Fambly “Schtuff”

{ I’m thinkin of re-writing the History of all Creation, but we’ll start out small here 🙂 }

— This is Moe – He ran out into lightly falling snow when I opened the porch door a bit to focus my camera on something interesting or picturesque to pop into a blog one day last February (2016). Then he ran to our half-finished woodshed to investigate – like it had been bothering him for some time. – You never know – There just might be mice out there to play with – But as much as he wants to be outside – he used to escape any chance he had, just to run maybe two yards (as in ‘meters’) from the door, plunk down in the grass, virtually stick his tongue out at us as if he really could say “Nyaaa! I got out again -” and then just sit there and smile at the universe as if suddenly everything was right in this world. But stepping in cold white stuff is not his idea of being ‘outside’ – ‘Outside’ is supposed to be warm and soft and have interesting grass to chew on – maybe even bugs to chase – not freezing cold white stuff that gets up between your toes and then you have to try to shake it off – that’s just not right –

— Dorothy Eleanor Borden Wellington ( October 20, 1923 – May 8, 2016 )

— She was very loving, intelligent, sensitive, talented and sacrificed a lot to bring up her children. She was either the salutorian or came in 2nd to the salutorian of her graduating class, from Stratford High School, class of 1941. She told me the only drawing she ever made that she was happy with was a drawing of Mickey Mouse that she said her friends wanted copies of. She wanted to be a teacher and had worked with young children in a private school or day care in the 1940’s. When she got married she was told she couldn’t be a teacher and raise a family at the same time. After my father died in 1995, she went to visit my sister and her family in Alaska – came back after a while, then after my niece Maddie died in Vermont in 1996. And After my sister and her husband and children came cross country from Alaska to Maine – discovered that the job that had been promised to my brother in law had been over hyped – Mom went back to Alaska with my sister and the kids, they ran out of money and decided to keep Mom until they had enough to send her home – she volunteered as a “Foster Grandparent” at the same school where my sister was a Teacher’s aide – She gave kids who needed a little extra attention the attention they craved and made them feel good about themselves and after the school’s principal just about begged her to stay with them, and all the kids in the school surprised her with hand-made birthday cards – she agreed to stay on – and worked for a stipend and travel money, but was doing what she truly loved and told us about her life long wish to be a teacher, which was coming true for her. For her 90th birthday somebody up there had a New York Yankees shirt made for her with the name “Wellington” and the number “90” on the back. ( My sister was the Yankees fan – Mom watched the Mets with me when she was in Connecticut and watched whatever my sister watched in Alaska when she was there. )

— When I was in second grade, I had a strange – overly vivid day dream that she had always been my teacher – I hadn’t heard of reincarnation, but when my first grade teacher had told us about George Washington at Valley Forge I was sure I had been there with him. I don’t know, maybe she was my teacher, or a very positive example through several life times – I believe she taught us an awful lot about love – by example.

— I believe  this is when Mom came back from her first visit to Alaska – My youngest sister, Nancy was there to meet her with her sons, Cody in the red jacket and Westley in the striped sweater. (I was there with a camera.)

— I scanned this from a photo that was ‘a little worse for wear’ – It’s Mom and Nancy before the guys got up off the floor for the photo above this one. I think Nancy probably got the boys to get up for the other photo.

— Glenn Wellington Austin ( December 10, 195o – Way too early – 2001? )

— This is my cousin, Glenn. I might have taken this photo in the late seventies or early eighties. I told a couple people that he picked up the back end of a big old Dodge or Chrysler station wagon with one hand and jammed a new muffler in place with the other. People who knew Glenn didn’t doubt that one bit – well – maybe they knew I was stretching just a bit.

— I have to check the date he crossed over to the next life. He’s come to me in dreams a lot, shown me things on the other side that he wanted to share – warehouses where everything was free to anybody who wanted it – homes on an island in a raging river where he liked to sit and watch the spring runoff curl over his head in double ‘pipeline’ like curling breaking wave effect that he thought was amazing. He showed me a city where quite a few houses had their entries about ten feet off the ground, so you couldn’t get there if you couldn’t fly –  or jump really well.

— Glenn’s daughter Sarah Elizabeth Austin, who is now married with children of her own, on a friend’s farm in Stratford, Connecticut. This was in 1996 I think – I also think these three photos are together like this because I scanned them all at once and haven’t separated them yet – In the top photo is Sarah’s friend, Christine, who at 18 years of age, didn’t mind having six or seven year old Sarah around. Christine told me that she’d been diagnosed as being ADD and put on Ritalin as a kid in school before they found out that she was actually Clinically Depressed after family traumas. On the right is my friend, Lora, who spent more time on her friend’s farm than she did at home in those days, with her kids grown up and going to University in Boston. Both ‘grown ups’ in that photo are probably close to unidentifiable – bad photograph – And I don’t know whether Sarah was trying to check out the pigmy horse’s gender or what she was doing. I think I got at least one better shot with my camera, but the OM-1’s sensors were a bit off or maybe I should blame it on ‘operator error’/over-confidence. But these are family snapshots, not entries in a photography contest.

— My uncle, Tom, above, looks like he’s contemplating the physics of smoking a cigarette. My sister, Diane, looks like she would really like to eat her sandwich in peace while pretending to be interested in somebody bragging about their adventures in the real world out of the picture to the right. This is probably from the middle nineteen seventies. And this is probably a New Year’s Day ‘Get Together’ at my grandparents’ home (Tom’s parents) in Stratford, Connecticut.

— A friend at the Cablevision of Southern Connecticut public access video studios in Bridgeport, Connecticut had me put on a suit and dark glasses and pretend to be Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top in an episode of his public access comedy program. I tried to talk slow, didn’t try to put on a Texas drawl – but the guys who were in the control room told us later that they were doubling over laughing at some of my reactions and answers to off the wall questions that were a trade-mark of this program. One guy told me, “You sound just like him!” They had me stand in front of a series of that day’s Weather Maps for the area, and dance around and do a couple signature ZZ Top gestures while they played “She’s got legs – and she knows how to use them -” as they rolled the credits.

— That was not my first fifteen minutes of [ local? ] fame. I used to call my friend at WPKN FM on Monday evenings and read poetry on the air – stuff that we’d worked on in our local community based creative writing workshop – Almost got one guy kicked off the air when I read a poem about the 1972 presidential election – “They should have held this election on Hallowe’en” – one of George Carlin’s 7 deadly words was in that. ( Four letter word, begins with ‘s’ – has something to do with a stinky bodily function – or the product of that function. 😉 )