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Thirteen Dysfunctional Family Secrets, 4th

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Thirteen Things about J. Lynne

  1. My great-great-grandmother divorced my great great-grandfather because he wanted to move out of Georgia. (Imagine the scandal of a divorce back then.) Even though he moved to Florida and remarried, he was buried next to her in Georgia.
  2. My great-grandmother was divorced twice herself. In fact, so was my grandmother. They were both married 3 times, though my grandmother married my grandfather twice. I guess she had to be sure.
  3. My mother is the first woman on her side of the family in four generations to never be divorced.
  4. My grandmother appears on the 1930’s census twice because my great-grandmother and my great-grandfather shared custody and they both marked her down as living with them.
  5. According to my grandmother, my great-grandfather, a rather strict man, “kidnapped” my grandmother and took her to live in Georgia when she was a child after the divorce from my great-grandmother. My grandmother never forgave my great-grandmother for not “coming to get her” and accused her of being too much of a party girl. My great-grandmother’s version of the story was that she didn’t have the money to go to Georgia (from Florida) to go get her and bring her back. Who’s telling the truth? It’s impossible to know. Perhaps there’s truth in both versions. My grandmother did go to live with my great-grandmother when she was sixteen.
  6. My mother’s and my father’s brothers’ have the same first name. I am not on speaking terms with either.
  7. My parents both have siblings but all of the siblings have only one child as offspring. I suspect this is because as siblings they drove each other crazy and didn’t want to make their own children suffer the same.
  8. One Christmas, which was also my father’s brother’s 40th birthday, my dad’s sister stood up during dinner and announced that she was in therapy because my uncle was born. Apparently there had been some psychological trauma as a result of waking up on Christmas morning to find she’d been abandoned by her parents and left to the mercy of my father, who was not the nicest older brother. That was the last time we were all together as an extended family.
  9. My father and his brother have always tried to call each other when they know the other is not home so that the other one would be forced to call back and have the long distance call on the other’s “dime”. This continues to this day even though they both have those unlimited long distance services.
  10. My mother’s father, diagnosed with lung cancer, would smoke cigarettes while hooked up to his oxygen tank.
  11. My mother’s step-mother was Vietnamese. She was outrageous with fluffy fake zebra fur on her car seats and plastic covers on her house furniture. She watched Bruce Lee in Chinese and kept fish heads in some weird liquid in a jar under a rock in the backyard (to cook with). She supposedly met my pilot grandfather while involved in the real “Air America” in the war and was a loan shark in her later days here in America. She was sadly brutally murdered in her home, apparently by some sort of Asia mafia, adding to her mystique.
  12. My mother’s mother and step-father had a refrigerator for their keg and it was in the living room. All my friends growing up used to think I had the coolest grandparents ever.
  13. It's not easy being green My mother’s step-father used to dye his hair, including his mustache, green every St. Patrick’s day. He kind of looked like a leprechaun anyway. He was always big into getting into the spirit of the holiday, whatever the holiday — especially if there was drinking involved. However, one year, he accidentally didn’t use temporary hair color and much to his chagrin, he had to live with that green hair for quite a while afterward. He just laughed it off and I’m sure he joked about it with everyone he met. He was just that kind of guy.

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Published:
09.08.07 / 12am
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Thursday Thirteen
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