A Left, a Right, and Four McDonalds

I turn left on Warner and then right on Beach.  From here, it will be a long, straight stretch.  Beach Blvd. for fifteen miles northward.  Through Huntington Beach, Westminster, Stanton, Garden Grove, Anaheim, Buena Park, southwest La Mirada, and then to my destination in La Habra.

I’m driving up to my old boss’s office to help her out with some things.  

The trip is 18 ½ miles, and all but one left and one right turn of it is a ‘straight’ stretch on Beach Blvd.

But the ‘short’ 18 miles trip takes the same 45 minutes that the 36-mile-long drive from Riverside used to take me when I made the trip daily back when I worked for her full time.  Gives me lots of time to think.

I think of my older sister now.

She can be so darn stubborn; my sister, Jenny.  She has lived alone most of her life. She was widowed two short years after being married, and sometimes I think she’s lived alone too long and can’t see past herself. 

Don’t get me wrong.  She’s not selfish.  She is very generous with family, and good-hearted, and spends time and money on various charities.

But there are times she just doesn’t think beyond herself.

I’ve been trying to convince her of the virtues of Facebook, but she just scoffs.  Why in the world would she want to know what everyone else is up to?

But I do care about what is happening in the lives of my friends and family.  It is very important to me.  I revel in their joys and their victories, and I grieve in their sorrows and their pains.   

I worried so when Jonathan was over in Japan when their earthquake hit, and so relieved to hear he was safe.  And so excited to hear when Gordon (a.k.a. Dr. Tan) returned from his trip to China!)

After this past week, I sent Jenny another invitation to join Facebook.  She missed out on so much this week alone!

My cousin, Steve, his wife, five grown children and first grandchild came back from a vacation in Cancun. 

 

By the looks of it, they had a very memorable time.  Now, even Jenny would have found joy in this!

I just adore Steve and Ellen. I’ve never met their children, but have watched them grow in photos over the years.  

And  I thrilled with them and the rest of the family over the recent birth of their first grandchild, little Elizabeth Marie.

I had so much fun sharing in their vacation photos, and enjoyed getting to know Chris a little through his great eye for photography and his obvious love for family through his lens. 

He’s studying to be a doctor like his father and grandfather before him.  I think that is so cool!

We’ve been able to get updates this week to let us know that Karolyn’s house has still managed to escape the horrific wildfires now raging through her canyon in Arizona, and to lift her up in prayer.  

It has burned over a half a million acres and destroyed at least 29 homes.  I pray for the hundreds of firefighters out battling this inferno in the heat of summer.

Now I drive past the first McDonalds along my journey, and my mind flashes back to my little Marlene - who graduated high school this week and shared photos on Facebook. 
She's the one who first called me "Auntie Liz."  I am so proud of her this week!

Then there is Josie (who was once my second-, or was it third- grade student?)  She just let us know this week that she got her nursing license.  And she’s expecting her second child.  What would I do without Facebook?!  Lord, please bless Josie and her growing family.  (She's in the lower left corner.)

My daughter, Erin, and her fiancé spent a week-long vacation in Maui and shared wonderful photos of it with all of us.  I wish Jenny could have seen them.  She'd have loved them!

“See what you are missing out on?” I ask Jenny, as I try to convince her one last time.

I wait at the stop light outside Knott’s Berry Farm and the roller coasters  make me think of the rambunctious hooligan that Noah was as a child.  And I thank God for his return from Afghanistan this week.  

The light changes and as I pass McDonalds #2, my mind wanders for the umpteenth time to our men and women serving oversees in Iraq and Afghanistan.  And I lift them up in prayer.

I step on the gas and continue on northward.  I pray for those who lead our military, and those to whom our military answer.

I change lanes and a blue mini van pulls up along side me with one of those “Baby On Board” signs in a window.  The ones that always make me wonder  if they think that is supposed to make us all drive any safer or something....


...and instantly my mind turns to my sweet little Gavin, the grandson I only get to see thanks to the wonders of Facebook. 

I long to smooch his baby pudge neck.  I pray for him and his parents, my daughter, Jen, and her husband, Travis, in Tennessee.

The speed limit slows to 35 where Anaheim and Buena Park meet and I cross the railroad tracks as I cross over the 5 Freeway and I pray for my loved ones who are traveling near and far this week.

