Butler, PA, and a July 27, 1987 postcard

My aunt and maternal grandmother lived together for the entirety of the latter's life. When I was a child, they lived in a neighboring small town called Rimersburg (which was where my high school was located). During their time there, my grandfather was bedridden with black lung disease. He had worked all of his life in the coal mines and was repaid with a disability payment and days spent in a hospital bed in the sitting room in their home.

It was always strange for me when I saw him. He laid in that room with no TV and a sofa which he could never leave his bed to sit on. Occasionally, the radio would be turned on, but mostly he just laid there and waited for people to feed him, give him coffee with a straw in the mug, or give him a bed pan. I never saw his wife or my aunt meaningfully interact with him. I didn't say anything to him myself because he struggled to get out any reply when I did speak and I don't think he really "knew" me.

We most often visited him when my aunt and grandma needed to take a caregiver's break. During that time, my mother would sit with her father, feed him, and sometimes have quiet and forced exchanges with him. My mother felt her father favored her when she was younger while her mother favored the aunt who lived with her. She'd sit next to him and prattle while he struggled to reply at all. This would go on until her sister and mother returned. My sister and I would read my cousin's books or get into their shed and pull out croquet equipment and play a little, but we were mostly bored and anxious to leave.

The only book I remember reading from that time was a little picture book about the pilgrims. The native Americans were shown as being friendly and caring about the survival of the people who showed up on their shores. It was one of the lies I was told as a child which was exposed when I grew up. It turns out that the Wapanoag were indulging in a little of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" diplomacy. The Iroquois were in a position to annihilate them and they sought to annex themselves to anyone who might help them in a fight.

When my grandfather passed away, my aunt and grandmother, who seemed to be fused in many respects, decided to sell their nice home in a small town for a nicer home in Butler. It was after this move, which plunged them into a life a hefty multiple mortgages and continuing to live even further beyond their combined means, that saw me accompanying my mother to Butler on a regular basis. It was a "big town" by the standards of people who grew up in a town of less than a 1,000. It was also the only place where I could find work after college and where most of my written correspondence to Tito was composed in the office of the halfway house there.

I made many pilgrimages to the Butler post office, where my uncle worked for a time in the back room sorting mail, to send missives and parcels to Tito. The people there didn't know me and didn't read my outgoing mail as the people at the local post office did. I sent Tito this card to show him the streets I was traversing to buy him goodies for care packages, stationary for our exchanges, and mailing things to him. In this card, I say that I learned the population was 33,000. That was either incorrect or it's been seriously depopulated since then.

This was the first postcard that I sent Tito in Japan and it was addressed to his workplace. 

Privacy, and a second July 19, 1987 greeting card

It's hard for me to imagine what levels of privacy people who didn't grow up in my home possessed because I so rarely had any. What little I had was constantly being interrupted by surprise guests or people who my parents decided should spend the night for whatever reason. In the card I'm posting today, I mention a surprise visit from my cousins who were going to stay with us for three nights. This wasn't especially unique except that these were the "good" cousins who had never stayed with us before.

The "good" side of the family was the maternal one and the "bad" was the paternal one. My mother's relatives rarely visited and never had their children stay with us because of the state of our family home. We were beneath them, and that was always clear. The reason my aunt's kids stayed with us was an emergency health situation with their father and no one else was willing to look after them for an extended time. So, they were too good for us, unless they needed us.

This card was written one day after Tito and I talked on the phone and started our long distance relationship. It seemed all too common that my privacy was yanked away from me at the most inopportune moments. It's no small wonder that I felt like fate was sitting around chuckling at my misfortune. Even in the best of times, things could be difficult or tricky. My privacy was taken away right when I most wanted to celebrate my new status as a partnered person.