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  • From: sjc <indexer AT fairpoint.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Economy & family
  • Date: Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:32:59 -0500

Lisa K.V. Perry wrote:
Fast forward two years. I saw the same people just last week. It was a much
different and somewhat subdued gathering. We all tip-toed around the economy
and the election. This experience has been eye opening to me on many levels.
I need to learn to trust and believe in myself. I am brighter than I thought
I was and will no longer think my brother knows it all.
I've been watching this whole thing unfold, Lisa, and several times been struck by the similarities to my situation. I've always been the 'crazy' among my birth siblings, and they weren't sky about stating their opinions. Rarely have they deemed it worthwhile to visit me; the accommodations are lacking, services are lacking, they I'm sure, could go on for a long time. Only one of them can even see the peace & quiet, the ability to be self-reliant to a great degree, clean, decent, reliable food supplies, and all the other things that have to me a higher value than to them, obviously. Always I have been the butt of jokes, some of which would be actually cruel if I weren't so dense as not to 'get' it :-) . They had prettier (true), smarter (debatable), blah, bhah, kids, who would go out into the world to do great things; in the meantime said kids were educated solely by the school system, mostly public, occasionally private. And so it went for many years. It was clear to me that they considered themselves successes and if I wasn't already a failure, I was about to fall in a hole any minute.

I'm a ways from where they are (no accident) and so haven't had all that much contact. I was busy, there were kids to work with, chores to do, didn't take too long till these guys just sort of receded to fleeting thoughts. As the last of my kids went out the door permanently I contacted the brothers more often, with little reciprocal contact, but I just sort of put things on a 'schedule' and eventually they began to soften a bit (for one thing, more manipulatable family members died, thereby reducing the numbers to the crazy sister). There were a few visits, and you haven't lived until you see someone who spent 46 years in a govt job we've all heard of, 21 years at the helm of it, "providing" press conferences, hobnobbing with those who can't chose their own clothing in the morning (he views this as a positive, or did, anyway) tiptoe around a splop of chicken poop. Actually, that vision is firmly lodged in my head, and comes to me at the most inopportune moments, causing me to smile at DMV clerks, even......
By a few years ago, maybe 3-4, I began to wonder how such totally inexperienced, unwilling, people would even survive in a crash; money's the only answer to a situation. Carefully, I broached their wives (totally clueless and no clue what to think about me, but both the kind of people to put nose to grindstone if need be) with the idea that I didn't think things "will always be so good financially" and pointed out that I would be keeping the Maine place or replacing it with another at least nominally agricultual piece of land "for all of US". Blank looks, in both cases, some extra explanations, parroting of their husbands' words, not much else said. But this past fall I started getting more interest......now I notice, no one's laughing anymore. I'm not waiting (or wanting) for them to say 'you may have had a point' but the harder-nosed one of them said to me in a phone call last week, during a conversation about selling his house (mansion, hideous, hard, cold even in FL, inside three nested security gates, every item dictated by a HOA) "It seems like nobody wants a house with high ceilings" (main ceilings are 27', bathrooms and spa only about 14-16').
So, no matter how they blind themselves, whether through ignorance or deliberate refusal to look at facts they find unacceptable, it's really a hard fall for folks like that.

Nobody's asking for help, and indeed, they may never. But I see them gradually letting in information bit-by-bit, so eventually it will actually sink in. Boggles the brain how perfectly intelligent people (at least one is a lot smarter than I, speaks/translates/interrogates in 11 languages plus many dialects in some of those!) can walk around with closed eyes is beyond the ken of this old slow woman with her goats.
Your sister's situation is even a bit sadder in that she got hit before she saw it coming. And your subdued Thanksgiving may be as near as anyone comes to saying that you were right, but they have to know it whether or not they own up to that. It's just going to be really hard for them to say.....and you have it clearly in your head to trust yourself and your knowledge and abitilites, so just hang in there, be available, they'll come when and if they're ready, Lisa. then you can worry about the next step!!

SJ




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