I’m in Greensburg Pennsylvania presently, the ancestral home of my mom’s side of my gene threads. I used to post these travelogs often here on my blog in real time, but I don’t anymore because thieves and burglars might be listening in and see an opportunity to break into my house and steal things; and never mind I always have neighbors and security cameras watching and my alarms set. It’s the world we live in now. But I’m getting tired of that, and I think I’m going to post about my travels here more often.

I’m here in Greensburg to drop some family history I inherited after mom passed away. Family bibles with birthdates, death dates, and marriages recorded in them, and lots and Lots of old family photos and random artifacts. I’ve given it all to the Greensburg Historical Society. I still have family living in the area I suppose, but I’m completely estranged from them because of how mean they were to my mom. The only person I’m still close to on that side is mom’s cousin, who stood by her all throughout her life and whatever the family drama was. But like mom, she doesn’t live here anymore, and hasn’t for decades.

As I type these words I suddenly realize that, like mom, and her mom, mom’s cousin never had any interest in returning to Greensburg after they left, long, long ago. Mom took me here often when I was a kid for visits, but in retrospect that was mostly for her mom’s benefit, to visit old friends and the one son she still had living nearby. We would stay with a distant relative, whose relationship to mom’s family I’m still uncertain of. I still have fond memories of those visits, but that was before the family drama really started touching me.

When I came to the Greensburg Historical Society the other day to drop things off, they gave me the tour of their collection so far. The people working here are very nice folks, history nerds, and so friendly it did my heart good because my feelings toward this place are mixed now at best. I’m writing this to my blog just to put this one more little message in a bottle out here for you because the collection of German artifacts they have surprised me, and then made my heart ache in a different way from the ache I expected to have being here. I always knew in the back of my mind the German influence here in central Pennsylvania, but seeing it all collected together and representing a significant part of the history of this place startled me.

There was a magnificent old bible, one of those big heavy embossed leather bibles with heavy metal clasps to close it, well preserved in a glass display case, and it was in German. There were school books in German, travel books, written histories of Pennsylvania and Westmoreland County. Stories of the people who came here, made a life here, in the language of their homeland. The folks who work here said they’d brought a translator in to help with cataloging all that. And I immediately  thought of you, and wished you were there with me just then, because you could have looked all that over and told them things about it that maybe they didn’t know. And I began aching for a life I never had a chance to have, and which probably one you wouldn’t have wanted with me anyway.  The old dream that will never completely die, but that becomes something to just acknowledge, like getting old.

I’m letting go of all that family history now because the Parkinson’s diagnosis leaves me with a new perspective. You always kept telling me toward the end of it, that I needed to let go of the past. Live in the present you said, using the word as a double entendre.  I wouldn’t exactly call Parkinson’s a present, but it works well enough as a mile marker. I can let go of a lot of stuff I’ve carried with me since mom died, because I was never much a part of it anyway, and I am going to need to carefully manage the energy I have left to me. I’m sure at some point the people in my family here became aware that mom’s son by the father they all despised is gay, but they’d have kept me at arms length anyway because I was his son and the sins of the father will always convey to the son if he’s the only convenient target.

Mom loved me, I’ve never doubted that, but she’s gone now and my connection to the others was tenuous at best because that was how they wanted it ultimately, and I came to accept it. The life of the only child teaches him how to rely on himself. The only one who took an interest in me was the one who left Greensburg for California and he never went back either. How I’ve wished I could have grown up closer to him. But then I would never have met you.

The trick in letting go of things is knowing what parts of that life you lived made you the person you are, what you need to honor and respect, for better or worse, and what was just the back story, not your story.