Freaking out the family

I obviously have the need to construct a narrative here, or somewhere.

Many times it has occurred to me that I should write a memoir, but then someone in my writing group said that memoirs are passe.

My sister tells me she came home today and her husband was sitting at his computer.

"Did you know your Uncle Harold died?" he asked her.

"Yes ..." my sister replied, the bile probably rising in her throat. I pictured her yelping to him, "Oh, no! She put it on her blog, didn't she? Tell me she didn't say he was a child molester ... or that he was in jail."

That was pretty much how it went down, she said.

And then I had to think really long and hard about how what I write on here affects others. (My sister wasn't angry; she just wasn't comfortable.)

And also how I didn't put the good things I remember about Uncle Harold from when I was younger, like how he always went into the swimming hole first to clear the accumulated muck off the bottom with his feet, kicking it over the dropoff before he would let us take that first swim of the summer (we would plead for him to let us in - he never did, until the bottom was cleared); how he always went out onto the ice first to check how thick it was before he would let us go out for the first skate of the winter (we stood at the edge of the lake, shivering with anticipation); and how he convinced my aunt, his wife, that I would much prefer the Barbie sports car as a gift as opposed to - well, almost anything else (I would pretend that my Midge doll was Jane Asher, who always got into a terrible and fatal car wreck in it, leaving Paul McCartney free to be mine).

And a bad thing, for him and my aunt, that happened when I was older: the image of him sitting on the ground, a big man crying like a baby, after he learned that he had lost a second son to an early death.

There are always two sides to every story. Aside from that one incident I earlier wrote about (it was never repeated) that involved me directly, I guess all I have to say as a postscript is that he and my aunt never treated me like I was anything other than their niece.

Which is not insignificant, considering from whence I sprang.