I pass McDonalds #3 shortly after crossing over the 5 freeway, and continue on northward with my thoughts and my prayers for those dear to my heart.

Then traffic dips under an overpass and comes through into the more open spaces of the eastern expanses of La Mirada, and the speed limits opens up to 50.

I think of my friend, Uzoma, who lives in Nigeria.  We met when he was here in CA for back surgery and I wound up being his physical therapist during his recovery.   He was staying with a cousin of his, here in La Mirada.  

When he left to go back home I never dreamed I’d ever hear from him again.  But thanks for the wonders of Facebook, I have.  He looked me up!  

My wide open space quickly comes to an end.  I see the last landmark McDonalds of my drive approaching on the rise to the right as I near the busy shopping center at Imperial.

Traffic slows and I have to come back to earth at the stop light.  Bless them all, dear Lord, I pray, and hold them in your hands.  And I focus on the busy  traffic as I begin to gradually make my way to the right lane in preparation to pull over soon at the Dr.’s office.

I’ve sent the letter/request to Jenny.  She will receive it, and she will either get it, or she won’t.

But that is what relationships are to me.  Once you come into my life, the relationship is constant, regardless of time and space.  If I loved you twenty years ago when you were in my third grade class, I love you no less now. 

If you were my BFF when we were in third grade ourselves (Daisy!), then your name is still written on my heart forever.  The same for an old boyfriend, a teacher, a neighbor.

I do care about my friends and family, and I love to hear about what is going on in their lives - always.  And to pray with them, and for them in times of joy and in times of sorrow.

I guess it’s sort of like my drive up Beach Blvd.  Traveling from point A to point B, changing lanes, speeding up, slowing down, stopping and starting, I talk to God about the people in my heart.

That’s the way it should be.  I love that tiny little verse in the Bible that tells us to “pray continually.” 

Two simple words.   When I was young I couldn’t comprehend this directive.  But in my monotonous drive along Beach Blvd., it is second nature now in my wiser, slower, more wrinkled years.

I can talk to God throughout the day - at stop signs, changing lanes, walking through the day.  He wants us to talk to him like we do to our friends on Facebook.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.  --  1 Thes. 5:16-18

It’s a Small, Small World

It’s a Small, Small World

(Thanks to the Internet)

In 2002, my childhood classmate from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and I tracked down half a dozen other classmates.  Friends I hadn’t seen in 29 years.  We all started chatting via email and decided to see how many more former classmates we could find.  And slowly our numbers grew.
 

As we began to share photos amongst us, I offered to build a web site where we could post them all in one place where they could be accessed by all.

Interest grew and we tracked down yet others.  And then we began talking about getting together someday.  And the seeds of a reunion were planted.

Sometime in 2005 or 2006, a man named Kenneth Mossberg and his wife Eleanor Schweitz left their home in Sweden to go to Denmark.  I am guessing it was for a family gathering, or possibly a family funeral.

While at the relative’s house, they got to going through old photographs, and one in particular caught Kenneth’s eye: a photo of a man probably taken in the 1920s by the look of his clothing.

It was a great photo, not necessarily for its quality or even its composition, so much as its mysterious quality.

Along a nondescript dirt road in the countryside somewhere, a man squats with a dog and three puppies.  By the looks of the man, he is an animal enthusiast.

Or  if it were modern times, one might speculate that he could possibly be taking a photo to advertise his puppies for sale on Craigslist.

He appears to be a solidly-built man with stocky, well-muscled shoulders, and wears a long-sleeved shirt, a tie and an Indiana Jones sort of hat.

But the mysterious quality of it derives not so much from any of those details, but his head and face – or what can be seen of them.

His head is tilted slightly downward as he looks at his puppies, with his hat slanting at a slightly jaunty angle, covering all but his nose and mouth.  And they are both cast into the shadows by the brim of his hat in the bright, mid-day sunlight.

You can just barely make out his nose in the shadows, and it’s hard to decide if you can glimpse a Mona Lisa type smile beneath, or it’s just the imagination.

On the back of the photo, in clean, clear penmanship is written in Danish, “Me with my dogs.”

Trying to make out the facial characteristics in the shadows of the brim, Kenneth imagines he sees a striking resemblance to his wife’s family, but it’s hard to tell for sure with just the essence of details.

