July of 2004 was both my first trip to the farm and first time meeting Corrie's extended family. I wasn't quite sure what type of response I would elicit. I didn't know too much beyond Ron and Carol, who were loving and generally progressive, and I was a free-balling math-graduate with long curly hair and a Left Coast outlook.
That was the first time I met Grandma June. She was real sweet and full of love and had a mystic way of both knowing and paying attention to all the grandkids and the few present great grandkids. She had knowledge of everyone's school situations, love lives, band associations (when warranted), and general dispositions. It was like my memories of my own Grandma, except there were fifteen grandkids instead of four.
1.
"You should really keep better track of your speed."
We got the news that Grandma June had passed around 9 in the morning that day after my Robot Cricket book signing, on a Sunday. We made arrangements and were set to leave around 8:30 Monday night. I started driving. It was the usual way we leave Long Beach to get towards heading east on I-10: 710 to 91 to 60, through Riverside and onto Banning and meeting up with I-10. It was nice and late and I was making pretty good time.
I made it to Phoenix in around five and a half hours, and from Phoenix to Tuscon in about an hour. Those cities are maybe a hundred miles apart. Soon I was in New Mexico and Corrie was fast asleep. Then I started to get a little tired. At some point my brain was hazing, and both my eyelids and pedal foot were getting heavy.
Then day started to break, and the sky went from inky black to blue, then to that neat mixture that gray and orange you get right before the sun comes out. I was admiring the view when the sun broke over the horizon. I was mostly staring at it, and then I noticed that the setting moon was visible in my rear-view mirror right above the rising sun. I thought that was pretty awesome.
Then I noticed that a cop was behind me. Then I noticed that I was driving nearly a hundred miles an hour. So that's when my turn driving needed to end. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" the NM patrolman asked. After 11.5 hours of driving, I was nearly pudding.
"I lost track of my speed and was going way too fast," I answered.
After apologizing for needing to ticket me, he said, "You should really keep better track of your speed. Be safe."
2.
Returning to Dwyce
When we first moved to Texas from Brooklyn we lived at the Dwyce house; that is, the house was on Dwyce Dr, and is known affectionately in Austin among proper heads as "the Dwyce house". Once, while we still lived there and before we moved out to our own apartment, we had Grandma June over for dinner. It was a nice evening off for me, and I was able to make a nice lamb dish. The sky opened up while we were eating, and a torrential downpour commenced, making our little evening into a a little longer and closer night.
When we finally got to Austin around 6:30 pm local time, we first headed to the house we house-sit for for a fortnight in 2010, Uncle Bill's house. That's where Grandma June was living up until the end. We made our meet and greets there, and were soon sent back off to Dwyce as our Austin hub. We were the only people staying there, as the house is getting ready to be sold. It was Corrie and I, and Kaya the red Doberman and Tarzan the stump tailed tabby-cat. Dolgia, a female tuxedo cat that was mostly claimed by one of the Dwyce roommates, was still around. We heard she was a feral or a stray, but since Steph moved out a while ago, we were only mildly surprised to see her hanging out when we first arrived:
It was our first trip to the Dwyce house since our going-away party in April of 2011. It was eerie, but not like returning to a house you may have grew up in. At least not for me.
For the few days we spent in Austin, we were stationed at Dwyce. It made a kind of sense. The next day, Wednesday, was the viewing, at a mortuary around the corner from Dwyce.
3.
Old Habits Die Hard
I went over to one of my former work environments, and met with my old comrades and former bosses. They were happy to see me, which I appreciated, and my former boss made it known that he would set up a reservation for a family group of us the next night.
That next night when we went back we arrived in groups, and not at the same time. My group was first, so I went to the back to take a look and say hi. It turns out they were going down in flames, so I jumped on the microphone and ran the show for maybe a half-hour. I even burned my finger pretty good.
4.
Two Random Observations
While living in Texas, you notice their two state mottoes for not littering: "Don't Mess with Texas" and "Keep Texas Beautiful". They're both official, and they're both emblazoned on signs and stickers around the large state.
I'm not sure what happened, but on the drive from Austin to Odessa, the roads were trashier than I've ever seen before. In parts that otherwise look like the surface of the moon, I started to think that we were in the vicinity of a landfill. The wind mixed with a landfill close by could explain all the plastic bag remnants and paper trash strewn along the highway and off to the horizon. When an hour past and still there was garbage everywhere, I gave up on the landfill theory.
After that section of the trip, I started to look everywhere. It was a serious problem. What the hell, Texas? A place that used to pride itself on the beauty of the landscape...
Is it appropriate to blame Rick Perry? It's probably easy enough to find policies that he enacted or supported that reduced public funds for land beautification, but he's not the one out there tossing shit on the ground and moving on. Civic pride seemed diminished.
The other random observation was in Corrie's birthtown of Odessa. There's a section of town that I was driving through that had a business plaza called "Sherwood Business Center." Then, close by, there was a "Sherwood Plaza". As we drove to a park near their old home, we passed the "Sherwood Church in Christ" and finally stopped at a multi-named park, one of which was "Sherwood Memorial Park" (or something similar).
