Aunts and Uncles and cousins, OH MY!

 My Aunt Peggy Bartly Arnett

    For this entry I am going to lump together several questions asked about my extended family and family vacations because they all go hand in hand.  As I mentioned in the previous entry my grandparents did not live in the towns in which I lived, nor did any of my aunts, uncles or cousins.  Military life has a habit of making close extended families a very real impossibility.   On my Dad's side of the family were his two brothers and I do not recall spending much time with them as a child.  I do remember meeting my Uncle Dale's two boys  Mike and Doug on our trip to Oklahoma, and liked them well enough but have never spent time with them since then because our only links, my dad and our grandfather, both died shortly after meeting them.  I have since spent time with both of my dad's brothers after a 30 year gap, and am still grateful for the  opportunity to meet both of them.  I have also spent time with Bob's son John.  I remember him from the early days, he was stationed near us when I was little and so I remember him.  I had the good fortune to reconnect with him on our return from Hawaii and had dinner with him and his wife in Las Vegas.  It has been a real blessing to find my dad's family again after so many years.   I still keep in touch over the phone with Bob and exchange the rare e-mail with Dale and I think it does us all good.
     Just like my grandparents I know my Mothers brothers and sister better and consequently I know those cousins better.  As children we did spend a lot of time with my Mom's sister Aunt Peggy.  Several summer vacations were spent in Dallas hanging out at her house in Oak Cliff.  Who knew that as I was sitting in the Texas Theater a few blocks from her house  watching Bruce Lee movies one summer, my husband- to- be was in New Jersey reading about Lee Harvey Oswald and his attempted getaway that resulted in a murder in that very theater.  (Weird how our lives overlap even when we don't know it, yea?) So time spent in Dallas meant time spent with our cousins Marladean, John, Terry Keith and Terrilynn.  We liked all of our cousins and enjoyed time with them.  They were all older than us, but each in their own way built memories with us.  Marla by mothering us right along with her own two children Tommy and Monica, Terrilynn by taking us along on the wild ride that was her young adult life, John by spending happy hours around a dinner table playing Spades and telling funny stories and Terry Keith by zipping us all around Dallas in a silver corvette and then treating us to dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse in the West End back when it was cool.  Of course there is also Uncle Clarence and Aunt Jean and their kids, the twins Russ and Rene, and Myra Lynne.  They lived in Oregon, so we did not spend much time with them, though they did come several times, and I do feel as if I know them.  I am facebook Friends with Myra, and its nice knowing I can contact her whenever I like.   Mom also has another brother, Uncle Ken.  I guess of all her siblings he is the one I know best because he has lived in Clovis since the early 1990's and in Mom's house for a large part of that time.  He is what could be kindly described as an odd duck, not because of his "alternative" lifestyle, but for numerous other things, each when taken individually is only mildly quirky but the cumulative effect of them all over a span of time gets down right annoying.  This is why he and Mom finally had to part ways.  He is still in Clovis, at an old age facility sporting an ankle bracelet to help ward off his unsafe wanderlust.
      I have not really addressed the question of family vacations.  I can only remember two official family vacations.  Both were trips to Dallas, where we all piled into the car and made the 8 -10 hour drive from Clovis.  The last one was during Thanksgiving and I remember it well.  Granny lived two doors down from Aunt Peggy on Brooklyn.  The Oregon contingent came down in an RV and we were all together for that one glorious extended family Thanksgiving.  Uncle Ken was still living on the edge in California, but everyone else was there.  Those were not the only times we went to Dallas, but they were the only times Mom was with us.  We went several times on our own.  We flew once, but more often we rode the Greyhound bus.  Try putting two kids on a bus alone now and see where it gets you!  But we did it more than once back in the day. One time in particular I remember staying at Granny's house over the 4th of July.  We wanted to see fire works but there was no one to take us so we were out of luck.  Granny tried to console us with the offer of watching them on her TV that was in her bedroom.  No, we opted not to watch at all rather than on a 12 inch black and white TV.  That was the summer of the doodle bugs and the flu.  I came down with the flu and spent the bulk of my Dallas visit laid out alone on the living room sofa with no TV and no one to talk to.  Jamie, who was well went with Marladean, Granny stayed in her room watching soap operas and I laid on the sofa with tears in my ears suffering from not only the flu, but an epic case of homesickness.  When I felt well enough I would sit in the sandy patch in the front yard and torment doodlebugs by digging up their little sand funnels just so I could watch them spin around and make a new ones.  Its amazing how little it takes to entertain the truly bored...