He asks around, but nobody seems to have any idea who the man is or where the photo was taken.  He’s mystified.

Then he comes across another photo that piques his interest.  It is of six children ranging in age from about two to thirteen or so, sitting on the ground with two of the same puppies and what looks like a straggly cane-type plant or oleander bush behind them.

On the back of this one, written in the same beautiful hand, is a clue to the identity of the mysterious man.  It lists the names of the children in the photo: “Asta. Oliver. Gerda. Amy (with the name Blackwood beneath). Ada. Peter.”

But no one looking through the photos has any idea who the Blackwood children are.  The mystery nags at Kenneth, and for the next four or five years, he tries searching the interenet far and wide looking for the connection of the Blackwood children, the mysterious man, and his wife’s family.

In 2007 I was invited to go back to my childhood home in the Virgin Islands for a high school reunion, even though I didn’t actually graduate with the class.  (I graduated from a high school 3,000 miles away in California.) 

But had I remained on the island, I’d have been a part of their graduating class.  Besides, the reunion came about as a result of the first few of us who began tracking down the others from wherever the four winds had sent them.

And so that summer, I spent ten wonderful days there at the home of my best friend from grade school.  And sitting there at her dining room table one night with her husband, I told him I’d always dreamed of writing a book – a historical fiction piece set in St. Croix.

Then for the next year, I did intensive background research in all things, Crucian (having to do with St. Croix): history, customs, flora and fauna, even tracing family trees of many of the islands families back through the centuries.

And I spent the following year writing the novel, finally publishing it in November of 2009.

In February of 2010, Mr. Mossburg resumed his quest to solve the mystery of the man with his dogs, and the elusive Blackwell children on Ancestry.com – the country’s foremost family history web site. 

Finally, getting nowhere, he decided to try searching for the children individually rather than as a family.  And only then did he come across some of the research I’d done on my island family histories.

And lo and behold, he found that Asta, Oliver, Gerda, Ada, and Peter were not Blackwoods at all, but were Skovs – the children of Peter Jens Skov – the mystery man in the first photo.  And Amy Blackwood was their half-sister; Jens’s step-daughter.

When he found the Skov/Blackwell family lived not in Denmark, but in the Virgin Islands, the puzzle seemed to deepen even more.  How did a photo of a family in the Caribbean wind up in an old box of photos in the attic of a home in Denmark?

So last Monday when I opened my email box, I was surprised to find a letter from a man I’d never heard of in Sweden!  He had found my notes on the Skov family of St. Croix and wanted to know how they were related to the Mossburg/Schweitz family of Sweden and Denmark. 

I had to admit that I had no clue whatsoever!  And the Skovs that I knew still living on island were very unlikely to have any interest in family genealogy – or even have internet.  But I promised him I’d ask around next May on my trip down there.

Then, on a hunch, I tried to look around on Facebook to see if I could find any of the children of Asta, Oliver, Gerda, Ada, and Peter. 

We’d known them as Aunt Asta, Uncle Oliver and Uncle Peter – and Uncle Teddy who was not yet born at the time of the picture.  And they were all the younger half-siblings of Uncle Clarence Blackwood of whom I’ve already written in he story of Uncle Clarence.

And what do you know!  I came across Jean-Pierre, the youngest son of Uncle Pete, right there on Facebook.  I sent off a note to him (in Rhode Island) telling him of the photo, and Mr. Mossburg in Sweden, and our puzzle.

Jean-Pierre (or John now) told me Uncle Pete is still living there (at 91) in his hilltop house across Teague Bay from ours – right above the goat farm and Uncle Clarence’s dock!

So he printed out the photos I’d emailed him, along with my questions from Mr. Mossburg and the info I’d sent him on their family history tracing back to 1801, and sent them off (snail mail) to Uncle Pete and his son, Carlos, back home.

Not quite a miracle, but as close as you can get in a time of technology.  The long-lost photo (some eighty years in transit) has found its way back to its rightful family.  And at least the first part of the puzzle has been solved.

Now we just have to wait to see if this will strike a chord in the 91-yr-old memory of dear old Uncle Pete.  Maybe Mr. Mossburg in Sweden will find his connection – via email from me in California, via email from the grandson of the mysterious man with the dogs (now living in Rhode Island), via snail mail across the Caribbean from Uncle Pete.

It is, indeed, a small, small world!