[disclaimer: This is pretty free form and completely lacks anything that might be called a point, cohesion or order. Thank you for understanding.]

Listening: Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, PJ Harvey

7/24:

Prayed a rosary for my Uncle Frank.

It's a solomn, Catholic thing where we bust out the prayer beads and repeat lots of Hail Mary's and a few other prayers as we retell one the sets of Holy Mysteries - Sorrowful in this case. It's too distracting to explain what that means. If you want to know just drop me a line.

The rosary was at Holy Family Cathedral in Orange. All of my dad's family have had their funerals there. Orange is a cute old town that has warped and mutated over time and yet made itself stay adorable over the years. Any oldster can tell you just forty years ago you couldn't spit without hitting an orange tree. Now people only have orange trees to decorate their lawns. My dad's family can almost all be traced back to Cypress Street in Orange. Several of them just moved over a few blocks to Center Street and raised their families there.

My uncle Leonard was closest to Hart park, but I think his kids sold the house. I *think.* Uncle Frank's house is two houses down Center St., across the street from Chapman Coll-, uh, excuse me, University. He was fourth in a family of eleven kids (my dad is fifth) and was the first to marry. Teresa was also from El Paso, but most of her family is still there. I don't really have good memories of my uncle Frank. He was very terse and never had much to say to kids. My mom and aunts said he was very shy. But he loved to pal around with his friends and brothers. I didn't really know just how much until the rosary.

Sister Virginia (the baby of the family) gave the eulogy and she noted that Frank came to love the drink a lot, so much so that when he became diabetic it really worried his family. Of course, he was stubborn and often fought them when they wanted to encourage good habits. This I already knew. He was family, after all. I didn't know that it was real problem, however. My dad used to tell me about how his brothers came out of the Army smoking (my dad and three of his brothers served in World War 2 - my dad and my uncle Roy were in the Navy, Tony and Frank were in the Army; Lupe um... skipped it... Leonard was four-F and Luis was too young, though he did a couple of years in the Army after the war). But after a few years of smoking Tony and Frank eventually decided they didn't really like smoking and just...stopped. My dad also told me how he used to like partying hard with his friends but he eventually realized he couldn't remember whether or not he actually had a good time because of all the alcohol so he drastically cut down his intake.

Having similar experiences myself in college I assumed my dad's family were pretty good at avoiding addiction. *shrug* Learn something new everyday....

I felt really bad for my Aunt Tere. She's a great cook and just the sweetest lady ever. She could always command us kids to do what she wanted with just a word that was never heated or a look that was never angry. She'd always been small and now she looked so... shrunken. Her youngest son, David, helped her get around at the Rosary and the funeral. David also looked pretty aged. I have no idea how old he is. Thirty-something I guess. My cousin Tere was a little bit of a wreck, but still a force to be reckoned with. Eventually in the rosary I lost it and melted into a few tears, but it was because we were seated behind my cousins and my aunt.

Though I noted with some amusement how, when we have large family things like this, huge contingents of Franciscan nuns come down and pay their respects. Two of my aunts are nuns and they can (almost) never go anywhere alone. That's not entirely true, but funerals are often half family and half Franciscans. Still they are so kind and patient it's hard to think of them as strangers eventhough I don't know who they are. There used to be one, Sister Magdalene. When I was very little I asked my mom which of my aunts she was. (It's *REALLY* confusing when you're told to refer to someone as "Sister X" when everyone else around you is calling them "Y" and that you're supposed to think of that person as your aunt, but while you normally call your aunts "Aunt N" or "Aunt A" you have to refer to this person who is your aunt as "Sister X" not "Aunt X" because if you were going call her "aunt" you should call her by her birth name "Y" not the name she took on when she joined the order which is "X." And if you did that you'd be totally insulting her.... So it was rather confusing.) Much confusing explanation later I figured out that the reason Sister Magdalene didn't look like the rest of us, eventhough she was always around, was that she wasn't related. She was just a really good friend of Sisters Virginia and Irene.

If any of the above confused you, feel free to ask me about it sometime. I'm sure I can confuse you even more.

Curiously absent was my aunt Sister Irene. She had been very unhappy at the last funeral I had gone to - last September for my unka Leonard - which was understandable because they had been close. But I know Frank and she weren't that close.... Recently I found out it's because she's very ill. Very ill. }:< the kind of ill I've only seen people fail to come back from.

Sister Irene is more or less my favorite aunt. She had always been the nicest and took the most time out for the kids. Both she and Sister Virginia were the only two kids who were born in California, but Sister Irene has always been the embodiment of the standards of California Cool. Non-confrontational without appearing shy or soft, I have never heard her raise her voice (except maybe to my grandmother's pooch who was a bit of a troublemaker). Eventhough the habit of a Franciscan nun calls for a headcovering (and the tradition calls for the hair to be cut very short); I could see a little bit of fringe atop the foreheads of the sisters. For as far back as I can recall Sister Virginia's hair has always been white and Sister Irene's was reddish that in the past handful of years has started to get grey. Sister Irene is older than Sister Virginia by roughly three years. But Sister Virginia was always the active, stressed out one. The one that makes sure she has everyone's phone numbers and addresses up to date, the one that organizes everything at the places she's been assigned to. When Sister Irene and Sister Virginia worked together at a parochial school in Ventura Sister Virginia was the prinicipal. Sister Irene? well she taught first grade and several art classes.

I don't know if Sister Irene still paints but I grew up thinking of her cool white hands as always stained with painting oils. My grandmother's house used to have her work all over the place. I wonder where it all ended up.

I really hope Sister Irene gets well.

7/25
We buried my Uncle Frank at Holy Sepulchre where Annie, Katy, Tony, Nina, Leonard, Marilyn, Lupe, Grandma and Grandpa are buried. I miss them an awful lot. (well ok, I didn't know Lupe or my Grandfather - they died before my mother was born.)

We went to Tere's house to eat and sing and collect e-mail addresses and make a new family tree. I don't know where the tree got off to. It was my idea but things kinda gamboled out of countrol. I think I should have gotten my Aunt Carmen's family on a seperate tree. She had something like nine kids and they've been rather... proliferate. (Now do you see what I don't feel a need to procreate?)

It was really hot, and as much as it was watching Alexa steal the show with her innate cuteness, after a couple of hours I took off for Long Beach.


And that was, more or less, that.