My poor brother was so bored today. There were tons of attractions in Tulsa he has wanted to see, but has not yet visited, any time he was up in this part of the state. We thought about going to lots of them, like the Woody Guthrie museum, or the Philbrook, or other neat, historically significant spots around town. There was one big hitch: today was Monday, and most of these types of attractions are closed on Mondays. He was stuck here while we dithered, and the most we did outside of the house was go shopping for a few groceries and kitchen tools. We would have happily gone to some of the museums tomorrow (especially the Woody Guthrie place--I would have been all over that), if my flight wasn't so early in the day. There's one spot we are hoping to reach, but if will save that story for tomorrow, if we do manage to get there. It's someplace that I'd never heard of before, and now that I know it exists, I am compelled to see it.
It was odd that we should be such boring homebodies on today of all days. It was tonight, after dinner, after we each had a couple of glasses of wine to lower our inhibitions, that I went and armed myself with pen and paper, and started poking around to discover which stories I'm allowed to tell from our collective past, and which were off limits. I suggested to them on my last trip that I wanted to dig deeper, and at that time I was given a generic blanket permission from all of them to write freely. Today I wanted to start the process of memory among all of us. It takes a long time to let the memories reopen, re inflate, and fall into words. I have just barely scratched the surface, and already I have learned things I never suspected about my family. I have also begun correcting the things I had wrong including stories where I was massively off course when I wrote in this space. It is not necessary to me to go back and change the posts, for even though some of the key details were wrong, the basic premises were not.
I've gotten rather stuck in my own routines, and I'm having trouble being separated from my Park, but I feel like I could use another three or four days with the family to get the stories started. It's difficult trying to be organized and act as ringleader and memory keeper, when I'm not on my own turf. It was great after dinner, when they could hear each other's voices, and build on each other's experiences, even those that took places decades apart. Damn my timing for waiting until nine or ten o'clock at night to really push them to talk. I need to find a way to get them all out to the Park again. Last time that was a logistical nightmare. There must be an easier way. It's a shame that passenger train travel is so diminished in modern America. That would be a nice relaxing way to get them to my side of the world, without wearing them out like the last long drive did, and without stressing them out like the last time they flew. I should find out whether such a train route still exists. What a great way to revisit the past that would be.
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