." I never wondered, it was a complete surprise. He met a man, Jerry, who worked in that gigantic funeral corporation. If you ever watched Six Feet Under it is that corporation that is being parodied as evil. Tyler essentially retired for awhile. He and Jerry (a vice-president or some such thing), live a jet set lifestyle. They came to my wedding mainly because it was a convenient excuse to visit New York. Tyler told me on Tuesday that his favorite restaurants in New York are 21 and Le Cirque and that he has a friend who just bought a condo in Trump Tower (overlooking Central Park, those apartments are known to sell for three million or more dollars). For hi sisters' birthdays, he flies them to Houston and gives them his credit card. For his birthday, Jerry flew his sisters out to meet him in San Francisco as a surprise. It is a lifestyle I cannot comprehend. Tyler is now getting into the home construction business. He has had a variety of illnesses and physical ailments in his life, so I worry about his health. But he will be well taken care of.

My mother's youngest sister is Sheri. She was always the pretty one, and very cute for a very long time. Now, as she is reaches her late fifties, her looks are suffering in many estimations. She is stick thin due to a rigorous diet. She is also an avid nudist and has sent postcards from various resorts urging my mother to join her. The tan she has is no doubt responsibe for her poorly aging skin. Smoking doesn't help. But it wasn't so long ago when all nurses smoked. Sheri was never good at relationships and has been in and out of marriage. Now she seems reasonably happy and settled though I know her sisters grumble in quiet corners about her current partner. Her children followed her on a wayward path. The oldest one, Trevor, is my brother Tom's age. He really meant to come to the funeral, which many didn't expect, but he missed his flight. So he is the only one not shown in the photos. He has had his own trouble with drugs and alcohol but I guess he has more or less solved them. He doesn't talk with his Mom and he seems to be running a micro-brewery in Seattle. I haven't seen him in twenty-two years or so. His sister, Dierdre, is the bombshell of the family. She actually had breast-reduction surgery though there is no way you could tell. She also is the live-wire party girl. She it was who was sharing in the shots of Red Bull and Jagermeister. She has also done time in a federal penitentiary for carrying drugs across a state line. She claims a certain innocence in this affair. The pen she was pent in was the same as the one Martha Stewart inhabited. Unfortunately for storytelling, their terms were not concurrent. I meant to get her to tell us about it but missed the opportunity.

There is yet more to come.....