Rooted

We tied one on at a remission party last night and Mom is still sleeping it off while I struggle with her infected laptop. (When the malware won't even let you read the Norton manual then you know you're really in trouble.) Last night while listening to my mother's brother go on about his duck-hunting adventures in Uruguay, I came to the realisation that I've finally grown into my uncles. Certainly they've mellowed some with age, but Twain's bon mot about his father's intelligence applies here, too. How else to explain the fact that I could ask m aunt's husband about the commercial real estate market and actually care about the answers?

I also repeated my invitation to have my cousin who lives in Toronto stay at our place the next time she's passing through Chicago about twenty times so that everyone would know I meant it. Her possible future husband is looking at relocating there for business so there's a chance they might actually take us up on the offer, which would be fine. It would be a small way of repaying her mother for everything she's done for me over the years.

Inbetween all the talk of diseases and dementia I had a chance to ask one of my mother's sisters about our Irish great-grandma and found that everything Mom had told us was wrong, sort of. She thought greatgrandma had been born in Ireland and brought her by her stepfather when she was two. Apparently the real story is that she was born in Carondolet and her father died when she was two. (Drowned in the Mississippi trying to retrive driftwood, according to my aunt.) Also I discovered her mother's maiden name, which was Monahan, but my aunt wasn't sure of greatgrandma's parents' given names, so I'm at a dead end for the moment.