Past and Present
One thing I love about the holidays is the time spent with family. We’re big on sharing stories and laughing about our happy past. Like many families, we have some classic stories and every year, often around the holidays, these stories float to surface at the dinner table or while sitting together around the living room. I can’t tell you how many times my “Oh dear God help us” reaction to the Submarine ride at Disneyland when I was five has been retold—at least 50 plus times. Regardless, it still makes me laugh :)
And then, there are the familiar stories with a surprise, a new unknown detail, that took time to reveal for no particular reason. My grandmother met my grandpa John at a USO dance for the U.S. troops in London during World War II. They fell in love and she traveled across the ocean to marry him. She was 23 when she took a ferry from England to New York. I’ve always been fascinated with my grandma’s journey. She’s lived in the U.S more than 60 years and 20 of those years were in New York. I strongly believe my family history has acted as gravitational force, pulling me to the place I’ve heard so many stories about growing up.
At lunch today, my grandma mentioned she had put together a voice recording introducing herself to her soon-to-be family before she had even left her country. We’ve talked about her journey to the U.S. so many times, yet I never knew that nugget of the story. It’s a small detail that I find so endearing. She was such a young, polite British girl who wanted to fit in and be accepted by her American family. She had never met them before and wanted to start things off right. Just goes to show that a gesture, big or small, offers valuable insight into a person’s character.
