Perceptions

Jimmy brought up a very interesting point about this whole effort, namely that given the great disparity in our ages--21 years between Guinn, the oldest, and myself, the youngest--as well as the fact that there are gaps of eight years, five years, nine years, between the rest of us, our perceptions of our parents, not to mention the other members of the family, are very, indeed vastly, different. I remember them mostly as old people, with grandchildren my age. I played with nieces and nephews who were my age, and cousins who were actually second cousins. My aunts and uncles were far older than I was at the time I knew them, so my perceptions are going to be very different from Guinn's, Randall's, and Jimmy's, and theirs will likewise differ from each other. One case in point that illustrates this very well is Guinn's comment about Ruth Mae, our mother. She was a very different person before Roy Lee died in 1970, very fun-loving and ready to enjoy life. Guinn wrote of her in a 1997 email:


"Mother wasn't the same person after Daddy died so they [her children] really didn't know Mom either. ... Mother was chosen to go with my senior class to New Orleans on our senior trip [right after WW II? -RW]. She was very well liked by my friends. She worked like the dickens at our senior shack. She was a lot of fun. She too us to all the out of town football games when I was a senior. And when [the other kids] were small she was always wanting to go on a picnic. One of my fondest memories is of the time we all went to Purgatory [Colorado] to go on a picnic and couldn't find any spot and we kept looking and looking and daddy (he wasn't of the picnic mentality) kept growling and growling about Mary Joyce and Mother and Baptists and picnics. We finally found a spot and made some coffee and he calmed some. But Mother was really enjoying herself. And she loved to play Wahoo! I remember she'd land on your space and would be so sorry that she just had to send you back...All except Teresa. On Teresa's spot she would never land. But what I'm saying is that the lady was fun. She had a good sense of humor and there was nothing she wouldn't for her kids and grandkids. One her her favorite expressions was that she'd go through Hell to get one of us a stick of gum. [...] And she loved to play the slots. She went with us to Vegas twice and to Bullhead several times. She'd carry her cup of nickels around and she loved it."

This is so true; when you look at all these family photos, as I've been doing lately, she always has a smile and just a look of fun. Indeed, when I was younger I never remember her being down in the dumps; she'd get after me about being a slacker teenager, which indeed I was, but she was always ready to go somewhere, to drive me to a friends house, to cook something up for me and my friends, to go on a picnic. As Guinn says, all that changed after Roy Lee died in 1970. After the funeral and all was over and everyone went back to their families, homes, and jobs, I was there with Mom, and she was devastated by Roy's sudden loss. She keened; I don't think I'd ever given that verb ["keen (kēn) : Irish: a wailing for the dead; dirge [...] lament or wail for the dead; to make a wailing, shrill, or mournful sound suggestive of a keen"] any thought before but that's just what she did, rocking and keening. This went on for weeks, and after a while I just couldn't stand it anymore. Even after we moved to Vernal, she never seemed the same; always a sense of loss, a shadow, a sigh. They had just celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary a month before he died, so of course she did feel a great sense of loss and there's no gainsaying that. We all did. But I guess I was, at 17, ready to get on with my life--now that I didn't have much choice anyway--and wanted her to Just Get Over It. Harsh, I know, and I'm ashamed to say it colored my relationship with her until she passed away almost two decades later. It's one of the things that affects my own relationship with my own kids, in what I hope is a favorable way. Ah well.