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jazzfishMom rolled into B-burg around 11:30 on Wednesday the second. Piled into her car and away we went. Thirteen hours later it was 'welcome to Helena.' Tennessee is around eight hours across: two from the border to Knoxville, three from Knoxville to Nashville, three from Nashville to Memphis. Add in an hour and a half drive south of Memphis and two hours to get to the border from B-burg, plus Mom's tendency to take rest stops every couple hours, and yeah. Not a bad trip, just a lengthy one.
The next couple days involved going through the house tagging furniture and knickknacks for whichever of the four kids wanted them. This consisted of going room-to-room with the four of them and whatever grandkids happened to be around at the moment, looking at everything and having someone say "Yeah, I'd like that" or (more often) "Well, if no one else wants it I'll take it." Surprisingly little bloodshed. I think the worst of the divvying came after I'd left.
Dad flew in from Geneva on Friday, so I got to drive out to Memphis to pick him up. Only got a little lost in 'downtown' Helena; pretty smooth sailiing after that. (There are an awful lot of riverboat casinos in Mississippi between Memphis and the Helena bridge. Don't you people have anything better to do with your money than feed it to the slot machines?) Paul and Alice flew in as well (but into Little Rock, so I graciously let Susan make that particular drive), and Dad's sister Sandra and her husband JimmyDale drove down. The funeral on Satyrday was, well, a funeral. I cried quietly through most of it, but I didn't have a lot of use for the service itself. (Episcopalian, graveside. The priest seemed like an okay sort. I didn't speak; if I'd tried I would have broken down altogether.) The largest ginkgo I've ever seen stood guard at the entrance to the cemetary: two people linking arms could maybe have gotten around the trunk.
Saw my semiestranged cousin Jennifer (she's, um, eight? years older than me) and her husband Vincent for the first time in a good many years, and their three very well-behaved daughters. (Islands of sanity in an otherwise crazy house right before the funeral. It helped that Abigail is seven or eight and thus 'above' all this running around and yelling, and Clementine is four and quite calm, and Sophie didn't yell at all despite being under a year old. Much better than the one- and two- and three-year-olds cruising around.)
For reasons not entirely clear to me, Paul and Alice and I were turned loose on the books that night, with Mom and Susan watching and snagging things that sounded interesting. Since there were a couple specific things I had my eye on I tried hard not to say often 'And I'd like this one' unless it was something no one else was interested in. Wound up with another three boxes of books that I've got nowhere to shelve; among them, Pop's copies of Lord of the Rings, four collections of Martin Gardner's Scientific American column (out of eight published, I believe), a very nice collector's edition of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (brilliant book; I'm in the middle of it right now), a possibly first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls . . . very cool. Also John Bellairs's The Pedant and the Shuffly, and "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 1 no. 5 (December 1950)." Quite nifty.
Rode back to B-burg with Jamie and Kylie; made the trip in under eleven hours, I think. I dearly love driving in places that aren't Virginia; they're not nearly so serious about this whole 'speed-trap' thing.
Which brings me up to about two weeks ago. Sigh.
Update 2009-07-21: Pop's obituary
The next couple days involved going through the house tagging furniture and knickknacks for whichever of the four kids wanted them. This consisted of going room-to-room with the four of them and whatever grandkids happened to be around at the moment, looking at everything and having someone say "Yeah, I'd like that" or (more often) "Well, if no one else wants it I'll take it." Surprisingly little bloodshed. I think the worst of the divvying came after I'd left.
Dad flew in from Geneva on Friday, so I got to drive out to Memphis to pick him up. Only got a little lost in 'downtown' Helena; pretty smooth sailiing after that. (There are an awful lot of riverboat casinos in Mississippi between Memphis and the Helena bridge. Don't you people have anything better to do with your money than feed it to the slot machines?) Paul and Alice flew in as well (but into Little Rock, so I graciously let Susan make that particular drive), and Dad's sister Sandra and her husband JimmyDale drove down. The funeral on Satyrday was, well, a funeral. I cried quietly through most of it, but I didn't have a lot of use for the service itself. (Episcopalian, graveside. The priest seemed like an okay sort. I didn't speak; if I'd tried I would have broken down altogether.) The largest ginkgo I've ever seen stood guard at the entrance to the cemetary: two people linking arms could maybe have gotten around the trunk.
Saw my semiestranged cousin Jennifer (she's, um, eight? years older than me) and her husband Vincent for the first time in a good many years, and their three very well-behaved daughters. (Islands of sanity in an otherwise crazy house right before the funeral. It helped that Abigail is seven or eight and thus 'above' all this running around and yelling, and Clementine is four and quite calm, and Sophie didn't yell at all despite being under a year old. Much better than the one- and two- and three-year-olds cruising around.)
For reasons not entirely clear to me, Paul and Alice and I were turned loose on the books that night, with Mom and Susan watching and snagging things that sounded interesting. Since there were a couple specific things I had my eye on I tried hard not to say often 'And I'd like this one' unless it was something no one else was interested in. Wound up with another three boxes of books that I've got nowhere to shelve; among them, Pop's copies of Lord of the Rings, four collections of Martin Gardner's Scientific American column (out of eight published, I believe), a very nice collector's edition of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (brilliant book; I'm in the middle of it right now), a possibly first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls . . . very cool. Also John Bellairs's The Pedant and the Shuffly, and "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, vol. 1 no. 5 (December 1950)." Quite nifty.
Rode back to B-burg with Jamie and Kylie; made the trip in under eleven hours, I think. I dearly love driving in places that aren't Virginia; they're not nearly so serious about this whole 'speed-trap' thing.
Which brings me up to about two weeks ago. Sigh.
Update 2009-07-21: Pop's obituary