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Sugeon General's Warning:
Dec. 22nd, 2004 10:53 pmStepmonsters can be hazardous to your sobriety. Also, sentimentality follows. Read at your own risk.
In a clever attempt to avoid the weather, I left Memphis this morning for Houston - see previous LJ post, which I imagine was entitled something like "OMFG MY BRAIN IS TOASTXORR."
Happy: I was indeed clever.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
whisperflight called me this afternoon to tell me the roads were ice in Memphis, and had I not left when I did, I would be trapped there alone for Christmas, deprived of the awesomeness that is my dad.
Sad: It was a trade-off. My ten-hour drive took eleven, after I encountered a thunderstorm outside of Baton Rouge that had everyone - not just paranoid me!! - driving down the interstate at 20 miles per hour with their hazard lights on, BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU COULD NOT SEE THE ROAD. And mostly you were just following the lights of the guy in front of you, anyway.
Arrived safely in Houston to be greeted by my awesome stepmonster, a bottle of wine, and much sentimentality. Which, half a bottle of wine later, I will share with ALL OF YOU. BECAUSE I LOVE EVERYONE WHEN TIPSY. ...and also, it's a really awesome story. Two, actually:
1) I am in awe of my stepmonster. Five years after marriage to my father, she can sit across from me and tell me how amazed she is that she married "Prince Charming," the best man in the world. The things she says about my dad make me blush, and not in a five-year-old perverted Elektra kind of way. She calls my dad 'radiant' and 'pure'. And, thinking about it, she's right. I just don't have the poetry in my soul or the freedom with my feelings to say so. But my dad is that cool, and I am eternally grateful that the woman who married him is awesome enough to realize it - more often than I do, I am ashamed to admit. I love her dearly.
2) I'd heard this story before, and forgotten it.
Given that one of my nicknames is "the kraut", everyone more or less knows that I am primarily mucho mas German by descent. My father was born in Stuttgart, and came over to the U.S. in a laundry basket when he was six months old. But I had forgotten that my grandfather and his siblings, though German, were actually born in America. Yet my grandfather fought for the Germans in World War II. THIS IS WHY:
As a mother of four children (three sons and a daughter, all born in America of an immigrant mother), my great-grandmother took her husband back to Germany to visit her parents. They arrived the day before Hitler brought down the iron curtain. Despite being American citizens, because they were of German descent my grandfather and his brothers - all teenagers at the time - were drafted into the German army.
Here I'm fuzzy on the details. My uncle knows them better, and one day I am determined to make him write them down. But I know that my great-grandmother was separated from at least one of her sons (I cannot recall which one), whom she had to leave in Germany while she fled with the rest of her children for the border. She was caught as they were trying to cross. I am told she bribed the soldier with her diamond wedding ring, to get him to allow her to cross the border with her remaining children. If I remember the story correctly, it was several years before she was reunited with her other child.
I will never be as awesome as my grandparents and great-grandparents. That's a fact. And in a way, I'm grateful. They were awesome because the circumstances demanded it of them. I've never had to face anything that terrible, and coward though it may make me, I hope I never have to do so. Wow.
In a clever attempt to avoid the weather, I left Memphis this morning for Houston - see previous LJ post, which I imagine was entitled something like "OMFG MY BRAIN IS TOASTXORR."
Happy: I was indeed clever.
whisperflight called me this afternoon to tell me the roads were ice in Memphis, and had I not left when I did, I would be trapped there alone for Christmas, deprived of the awesomeness that is my dad.Sad: It was a trade-off. My ten-hour drive took eleven, after I encountered a thunderstorm outside of Baton Rouge that had everyone - not just paranoid me!! - driving down the interstate at 20 miles per hour with their hazard lights on, BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU COULD NOT SEE THE ROAD. And mostly you were just following the lights of the guy in front of you, anyway.
Arrived safely in Houston to be greeted by my awesome stepmonster, a bottle of wine, and much sentimentality. Which, half a bottle of wine later, I will share with ALL OF YOU. BECAUSE I LOVE EVERYONE WHEN TIPSY. ...and also, it's a really awesome story. Two, actually:
1) I am in awe of my stepmonster. Five years after marriage to my father, she can sit across from me and tell me how amazed she is that she married "Prince Charming," the best man in the world. The things she says about my dad make me blush, and not in a five-year-old perverted Elektra kind of way. She calls my dad 'radiant' and 'pure'. And, thinking about it, she's right. I just don't have the poetry in my soul or the freedom with my feelings to say so. But my dad is that cool, and I am eternally grateful that the woman who married him is awesome enough to realize it - more often than I do, I am ashamed to admit. I love her dearly.
2) I'd heard this story before, and forgotten it.
Given that one of my nicknames is "the kraut", everyone more or less knows that I am primarily mucho mas German by descent. My father was born in Stuttgart, and came over to the U.S. in a laundry basket when he was six months old. But I had forgotten that my grandfather and his siblings, though German, were actually born in America. Yet my grandfather fought for the Germans in World War II. THIS IS WHY:
As a mother of four children (three sons and a daughter, all born in America of an immigrant mother), my great-grandmother took her husband back to Germany to visit her parents. They arrived the day before Hitler brought down the iron curtain. Despite being American citizens, because they were of German descent my grandfather and his brothers - all teenagers at the time - were drafted into the German army.
Here I'm fuzzy on the details. My uncle knows them better, and one day I am determined to make him write them down. But I know that my great-grandmother was separated from at least one of her sons (I cannot recall which one), whom she had to leave in Germany while she fled with the rest of her children for the border. She was caught as they were trying to cross. I am told she bribed the soldier with her diamond wedding ring, to get him to allow her to cross the border with her remaining children. If I remember the story correctly, it was several years before she was reunited with her other child.
I will never be as awesome as my grandparents and great-grandparents. That's a fact. And in a way, I'm grateful. They were awesome because the circumstances demanded it of them. I've never had to face anything that terrible, and coward though it may make me, I hope I never have to do so. Wow.
