While I was clearing out of my room this weekend, my grandma asked me to take all the containers out from under hte bed, since my uncle and his wife and baby are going to be staying here when they move to NM in the spring. Today, she called me into her room to show me what had been in one of the boxes - a tablecloth and napkin set that my great-grandmother embroidered for her while she was pregnant with my dad fifty years ago. She said she was putting it away for now, but that when I was older and had my own house, she was going to give it to me - and make sure my aunts knew I was getting it, in case she passed away before that happened. She also told me later, kind of in passing, that I'm getting most of her stuff when she dies. Which I wasn't actually aware of - I knew I was getting a few things, like a Japanese figurine set I've always loved, the painting hanging over my bed that reminds me of me and my mom, and the silver, but that's it. And you know, I don't really care about the /stuff/, but it means a lot to me that my grandma is doing this for me.
I talked about it a little with my dad, and then again with my mom, because I wanted to work through how I felt about it. There are two reasons, I think, that I'm getting a lot of her things in the will and my cousins mostly aren't. The first is that I'm much closer to her than any of them. We've lived in the same town since I was a baby, and I've always spent a lot of time with her, not even taking into account the last two years that I've stayed with her most of the time. When I was a kid, and even now that I'm older, she was always taking me places - I practically lived at the Museum of Natural History and the Albuquerque Art Museum, where she was a docent. Heck, I could probably give tours through half the rooms there. I volunteered with her at the Casa San Ysidro (a recreated 19th century rancho that's part of the Albuquerque Museum). She took me to more plays and ballets and musicals at Popejoy than I can count. We went every year to the Santa Fe Opera as soon as I was old enough. One of my favorite memories from being a kid is the summer I got to go to a bunch of archaeological digs with her and grandpa. She's been a huge positive influence in my life, and as much as I complain that she drives me crazy (and oh she does), I'm closer to her than probably anyone in my family but my parents, and I really do love her.
The other reason is that she thinks - and I believe she's right about this - that I will appreciate the things she's giving me in a way my cousins won't. A lot of it is family stuff; things like the tablecloth my great-grandmother made, things they have from back in Guatemala, things my grandma has bought on all the trips she's taken and in all the places she's lived, like the prints from Japan. Some of it's valuable, some of it isn't, but it's all /important/, because it all has history. It's all part of who we are and where we've come from.
It's so important to me to have that sense of family connection, and sometimes I get the feeling that very few other people do. I know my family history going back at least four generations on every side - how my grandma's mother eloped because she fell in love with a poor boy her family didn't approve of, so they left Guatemala to go to Chicago. How my mother's grandparents left Slovakia because of the rise of the German regime and went to Argentina, and then to the Pennsylvania coal mines. How my Grandpa Jenkins' family has been in Virginia for six generations. I can't imagine what it would be like to only know about your family that you moved from New York 10 years ago and that your grandparents live in Florida. I've always wanted to know as much about my family history as I can, because it makes me feel...a part of things. I understand what it took for me to be here, how I'm part of a larger picture. I feel like I belong, like I have a place in the scheme of things. It's why I love my name so much - I have my father's last name, my middle name is my maternal great-grandmother's maiden name, and then my first name is something my parents picked together, something that's all mine.
I hope I can keep this history alive for my children. I hope I can tell them about the remarkable people, like my grandmother, that they have in their family tree, and have them feel the same excitement I do when I learn about our past. I hope my mother and father will be there for my children like my grandparents were for me. I hope I have things I can hand down to them, so they can remember where they came from.
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