Quiet

Today has been quiet. Not much new to report. I slept late after a restless night, ate bfst about noon. I've been working on taxes, even though the deadline is extended. Lots of time available, so I might as well use it. Ellen took a little walk with Eliza and the girls.

I realized that what Tristan Crockett has been reporting on re family members is a DNA testing site called "23andme." So evidently he was tested and has been hearing from dad's relatives who have also been tested. That brings some people out of the woodwork that we might not otherwise have been aware of. Interesting! Maybe more will emerge.

One person he heard from was a daughter, Jane, of J. Carl Williamson (son of dad's sister, Annie). I knew about Jane - I had  met her at the Williamson Family Reunion. I was able to send him a slide dad took of J Carl (and me and mother and one of J Carl's children) back in 1946! It was taken on Lookout Mountain, TN - a fairly short drive from Bremen, GA where we were visiting for Grandma Crockett's funeral:

J Carl Williamson, a grandchild?, me and mother, 1946.

Scrabble!

Ellen and I played Scrabble this evening - not online but with an actual board, the old-fashioned way. Ellen had my usual luck with tiles - she got all the vowels. I got the Q, J, Z, and tho I won (292-252) it was not by that huge a margin. So she did better with what she got. It was a strange game too in that it was very condensed in one quarter of the board for a long time. Here is the final board:

Reaching out to cousins

I've been doing some reaching out via the Internet to family I've not been in touch with for a while - like southern cousins. I re-established contact with Frances Gardner via Facebook and got her email address. She is 92 and lives in Mississippi.  She is the daughter of my father's sister, Annie Williamson. I first met her in 1946 at my grandmother Crockett's funeral in Breman, GA, and more recently saw her at a Williamson family reunion in Florida about 10-12 years ago.  She is my favorite cousin, but I had lost her current address and hadn't gotten a Christmas card from her recently. But I got an email from her -  she still drives!

I've also reached out to Wiley Crockett whom I may have met back in 1946, but have not seen since. Wiley is the son of my father's younger brother, Bernard.  I haven't heard back from him yet.

Meanwhile, Tristan Crockett, my grand-nephew, had been doing some family research and had heard from a Lily Jinkins who turns out to be a descendant of my father's younger sister Otsie Maude. I had never heard of Lily before, but I was able to find a photo of dad and Maude and provide Tristan with  other information on dad's siblings.
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My dad's family in 1946. I am the 13-year-old boy in the next to back row fifth from the right. My mother is just in front of me to my right. Cousin Frances is two to the left of mother (or two down on her right) in a plum-colored suit jacket.

Maude Crockett with my dad, c. 1924. I think this was taken at Piedmont College, GA where they overlapped a year.

The Williamson Family reunion. Cousin Frances is almost center in the first seated row, white hair, and wearing a white blouse and black vest.  The three older folks to her right are all first cousins to me - Etta, Randall and Clyde. I'm in the back row, second from left.

A beautiful day

Today is gorgeous!

Ellen is giving our bed quilts a good airing and sunning. Yesterday I went out,  and coming back up the driveway, for the first time, I got stuck with the car. We had not been plowed out and it was just icy and watery enough to make it impossible to get up the final little bit. Fortunately I had my ice grippers for my shoes and my ski poles with me and I walked up the last few feet to the house. I called Zach, and in a  few minutes he came up and got the car up to the house. Today he came up and back-bladed the drive and cleared  the snow and didn’t turn up the mud. Ellen just went out and it’s fine.

Airing and sunning

Stewart Letter #20

Letter # 20, March 25, 1945

 25 March  45

Dear Dad,

            In three months, I will be eighteen years old, and then if I am still in the ASTRP, I will have to wait for another month and a half to go by before I can find out what the active-duty man has to put up with. If, however, I am not in the ASTRP  then, I will have to go right away.  If I find that I cannot go to language school, and cannot have a furlough either, I believe that I shall obtain a release from the ASTRP so that I can be home for a while.[1] I might not have a furlough if the remaining members of my section are transferred to another university. Since there will be less than ten left in my section at the end of this term, and 10 are needed to make a section, there will be either someone shipped here, or we will be shipped out. The last section that was transferred that way did not get furloughs. Meanwhile I will try to learn as much as possible while I am here.

