Family Ramblings

My sister Janet drove down to Durham today to celebrate my father’s 75^th birthday with us.  My Dad just wanted to have a lunch outdoors so we went to the Washington Duke Inn.  We went late enough that the rain had stopped so we were the only people on the terrace.  There may have only been six of us, but we are loud enough to be a party of 20 so it was nice to have the place to ourselves.   Who knows if we disturbed any golfers on far off holes, but luckily no one complained.  My mother has spent her life being embarrassed about how loud we are, but now that she can hardly hear I think she appreciates the volume.

As is always the case when any two or more Carter’s get together we told stories of our childhoods, family trips and traumas or perceived traumas.  I love to hear everyone’s different recollections of the same story or the true confessions about things that happened long ago.

Janet, being the youngest of the children by almost nine years, always had a lot of experiences that somehow slipped under the table.  Today, she recounted how at age 9 she fell off a ladder onto a Danish friend and broke the girl’s leg.  In normal Carter fashion my mother came out and told the girl that she was fine and just to get up and walk.

My mother, having no recollection of either this girl, or the leg-breaking incident said to Janet, “Was this girl living with us?”  It was not such a far-fetched question since my parents always seemed to be the shelter for our wayward friends.   I can remember more than a few holidays when we had a friend of Margaret or Janet’s living at our house with no apparent plan of ever returning to her own family.

In fact we talked about a girl today who lived with my parents more than a month after Janet had moved away from home.  My mother did remember eventually calling Janet to ask her how she might get her friend to leave my parent’s house.

All these true confessions prompted Carter to remind us of a friend she had made once in St. Croix who had broken her arm.  Carter said she had fallen on that girl and that was how she broke her arm.  Why that child never told on Carter I will never know, but she must have been complicit in the accident to keep that fact quiet.

There is not much of a point to these rambling except as a warning to keep your distance from anyone of us in case we might fall on you and break something.