Monday, May 11, 2009
A familiar and familial bond
Steve Huff
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From the RoundTable blog
There are some people I find myself hanging around with at family reunions: funny, confident, a bit off the beaten path.
When the reunion is a funeral, however, the mood darkens and the conversation dims. If the person who died was the link between you and your relatives, future encounters become fewer and farther between.
Such was the case when Uncle Rick -- my father's brother -- died before his time. His second wife, Georgette, seemed a little cooler and more sophisticated than what I was used to. She spoke in accent-free, complex sentences tinged with subtle humor. She owned a dress shop with fashions that seemed more metropolitan than her small Midwestern town might like.
After Uncle Rick died, we didn't see much of Georgette. The last I'd heard she was working for a newspaper up in Ohio.
Then my own dad died. His second wife was Kathy, also a bit of an outsider: polished, engaging, aspiring. She made a point to phone, send cards and stop by when she was in the area. Still, without my dad, the connection seemed likely to fade.
One son, two widows, three Huffs, drifting apart as the family glue dried and cracked.
Meanwhile, the political situation provided me plenty of distraction. The Bush administration policies on the war, the environment, medicine, the economy -- you name it -- all seemed to be taking us down the wrong track. I found little sympathy in the conservative bastion of Patrick County.
Then came a contest. The Roanoke Times needed some new columnists and announced a call for submissions. Several nail-biting rounds of cuts later and I was writing opinion pieces. While I didn't make a lot of new friends in Patrick County, I found myself trading thoughts and ideas via e-mail with scores of people throughout the Roanoke Valley. On more controversial topics, e-mails poured in from Oregon to England.
At one of those ever-shrinking family get-togethers, someone reminded me, "You know Georgette works at a newspaper."
Does she ever. It turned out she had become an advertising assistant and columnist with the Alliance (Ohio) Review. Not only that, but she'd been chosen by the Associated Press as the best columnist in the state for her category of paper.
"And didn't Kathy use to work for a paper too?"
You bet she did. The daughter, granddaughter and niece of newspaper editors, she won the Annie H. King Award for Journalism as editor of the high school page in her local paper. She went on to edit other publications through college and adulthood. Now, coming full circle, she has published several highly regarded opinion pieces for the The Aiken (S.C.) Standard, the paper that first published her high school work.
"Printers' ink," she says, "runs through my veins." (Not only that, but people routinely recognize her from her mug shot in the paper. Only one person has ever recognized me from this column.)
Georgette writes hard-boiled, confident prose about anything and everything, from the local and mundane to the national and contentious. Her strength, from what I've read, is walking the high road to a forceful conclusion without ignoring or insulting either side.
Kathy completely avoids politics and controversial issues. Boring huh? No way. To begin with, her prose is smooth as butter. She has a keen eye for the foibles, idiosyncrasies and joys of human nature and presents them in a way that we all can appreciate.
I might not have guessed it, but I really look forward to reading the columns and e-mails of my aunt and stepmother. I know too that they enjoy sharing their writings and corresponding with each other. The fact that they were married to brothers allows them to wade through overlapping emotional ripples together. By reading and corresponding with Kathy, I find myself clearer in memory and understanding of my father.
Serendipity? Divine intervention? Dumb luck?
Who cares? Like they always say, relationships are about communication. In spite of the loss of the brothers who originally bound the three of us together, we have found an unlikely form of family glue: journalism.
Huff, who lives in Patrick County and practices family medicine, is a columnist for The Roanoke Times.
