Bloodlines

     Been thinking on our mortality a lot recently...
     Strange topic, I know. And slightly depressing and scary.

      Went to visit Nano yesterday, which was nice. There's just something good about talking with her, because you know in the back of your mind, most people don't have their great-grandmas as long as I've had mine. And old people just have such a completely different mindset on life than we do now...

     Meg the cat had kittens a few weeks ago, and they're just now old enough to be adopted. One of Mom's cousins wanted one, so she drove east to Tahlequah to drop off the kitten before going to Westville to see Nano. Since the track is about a ten-minute walk from my dorm, I walked down there and rode with her.

     It was a good visit, we went grocery shopping and organized the medicine and looked through old picture albums. And also got a lamp from her neighbor's house and set it in the back room to await repairs.

     Nano just seemed so frail. It's incredibly sad to see elderly relatives you enjoy being around getting older. Her spirit is well, but beginning to wear down and out. Her eyesight is failing, and she can't move aroud quite as well as she once could. Still very healthy for a 92-year-old, but on the other hand...
     Seems like a lot of relatives' health are all crashing downhill at the same time...it's sort of scary, it'll be such a huge change, life will, when they're no longer here.

     Anyway, like I was saying, we were looking through old pictures, extremely old photographs, most of them. From the '20s and '30s, slowly increasing to nine years ago. A lot of characters from the early old stories are there: Charlie the train engineer, Nano's dad; her brothers Marvin and Leo, her sisters Lois and Ina, this unusual neighbor named Aint Sairy... Then later, pictures of everyone and their various beaux, which go with stories of dates to church and not marrying a man because of his rough hands... And then pictures of Nano and Dado, and Mimi, my grandma, as a little girl, in all the various places that they lived. Seeing what these locations of the tales Mimi would tell actually looked like, brings a whole new demension to the stories.
     Got me to thinking about the sort of people I came from.

     I've never been able to keep most anybody very straight, unfortunately; the really great historians are all very distantly related, so I don't know much. Through my mom's side, the Morrises, Cagles and Lankfords, were mostly farmers and such, a blend of English, Scotch and Cherokee that originally started out somewhere in eastern Tennessee and Kentucky, gradually moving west into Oklahoma. One of Mom's cousins is a congressman. The Lankfords were mostly the same; from Virginia into Tennessee, then to Oklahoma at some later point. Most of them were farmers or ranchers, and when electricity came in; they all jumped on that. Switching back to Mom's mom's side, Dado single-handedly wired the entire town of Westville for electricity in 1946. Back to Mom's dad's side, Papa Lankford was a preacher and carpenter, and fourteen generations back in our family forest you can find Thomas Jefferson.

     I don't know much at all about Dad's side of the family; nobody else does, either. Irish blood is in there for sure somewhere, legend has it from a band of pirates. Cherokee and Creek blood came in there, too; the earliest I know of, those ancestors came from eastern Colorado, western Kansas and somewhere east, like North Carolina or Georgia. My dad's uncle is a senator, my great-grandpa (who I was named after) was a successful businessman in the optical field, and Dad's mom was a DJ.

     But mostly, there's just ordinary people, who had to work extremely hard for whatever they got in life. The storytelling gene has been passed down through the years, I seemed to have picked up an extra-strength dose of that one. Humor has been passed along as well, which is a fantastic legacy, although one that doesn't mesh as well with the intense drive to succeed.

     Whatever collection of personality quirks and histories go into making a person, well, here I am. It's impossible to tell exactly how much heredity and natural disposition vs. environment and circumstances go into making a person who they are, and even harder to assess your own personality and understand it, to accept both the strengths and weaknesses in their actual porportions in order to go through this life.

     I like looking through old pictures.