In the light of our sun room you can see the silhouette of the tree the boys sawed down. No rifles. I thought we might disturb the owner of the property with that method of tree capture. The boys sawed it down and we lashed it to the Traverse but not before the tree seller discovered I was “Welty.” He told me he liked my politics and that Johnston fellow’s too. Claudia wouldn’t have minded if I’d shut the door while the praise snowed down on me. It was cold in the car.
I stayed away from the blog over the weekend so naturally I have a raft of things I want to unload. I won’t get to them, or at least not most of them. I shoveled a little this morning, I read the paper, I took a call from a much praised fellow school board member and we talked about the early threadbare budget materials we will talk about at today’s Business Committee meeting with our new Finance Director Doug Hassler. For the first time in a decade some board members will know their budget better than their chief financial officer.
I thought about writing about the multiple infinitesimaly small injuries I suffered on my second day of being 66 that sadly reminded me that my godly status as a birthday boy had come to a predictable end. At first I was even prepared to ignore my leading my choir off in the wrong pitch with my first ever solo with the choir. They would have nothing to do with it and I was forced to make a quick correction after the first stanza two notes shy of middle C. Take comfort that I’m not the President Elect of the United States. Or don’t.
I devoted much of last week to pouring through my voluminous family records. These encompass the histories of my four grandparents families and my wife’s parents. Over the years I’ve worked on them for short periods and filed them away but often in such a rush that they became co mingled. I’m glad I uncomingled them because I found many additional records of my first priority the records of my Grandfather George Robb. (I’m writing that book remember)
I now have five reasonable separated family records. (I combined my Wife’s Scott and Martin clans for the time being) One item I am detouring through is the scrapbook my Dad, Daniel Welty, made at the beginning of the Second World War. Its mostly Life magazine stories about the war with all the famous photojournalism of that publication. I was curious to see what part of the war it covered and it looks like it began in earnest with the Japanese onslaught on the Pacific in late 1941. He would soon be in a high school ROTC program. He was lucky that the war was over before service was required. He wrote regularly from shipboard to the home folk in Kansas City Kansas about the minutiae of shipboard life. He was a good boy and I don’t think I’ll find any mention of the shipmate he told me about why was dragged into a house of prostitution somewhere in the Panama Canal Zone by a Madam. A letter home in January of 46 writes of his heading to Japan. He would soon be taking shore leave at Hiroshima that had been leveled five month’s earlier.
Ah, I can hear a grandson downstairs. We have to take him to the Dentist in the next hour. Or maybe Grandma will. I have gotten so little done yet today and I need to read the agendas for the School Board’s Human Resources and Business Committees. Sayonara.
