Left to my own devices

There are some people who you can't remember a life without. Not necessarily figuratively, but in the true sense of the sentiment. From your earliest memories, some folks were simply just... there. For my minute existence in this universe, aunt Charlease is one such person. Now, like so many passages before hers, it is time to live in a world without her in it. It's been less than a week since Charlease Williams died, so of course many memories have come flooding back, some of them ones I haven't thought of in years, perhaps decades. One such item is how Charlease would often love to tell me how her arrival in Champaign coincided with my own. I was born in December 1975. If memory serves correctly, Charlease moved here from Missouri in January 1976. "That's how I always know how old you are," she would say, in her sweet, raspy voice.

"I heard the Fire Chief say your name earlier, and Gladney isn't a common name. Are you by any chance related to the Gladneys who were in construction?" The preceding quote is from a white-haired gentleman who introduced himself to me last week after an awards ceremony for Champaign firefighters. He'd worked alongside my dad and uncles doing construction work in the community and around Illinois, and asked after a few of them: Lewis, Joe and Paul. Unfortunately, I had to tell him that Joe and Lewis were both deceased, and that uncle Paul wasn't doing too well. He seemed genuinely sorry to hear that. The aforementioned encounter is one I have more frequently than you might imagine. It occurred again just this past Sunday, at a dinner party. It was one of those occasions where everyone was wearing a name tag and, early on in the evening, an older man walked-up, read my name tag and asked if I happened to know a Gene Gladney (Gene is uncle Paul's act...

Those commercials for Ancestry.com finally got to me. At first there was annoyance. I'm sure the woman who currently features in the majority of their ads is a nice person, but something about her voice and her delivery grated on me. After awhile, it didn't offend as much, and I learned to simply gloss over the commercials whenever they came on. And then.... there came the curiosity. They say the older you get, the more you begin to care about where you came from, so after months of being inundated with Ancestry.com ads on TV, I signed-up for a two-week free trial period. The biggest surprise wasn't anything as grand as discovering blood relation to a monarch or former president, but that the web site wasn't all Big Brother-ish. I'd just assumed that it would take my particulars and plug-in everything. Not so. You have to provide it with the names of family members and then it searches for potential matches (which you have to confirm). On my dad's ...

"Matt, you sure have gotten fat." The aforementioned words were said to me by my uncle Joe, during one of the many pre-Christmas dinners that used to be an annual occurrence at uncle Paul and aunt Vilda's house. I remember sitting at the long dining table, surrounded by family, many of whom I only saw at these gatherings. The door opened and in walked Joe, moving fast as he always did, and that's when he stopped, stared, and said those words to me. Now, I'm not saying that I wasn't slightly wounded by his remark. Weight's been a struggle for me since the middle school years and, yes, I'd put on a few pounds since the last time he'd seen me. But it was hard to be mad at Joe. He had a way about him. Almost always a twinkle in his eyes. It's true that I have different opinions of my dad's several brothers, but it can be said that Joe was the only one who I thought of as cool . He just was.