« July 5, 2006 | Main | July 10, 2006 »

July 8, 2006

The Dude on the Right is Back to Wondering About his History.

By: The Dude on the Right
This past week or so something came back up in my life that I would really like to research, really would like to find out the answers to, and would really like to figure out a great way to document things, both the good and the bad, but sadly the time to find these things are slipping away.  It's my Dude genealogy.  I got into it a bunch of years back, but it started again over the 4th of July weekend, when I was starting to clean the Dude-Pad, and I found a place to hang some older paintings of some of my elders that would actually sort of work in the decorative scheme of my Dude-Pad.  I was pretty sure the one picture was of my Grandma, but didn't really know who the other dude was.  So I e-mailed my mother, and for the photo to the right I was able to confirm that the painting of the girl was my Grandma, at age 16, and that the painting of the dude is my Great Uncle Edward.  From my Mom's memory, he died in World War I, was declared missing, then my Great-Great Grandma went to France to see what is his grave.  I have never known the man, but we are related, and thanks to my Mom, I have a story to tell about him, the man in the painting.  And that's the thing we seem to miss about our ancestors, accurate stories to tell.

The sort of bummer side of this is that my Grandma always had stories to tell, and I was a lot younger at the time, so most of them are in fragments.  I remember her stories about her coming over on a boat, and the boat had trouble getting here, and still remember that she made the best toast, with the pat of butter that didn't melt so when you got to the middle of the toast you got squished bread with a big pat of butter.  My Grandma aside, in the grand scheme of things, my mother had a plan to record our history, especially since this was the donning of the age of cassette tapes:  Visit Grandma and let her record her stories.  But my Grandma was not really one for technology, didn't want to "tell her stories to a tape recorder," and for most of the times, unless those memories pop up for whatever reason, most of her stories are lost.  As I'm writing this blog, two of her stories pop back into my head, and they are two of my favorites, never to be forgotten, but my dilemma in this blog is how to start to record these things I find, or remember, and try to find the best way to document them.  And now my self-diagnosed OCD kicks in because as much as we don't want to admit it, all of our families are fascinating, from the good to the bad, and in this day and age, when we can easily record our history, we still forget to.

71ish years ago a woman named Miss Burrell put a simple quote in an autograph book of my Aunt's.  Back then, girls kept autograph books, and my Aunt had a book, which I now have.  The quote was this:  Happiness is an excellent remedy and keeps people in better health than any other medicine.  I don't know where Miss Burrell got this quote, or whether she made it up on her own, but it's a quote that still fits with life today.  The autograph book I have isn't that big, but it is filled with lots of other quotes, sayings, things, that shouldn't be lost.  And as I hold it, it is at least 71ish years old.

And as my OCD continues to kick in, the oldest thing that I know I have is a silver dollar coin from 1878.  It's not worth much money because most of all of it is worn, but the date is there, a mere 13 years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  My Grandma on my Mom's side was born a mere 20 years after that coin.  And I'm not even going to get into my Dad's side right now because otherwise this blog will get really too long.

I guess I got sort of melancholy over the last weekend, but realized again that all of our lives are fascinating, and should be shared, to at least our families, and it shouldn't just be the good, but it should also be the bad, so that we can, and our siblings can, know where we come from, and learn.  I guess I'm such a dork sometimes.

That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!

Posted by Rightdude at 9:29 PM | Comments (0)

What's New? A Moview Review of "The Devil Wears Prada."

For this movie review of "The Devil Wears Prada," The Dude on the Right comes right out of the box and admits he liked it. He thought the women were hot, especailly since some of the times the outfits were skimpy, and really enjoyed Meryl Streep, doing a fantastic job as the bitchiest of bosses. He also finds Anne Hathaway attractive, but isn't sure why.

Posted by Rightdude at 6:53 PM | Comments (0)