Skeletons

We don’t normally frame them and hang them on the wall in the lounge

We all have them, you know…

…apart from the ones we are currently using for corporeal support.

They are the ones normally kept in the wardrobe (closet, if you are of the American persuasion).

Society is just full of family skeletons in wardrobes.

We don’t normally frame them and hang them on the wall in the lounge for all and sundry to see.

The shame is too great.

The skeletons often have a pet name, a euphemism; the Black Sheep of the family.

I have pieced back over the years and made a substantial family tree going back in principle to the mid-1500s.

England’s stamp commemorating the Domesday book

I discovered sea captains, landowners, publicans, connections to important personages and I managed to find a reference to my recently departed mother’s surname in the Domesday Book (England’s first census after the Norman invasion) dated 1086.

Of course I found some  some Black Sheep.

Having considered myself to be the Black Sheep of our generation, my younger brother was always the ‘favourite’ son in my father’s eyes, although I inherited more of my father’s attributes than he, whereas he inherited my father’s heart problems, I have not. I got my father’s gangly toenail, my love for Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce, my father’s laugh and his love for the garden and cricket.

My father was a man who never drank, smoked, swore nor lied, but he did have a terrible temper; certainly not skeleton material. My mother, likewise, was a saint; she had to be to put up with my father’s temper, certainly no skeleton material there. Although, a confession from my mother (I was her confidente, for things she dare not mention to my father), I knew that she had been married before my father and that her first husband was killed in an accident. Okay, that’s not too wicked.

Baaa!

But, I found out after the funeral that my mother did have a skeleton hidden away in the proverbial wardrobe.

Maybe that’s why I was closer to my mother than the others, we were both Black Sheep. It turns out that my mother was an unmarried mother at the age of eighteen; in the 1940s a child out of wedlock was a horrendous fate to befall a girl, oh the shame, the blight on the family name. I have a half-sister 10 years older than me squirreled away in my mother’s wardrobe. She had a daughter and subsequently married a school friend to hide the shame, although the daughter was put up for adoption, the man died and along came my father after WW II,

The skeleton was revealed to my younger brother, and I had to confess being privy to an inkling of it many years earlier; another black spot on my sheepish hide.

So at the age of 60+ I find that my mother was a pretty normal teenager, a fact that I find some comfort in.

So we all, perhaps unknowingly, have (exo)skeletons…

My Tonto-pills seem to be working, I went to work last night. I was a little unsteady on the pins at one point, but managed two lessons with the required decorum, and then decided to go off to a BBQ restaurant for dinner; surprising all the staff when I ordered a jug of orange juice instead of my beer or wine.

Appears as though I will survive; given enough coffee.

Right now I m going to scare the crap out of some pigeons making a racket on the tin roof on my carport.

Blogging right along.

Later.