It has been an interesting week, my move to the “consolidated” winery is getting closer and closer by the minute. The woman who is retiring has been training me in Champagne production and other tasks, but her last day was yesterday and I am going to a departmental retirement party for her tonight. So the past couple of days, she has been cleaning out her office and I have been packing up my old office to get ready for the move. My first was office was a nice big, open office with nice furniture, but it had now windows as it was an inside office. Then I got as promotion and that moved me to the sister winery which was an older facility and I moved into this:
Yep, those were my glorious digs. It was the size of a broom closet, the walls were paper thin so you could hear everyone’s conversations and everyone could hear yours, but hey it had a window with a nice view. Now I get to move back into a larger office but, again this new office as no windows. It would be nice to have a big office with windows, but I’m just a small fish in a big pond so that dream will have to have wait and in the meantime I’ll sacrifice the window for space. But anyway I packed up all of my files, books, office supplies, and various other things and it amounted to this:
2 large boxes, and a 1 small box. It was kind of depressing. I took one more look around my office to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Then I spotted a scrap piece of paper with some writing on it in at the back of my file cabinet. **Get ready, because here comes a big right turn into randomness.**
Written on that piece of paper was the name of my paternal Grandfather, his birthdate, birthplace and possibly the name of his mother.I had apparently met him once or twice when I was a toddler, but I have no recollection of any of it. A couple of years ago I got swept up into the “family tree” craze and did a lot of searching on the internet for who my people were. I mean have you ever wondered how you got here? I would love to actually see the line of my people back to the beginning. Were they royalty or were they thieves? Were they working class people who worked a trade, and if so what did they do? Or were they a traveling band of gypsies that turned to the darker side of life to make it through? I just found it very interesting, but what really sparked my whole interest was that about that time my paternal Grandfather Duane died. I remember my father calling me to tell me and I really wasn’t affected I never knew him other than the two times I saw him as a baby. All growing up whenever anyone brought him up it was always to say what a prick he was. I heard he was mean, he was a con artist swindler who used whatever means necessary to get what he wanted out of you. I heard he beat up my Grandmother once and walked out on my both my Grandmother and my Father when he was very young. Hearing all of this I had never wanted to meet him, as far I knew he had forgotten I even existed because my father didn’t have any contact with him either. Then apparently my father’s half sister called him to tell him that Duane had died and as they were going through his things, in his wallet he had a folded newspaper clipping of L Bird’s and my engagement announcement. So that kind of struck me really deep, I hadn’t seen this man in 28 years and for the greater part of my life I forgot he was out there, but apparently he was silently observing my life. Hearing all of the things about him I like to think that as he got older he had a change of heart and was honest and actually cared that I was who I was and that he was proud that some small part of him had actually made something of themselves. (Almost all of his other children & grandchildren ended up in jail for one reason or another because they are a bunch of nitwits.) So I still want to know where I come from, but I’m willing to put that search on hold for awhile.
But anyway, that’s the kind of week I have been having. Its funny how you find things when you aren’t really looking for them, huh?
No comments:
Post a Comment