            Since I have come here, I have gained more confidence in the water. There is a nice swimming pool in the coliseum here, and we are given an opportunity each P. T. period to use it. My endurance is not very great, however, because I am not used to it yet. I can swim on my side and float on my back most easily. Also I can dive head first into the water for the first time.

                                                                                                                                   (cont[2])
                                  V ...- 3 Mail

---

[1] It isn't obvious, but future letters will make clear that at this point, Stewart was very unhappy with his situation at Lincoln and was seriously considering withdrawing from the ASTRP program. Such a withdrawal, however, would have had negative consequences for subsequent choices in the Army.  A short time after this letter, he will go through a very down time but ultimately will be persuaded to stay in the ASTRP and he will be transferred to South Dakota State University at Brookings, SD, where he will be much happier. All that will be made clear in Letter #21, dated May 30, 1945.

[2] This letter is incomplete - the reverse side did not get copied for some reason.

[3] The three dots and a dash after the letter "V" are Morse Code for "V."  "V" for Victory.  It was very common back then to sing these using the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony - "dah-dah-dah DAH!"  It was sort of a mantra during WW2.  This V-mail form was a  special light-weight, low postage Air-Mail letter widely used during WW2 for letters to servicemen.

Zoom

We just had a zoom session with several members of the Dummerston church that was organized by our pastor, Shawn. About seven people participated, including John. There will be another one on Friday, and Shawn is hoping it’ll grow each time.

Today I digitized a service from July 6, 1997 at the Guilford church, on the theme “do not fear.”  It was Fourth of July weekend, so elements had to do with that theme. But it was still pretty relevant for our own time today. An element of the service I had completely forgotten about was that I sang a solo – Zarastro’s song from The Magic Flute. It sounded pretty good! The text of the song fit the theme of “do not fear” very well.

Life goes on!

Looking out the west living room window at the snow this morning

Some big decisions

As the pandemic develops, I’m making some big decisions. First, I’ve decided to put on hold my visits to physical therapy appointments. I’ve had four visits so far, and I have exercises I can do at home. I don’t have their equipment at home - the squishy discs to stand on, etc. - but I think I can make progress. I have a dental appointment coming up in April, and I called the dentist office and learned they were closed until the end of March. Since the appointment is just for a cleaning, I think I’ll call them later and postpone that appointment as well. I also have a podiatrist appointment in early April. That needs more thought, because walking is painful, and I would like to be able to take good walks. I wonder if he would be willing to work on my foot out in the parking lot with me in the car.

What all this adds up to is that I feel I need to stay secluded until there’s a vaccine available. I really don’t want to get this virus, and I don’t think it’s going to go away anytime soon.  I can see a reasonable life staying at home, going out for walks, going out in the car, but staying away from other people, staying away from public places. That could conceivably go on for another year or so! Those are the lines I am thinking along right now, but obviously  it will have to be reevaluated every week.

I realize that this might be a God-given opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to get done for years and that is digitizing the cassette tapes of Guilford church services from the 80s and 90s, when Shirley and I were pastors, of which I have over 400. Being able to pass those on to the church as CDs rather than tapes would be great.

Meanwhile, we got a lot of snow last night. I think we got probably seven or eight inches at least. I’m not sure if Zach will be able to plow it though, because it’s pretty muddy underneath. We’ll see.

Ellen had a successful Zoom  session with her knitting companions yesterday, I think Zoom will turn out to be a very handy way to stay in touch with people. We couldn’t have done that with the old iPhone. It has too old an operating system.

New fallen snow