My own personal wayback machine
Jan. 15th, 2006 01:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susandennisMom called to check in. While I was on the phone with her, my land line rang and someone was leaving a message. Mom hung up and whoeveritwas was still leaving a message! I looked on the caller ID and it was Joyce Gibson. I grabbed it and caught her before she hung up.
When I was 6 we lived in Winston-Salem and Joyce and Jim Gibson bought the house on the other side of our corner. They were young and they had a baby, Eddie, and Joyce sometimes went barefoot. My mother NEVER went barefoot. I remember asking Mom once what 'newlywed' meant and she was busy so she didn't really answer but she did tell me that Joyce and Jim were newlyweds. I watched them very closely.
I made my first babysitting money watching Eddie. Joyce and Jim and Mom and Dad spent many a Saturday night barbecuing with friends in the back yard. My bedroom window overlooked the patio and after dinner they would be sitting and drinking and Jim would go get his Ukulele and they would sing for hours.
We moved from that house when I was 14 and Joyce and Jim went on to have three more boys. Over all the years they moved around. Mom and Dad moved around. Everybody grew older. When Daddy died in 1999, they came to Charleston for the service and we had a nice visit.
And here was Joyce on the phone. She said that they had sent Mom some peanuts at Christmas and a card and the card got returned with addressee unknown. And she had sent my sister and email and it got returned. So she fired up Switchboard and found me.
She sounded so just like she did when I was 6. Eddie was a brilliant kid when he was a kid. He is now a brilliant adult and has a brilliant girl child who is a freshman at William and Mary. John is the director of Live Arts in Charlottesville, VA. Talton is working with Jennifer Laslo on the Israel Project and Campbell is managing a hedge fund in New York City. When you ask Joyce 'so how are the kids' you get your money's worth.
It was so wonderful to hear her voice. And to hear about her family and the bits she knew about other people. We've all wondered for years whatever happened to Jack who built our house in Blowing Rock. They saw him not a month ago. He's dying now but the apple of his eye - his daughter, Janie has - come home to care for him so he's moving smoothly on. I filled her in on Mom and gave her the correct address.
Joyce and Jim live in Smithfield now in the home her family built in 1850. Oh and the newlyweds celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last year. Amazing, just amazing. Thank you Switchboard.
totally unrelated to your post
Date: 2006-01-15 11:36 pm (UTC).
Would you mind terribly if I used some of your photos for DLU entries in my journal? If you're okay with it, I would make it so the image is a link to the page on your Flickr site whenever I used one.
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Re: totally unrelated to your post
Date: 2006-01-15 11:48 pm (UTC)But, I gotta say that I'm kind of seriously quite flattered! :)
Re: totally unrelated to your post
Date: 2006-01-15 11:50 pm (UTC).
Cool! I'll still link them to your site because I don't want people to assume I took the picture and thereby take credit for a photo I didn't take.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-16 02:55 am (UTC)A couple of years back my mother came to visit with a family friend whom I hadn't seen in, what, 15 years, closer to 20 years. It was so strange, like I'd seen her last a week before. I was friends with both her children; we used to do the funnest things. One of them now lives in Brazil. The web we weave in our life feels so thing sometimes but covers so much ground.
Mf, forgive the pretentious prose-poety.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-16 01:18 pm (UTC)