Conways, Winding Ways, and Saints in the Snow: A Reflection on Family

…. being a celebration of a lovely lady, my Aunt Nene, on the anniversary of her birth.

When I was a wee lass, writing letters (versus emails or texts) was still A Thing, and I loved to get letters but was not really an international peer pen-pal sort of girl.  Instead, I wrote letters to my mom's sister, Aunt Nene, and  every one started in the same imaginative way:

"Dear Aunt Nene:
How are you?  I am fine."

…after which I would blather on about whatever scintillating news an 8-year old might have, likely tales of sibling woe or an epic retelling of the appropriation of a paint-by-numbers kit (mostly unused!) from the neighbor's garage sale or some such.  

Nene, being a charitable sort and also spectacular with children, would obligingly reply:

"Dear Astrid:
How are you?  I am also fine."

Sometimes these would be handwritten notes in Nene's characteristic loopy, not quite cursive printing; and sometimes they would be manufactured on an old-school typewriter with many an exclamation point and lined- or X'd-out erratum, from a machine dating definitely back to pre-correction-tape days.  I think this may have been around the time Nene was writing for her local newspaper and so that was probably the tool of her trade, but whatever the source, I adored those letters, and the lady who sent them, and I still do.

Nene turned 80 last year - and a couple years before that she could be found showing a little leg before jumping off of her younger brother's boat into the Mighty Mississippi with her nieces' children:

Two too-canny Conways can can-can.  Can you?  Lookit those pointed toes!  Ha chachachacha!

Here is a woman who is always ready to

Life: A Quilting Lesson

…being a dispatch from The Unsolicited Advice Lady for a nephew on a new adventure.

I first met my nephew JB when he was about 9, I think - my brother El Jefe brought his new lady friend (now wife, Cairo) and her sons to dinner to meet the fam, which I'm sure was about as horrifying a thing as could be imagined, for a lad of 9….especially given it was MY family, boisterous as we are, and especially for a young dude as reserved and adult as JB was at that age.  He sat quietly observing the chaos that is the Reflux family en masse; leaned against his mom, with preternaturally wise old eyes in his little boy face, and made the best of it.  That dinner has now lasted about 15 years, lucky kid.

In the ensuing years, despite sporadic, holidays-and-birthdays level contact, I was delighted to witness JB growing into

Stars Fell On Alabama: A Georgia Peach Welcomes The New Guy

….being a wee baby quilt for my college bestie, and the resulting sweet reminiscences.

I had a good long gab with my old pal Mocha last night, who was one of the very first people I met on campus as a Freshman.  I was NOT super-excited to be going to college, because I had sniffily decided I had Bigger Plans, and she had come all the way from Georgia to the midwest for the express purpose, it seemed to me, of making my life bearable until I could graduate the fuck out of there and go explore the world.  We lived on the same dorm floor, and I first saw her at some idiot icebreaker event as we were all moving in, where I was scowling at all the sorority girls I was going to have to live with; she had just leaned over her lap forgetting there was pizza on it and was laughing at herself merrily for the subsequent pizza-shaped marinara imprint on her shirt.  Naturally, I thought to myself: "We are soul mates." And so it came to pass.

Dorm life is basically a psychological experiment in the stresses of group living, but it certainly has its high points. I suppose everyone who ever lived in a dorm has stories that make them feel like their experience was unique, but it hardly matters if they are or not, no? As long as there are late night "study" sessions during which vast quantities of mac and cheese are consumed, earnest counseling over tragic break-ups or scholastic insecurities, catty passive-aggressive fighting with the Others on the floor, the incessant playing of the same song or singing of the same single lyric over and over and over until the death threats start (in Mo's case, this was "SUZANNE THE PLANS THEY MADE PUT AN END TO YOU", in my case it was whatever Trip Shakespeare song was on heavy rotation that week), the endless plotting and scheming of the truly dedicated groupie, drunken wheelchair races down the hall, roommate drama, the group-watching of noxious trash television and associated groans and rude commentary, and, oh! the hysterical laughing fits - the wheezing, gulping, crying, shaking, ab-paining, helpless laughing fits, about absurd and embarrassing situations we constantly found ourselves in or about an unfortunate smell that may or may not have emanated from me (I admit nothing) or about nothing at all - as long as there were all of these things, then I think you can consider your entire college career a success. And by this measure, our Freshman year may have been the pinnacle of human achievement, in particular when it came to hysterical laughing.  Mo and I were gut-busting laughers extraordinaire. Seriously. It was like a super power. We should probably hold clinics.

Just a couple of beautiful, demure ladies with a lot of time on our hands. Yes that is zit cream on my face.

Armed with the friendship of the funniest, prettiest, and most interesting girl in all of Weston Hall, I was much better able to navigate on a campus of merely 35,000 undergraduates in order to seek out and find the larger but still select community of like-minded souls who became our scene. And so she may be hanging with her buddies from her athletics programs and I might be sampling an environmental action group, but no matter what social circles we roamed to or what new music venue there was to check out or what new boy I was pining after, there was always Mo -  in the front row waiting for the show to start; charming the bouncers with her Southern drawl and her big blue eyes; trying to warm up her cold Atlanta bones during midwestern winters by running her hands under hot water until they were chapped, while I sat on the bathroom floor bitching about….something; deciding for no apparent reason to take Italian; confusedly wondering if the restaurant we were going to would still be open if there was an inch of snow on the ground (spoilers: Illinois, yes; Atlanta, no); later, in Grad school, obtaining an enormous Malemute of truly Brobdingnagian proportions, the excellent Marley Dog; and in general hanging out on the Quad and at our local music venue and at Disco Night and on the porches of crappy college houses, and talking and laughing for hours and hours as we whiled away the afternoons of our youth.