Fourth of July

This is certainly not a great picture.  It’s not even in focus even though I was using automatic—well, I’m learning.  However, this is a picture of people.  Okay, children who are well on their way to being people.  The kids are the children of my cousins, the grandkids of my Aunt Georgia and Uncle Jim

I went to my aunt and uncle’s cabin in the “mountains” of central Pennsylvania for the Fourth of July.  Uncle Jim is my dad’s youngest brother.  He seems the sanest of the five siblings by quite a bit.  The youngest sister has been hospitalized for depression and is probably bipolar.  The oldest brother and sister seem to be deeply unhappy and stuck in the ruts of their personality.  I credit my dad for having changed a great deal for the better over the course of his life, but when I was a kid, he and my mom were pretty unhappy and did nearly as much emotional damage to us as their parents did to them.

So being with my aunt and uncle and their family was a little surreal—they are or were just a little more emotionally healthy than my parents but that little bit makes a profound difference.

I’m afraid that what I’m trying to say here is going to sound like I am idealizing their family.  I’m not around them often, but I can see some flaws—the strains in the cousins’ marriages, a snobbish and materialistic streak here, an angry and morose streak there. 

But I also see that all three are married, and their marriages are settled and appear to be solid.  They make money and are not in any financial distress.  They have kids.  Their kids are good kids, and loved kids.  The oldest girl makes me think of what I might have been like as a child if my intelligence had been met with affection instead of the barbed combination of pride and resentment that shaped my parents’—especially my dad’s—attitude toward me.

In any case, my cousin who I am not close to invited me to join them at their cabin, and I went.  I played with their kids in a cold mountain stream, drank with them, and let them rib me a little bit about how much my grandmother, my dad, and whoever used to brag about me.  I know that many of my cousins resent me because other people bragged about me a lot when none of them, the braggers or their audience, really knew me at all. So I allowed them to finally get a glimpse of me.