Earlier we heard a story from one of Corrie's older cousins about how one of their shared ancestors had lived in a rural town and had done business with one of her husbands ancestors. That got some of Corrie's family thinking about my Sherwood relatives.
I tried to convince them I was pretty sure the Sherwoods of Odessa and the Sherwoods in my family were almost assuredly not connected, but it seemed like the romantic idea was too much, and I was mostly unsuccessful. I even tried to explain the commonness of the "Sherwood" last name.
5.
Events
I'm trying to keep the bullet-paced nature of this trip in perspective, but mostly failing (I feel). We left Monday night, arrived Tuesday evening in Austin, had the viewing on Wednesday, the service on Thursday, Friday was reserved for the six hour drive from Austin to Odessa, and the burial on Saturday.
The viewing we showed up for a few hours after it started. The mortuary was close by to where we stayed, but we had errands to run for most of the day. There was a video running on a loop, one where the grandkids acted out Grandma June's life's story at her 90th birthday party at the farm during skit night. The great-grandchildren were running around that evening, but not in a mischievous way. We tried to pay our respects to both the body of Grandma June and her close kin from the Austin and environs area.
In an honest moment my feelings were confirmed when Ron, shaking his head as he examined his mother's face in the coffin said "That's not her. They didn't...really..." He was right. They hadn't quite captured June. I wasn't going to say anything, but if her own son felt that way, I felt I could lend my support.
The service was held at June's oldest daughter's church. There was some singing and some prayer-making (I was respectful if uninvolved), there was some grazing and schmoozing (a retired judge complimented how well 'I clean up' before saying that I may not be ready for heaven just yet), and many family members were able to get up and say a few words. I felt like saying something, but then ultimately skipped it.
The burial was at a cemetery next to her first husband in Odessa, where they lived for a number of years. There was a different set of family members and people at this one, since some of June's remaining siblings could come from their corners of Idaho easier.
"I remember you...Corrine's husband, Patrick, right?" was how Uncle H.A. greeted me in the lobby of the Odessa Holiday Inn where we stayed. He was June's younger brother, more a farmer than a good-'ol-boy, but not not a good-'ol-boy, had met me once in 2004, but either had a fantastic memory or been supplied with photographs. He's an active farmer in Idaho, and must have signed off on the grandkids-as-pall bearers call.
As it turned out, I was asked to be a pall bearer for the first time in my life.
I felt honored to be a pall bearer. This was a woman that I respected and enjoyed being around, but with whom I didn't get to spend too much time. I was told she found me truly special, and though that Corrie and I were perfect together, and I guess that I could get a sense of that through our talks, but that would have been a bit presumptuous. Oh well.
I barely get updates on my own father's mother--she went into hospice but while there and taken off her heavy meds, she came back and was asked to leave hospice--but that's more a testament to my own family's dynamic. It's just different. I don't feel like it's any better or worse, because the crush of the family on Corrie's side can be a daunting and stressful task that my family doesn't ever impose on you.
6.
"She lived to see all of her kids become grandparents."
Grandma June had a subtle style of being a matriarch. She set the tone and used her own example of how she thought you should act around family--with a certain kind of love--that it seemed like everyone I've ever met from the family in the years I've been with my wife. She was a patron of the arts, supporting both her Morris grandchildren, Josh and Jacob, who are musicians, as well as me, being a frequent reader of my blogs and the purchaser of the first copy of my constructed book The Big Weirdness at auction.
I remember having a conversation with her after we first arrived in Austin at the end of 2009. She had a better idea of what was going on with everyone in town, including our own roommates, than we did, thanks to her ability to embrace newer technology like Facebook and texting.
Near the end, during her last conversation with Corrie, while she was in the hospital, she complained that although her daughters were there for her, they weren't letting her get onto the computer and she was feeling less connected to the outside world. A wonderful observation from a spry-to-the-end lady.
June had five children: Bill, Susie, Paula, Ron, and Debbie, in that order. Susie had kids first, and her kids had kids first, the first set of great-grandchildren. Then Paula had kids, then Ron and Carol, then Debbie, and then Bill and Martha. Ron and carol were the second set of parents to become grandparents, and then Paula, and, with Corrie's cousins Josh and Richard, both having kids within a month of each other, and right near the end of Grandma June's time among the living, led to Josh, during a brief word at the burial, making the observation:
"She lived to see all of her kids become grandparents."
7.
Returning to California
We left Saturday from Odessa a pair of hours after the burial for Phoenix, a maybe ten or eleven hour drive away. This time I embraced the cruise control. This time I didn't get from Tuscon to Phoenix in an hour. This time seeing my own Grandpa Tom almost became a priority. It didn't work out, but almost.
It was nice to see my mom, and have a night's sleep after all the car time. We still had a long drive home, but at least I was able to appreciate my own family while at it.
