The last touchstone

I just called my Great Uncle Paul -- the youngest brother of my grandmother. He is 95 years old and still totally with-it. He is a part of my birth family, my only touchstone with my long-dead birth mother. We talked and switched back and forth from his constipation to my mother, Shirley (dead at 49), to his daughter, Judy, who had died a year ago, to his nephew, Jim, dead two years, to his late wife, to his son who looks in on him...........to the nurse who gives him his enemas..........I kid you not.

When I finally found my birth family I was overjoyed and Uncle Paul was and remains one of the touchstones of my birth family. He was the one who dropped this into a conversation a few years ago.........."Did I ever tell you that your great-grandmother was a Mohawk Indian?" Whaaaaaaaaaaaat????? Well, he had forgotten to tell me that bit. He went on to say that this grandmother had no teeth, spoke no English, smoked a pipe, but was the only one who could chop frozen wood for the cook stove in the dead of winter. After her husband died, she moved back to the Tyendenaga Mohawk Reserve in Napanee to die. My Indian heritage explains a lot about me. Let's leave it at that.

I did not meet my birth mother, she had died a year before I had found her. More about that in another blog. Suffice it to say, I am like her in many ways. The argument about genetics versus environment is an interesting one. I am completely like my adoptive mother when it comes to rearing and values, but completely like my birth mother when it comes to personality and intelligence. Shirley I am, but Lillian I am also.