It's always a pleasure to see Lynne, who's a noted local actress in her own right, and (don't tell anyone) one of my favorite cousins. Of course, I don't think I'm really insulting anyone by saying that, since I have so damn many cousins, and none of us are particularly good at keeping in touch. It's a matter of small degrees.
Anyway, I had this rare chance to catch up with Lynne, who's had, truth be told, a pretty fucking rough year. She lost her dad, my Uncle Bill not long ago, after she'd been taking care of him for some time. So seeing her able to get out and enjoy herself was a bit of a treat in itself.
Seeing Lynne, and having the chance to talk frankly with her (no pun intended) was kinda nice on a couple of levels. Lynne and I share a lot of the same character traits, so we end up having a lot of the same personal woes, and it's nice to talk to someone about them - a thing that doesn't happen much in my life. I can't speak for Lynne, but in my family, these kind of discussions don't happen. Don't get me wrong - I could talk about the most personal and intimate stuff with my mom, and even with my sisters; and I don't doubt my dad would happily sit and listen to my woes in an effort to offer comfort. But they're not going through these things, or at least they don't seem to me to be, so it's the same thing. I connect to Lynne on a level that I don't with many people.
So, for what it's worth, seeing Lynne was comforting and entertaining and just plain nice - and I hope it was nice for her, too. She's one of the people who reads this journal regularly, I know, so I hope it doesn't embarrass her to have me talking about her.
Talking to Lynne, by the way, reminded me of my Uncle Bill, a lot. I'd fallen out of touch with him as I'd gotten older, what with the way the world works and my moving and all the traveling I've been doing the last couple of years, but I thought about him often, and how much I loved him as a kid. With apologies to my other uncles, all of whom were absolutely great (and, for that matter, are!), but Uncle Bill was my favorite.
He worked for the Port Authority, too, driving buses instead of fixing them. For many years, he drove the 24A Broadhead bus route, which ran directly past our front door. I can't count the number of times I'd sit on the curb in front of our house, waiting for his bus to pass by so I could jump up and down like a Ritalin patient and wave at him. As I got older, he used to throw the doors open and take me along on his route - all the way through Broadhead and McKees Rocks and back into town. When I got to be ten or eleven, and deemed (remember, this was the seventies and I was part of a big brood - you became self-sufficient early and they weren't afraid to let you out of their sight, then) a little more independent, I would hop his bus (always free!) and go to the movie theater in McKees Rocks. I've been racking my brain for the name of that place, lately, but can't come up with it. The Roxy? Ugh.
Anyway, Uncle Bill seemed to me to be an idealized version of my dad - at the time, at least. See, I never got to see Uncle Bill angry (he had to be nice to the bus-riding customers who pissed him off, of course), and he always had a smile for me. My dad had to be my dad. Funny how it's not 'til you're an adult yourself that you understand these things, is it? But knowing that the man probably had faults of his own didn't make me appreciate him any less as I got older - Uncle Bill remained, for me, even 'til the time he passed away the same smiling, genial fellow whose bus I rode as a child. Always with a smile, always with a pat on the back.
And it's funny, too, how much my Dad seems to be merging with him in my mind as he grows older; now that the pressure of being my authority figure is off my dad, he's free to be as friendly as ever Uncle Bill was. And the fact that they look so much alike, at least to me (my dad is nothing so much as a younger version of his big brother, with hair that's gray as opposed to white), just helps the whole transformation happen.
The passing of our generations is a marvelous and painful thing, I think. And the only reason, I think, to be God - to be immortal and omniscient - is to be able to watch the tenderness of this discovery happening over and over again.
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