It?s not often I sit down to write here and feel a tremor of trepidation.

(Okay, fair enough--I NEVER sit down and feel tremors of trepidation because who among the vast assemblage of bluepoppy readers would move an eyelid in anything but perhaps boredom at what I might write?)

It's just that today I have something to share that is muito personal and it's not even from my closet, it belongs to T.

My father-in-law can only be described as a 'quite a character.' Sure, there are many other adjectives available to me that would be most fitting, but let's just leave it at that, shall we? One of his endearing, if puzzling, quirks is the steady stream of mail that we receive. Rarely is there an accompanying note to explain why we have just opened an envelope to find a random snapshot of T, or a newspaper clipping, or a photocopy of a letter that someone sent to him in 1953.

Fortunately, we can usually figure out what the intention was, although I would put our success rate at about 67% due to the erratic and often high WTF level of mysterious content.

Packages and letters from my father-in-law arrive pretty much weekly and have done so for the past fifteen years. All of which is explanation on why it took me three months to notice something he had sent last July; after a while, you tend to just scan the crazy and throw it up on a shelf.

But yesterday, sitting at T's desk, I picked up a sheaf of papers bound together with a large, black clip and began reading some recorded memories of Okey, T's great-grandfather, that my father-in-law had passed on to us and oddly, I was enraptured.

Odd because in general I find memoirs rather tedious, odd because I knew Okey had been a preacher and how much do I NOT want to read whatever a preacher might have to say, odd because when I finished I couldn't believe there wasn't more - it was barely a scratch on the surface.

These pages were written in 1943-44 and he grabbed me right from the start, the old coot.

"I am now in my 84th year; at the urgent request of members of my family, I am beginning to write some account of my uneventful life. I have never kept a diary for more than two or three days after the first of January. Hence, I shall have to depend on my memory and the law of suggestion, with here and there a flight of the imagination, for my data."

Through reading this memoir, we learned that T's great-great grandfather fought (and died) in the Civil War. In fact, as he had been raised in Virginia, branches of the family found each other facing off in battle as some were on the side of the Union and others on the that of the Confederacy - how very whack.

And, wildly enough, we learned that his great-great-great-great-great grandfather (give or take one of those?I lost count) was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. And, get this, his name was Enoch Furr.

Enoch Furr. God, they just don?t make names like that anymore. Woot. But it gets better - Enoch married Beersheba.

Beersheba Furr. Is it just me? Do you not love this?

Oh okay, I'll shut up now?but when I think I almost didn't read this and how much I enjoyed it and how much we learned about T's ancestors, I feel like such an idiot - that is, more than I usually do.

"The other big room was called the parlor and was not used except on Sundays, holidays and special occasions. In this parlor the girls and their suitors courted (called sparking) and made merry on wedding occasions, when the whole big house was opened."

Sparking--- how perfect to describe what might happen when two people meet. A world of difference from what my nieces say today: hooking up.*

And (oh whoops, did I say I would shut up? Sorry one more bit), his relationship to God to church to people was not at all what I expected. As a kid,

"I was admitted to the school, though not in any formal way. I am sure I was not under very strict discipline. About all I learned was how to hold up my hand when I wanted to go out; and when I got outside I was in no hurry to get back. In fact my going back was involuntary when some adult used physical force to help me along. . . . I preferred to get down from that high bench, and get outside to the open yard and toddling down to the barnyard where there were not only dogs barking, but pigs squealing, cows and bulls mating, hens cackling, roosters crowing, ducks quacking, turkeys gobbling, and have the feeling of belonging to a real living world. I was in real sympathetic touch with the animal world, and the world inside of the log school house was far from fitting into my previous, developing life."

Turns out he was a very cool dude, just like his great-great-grandson.

*Oh GOD I am so old I can't believe I just wrote that. GOD. It's like I'm the woman from the crypt.

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