Today’s blog, from the road
Lynn Murphy Mark
My Indiana family
This morning I need to get going toward Tulsa, some 650 miles away. But before I go I want to reflect on my day yesterday with the Murphy first cousins. There were six of us and two spouses. The Murphy girls and Cousin Jack were together for the first time in decades.
There were lots of old pictures – and I mean 100 years old in some cases. There was a tintype of my grandfather as a young man who left home to literally go West, young man, go West. I learned that he could not read or write until someone took him under their wing and taught him his alphabet and how to put those letters together into words. What he did out west included a stint riding with the Pony Express. At some point he turned back East to Indiana and became a tenant farmer.
There is a dark part to his story. He was an alcoholic and he had a terrible temper. This did not bode well for anyone in his orbit. The ugly stories are not exposed to the light very often, but they are there, nonetheless. My father inherited the addiction to alcohol. Thankfully, he was fairly even tempered although I remember hiding under the stairs when he and my mother would go at it, angry and loud.
Larkin and India Murphy, my grandparents, had 8 living children, one of whom died as a baby. Three boys and four girls witnessed domestic violence. The eldest girl ran away to get married. The other three remained single, perhaps not wanting to experience what they saw growing up. Two of my aunts went to school beyond high school. Aunt Olive, at a very young age, headed to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore to go to nursing school. Aunt Bonnie became a teacher and taught for many years. Aunt Doris, however, stayed home on the family form. She took care of my grandfather as he aged.
Two of the boys, my father being one of them, went to Purdue University to become engineers and never looked back. My dad worked overseas most of his life, so our connection to the Murphy family was limited to home leave every three years. Uncle Pat stayed in Winchester and was a hard working farmer for many years. His wife, Aunt Audrey, was the hardest working woman I’ve ever known. She had five girls to take care of and a full time job as a farmer’s wife.
She didn’t sit down much.
The Murphy girls, five of us, are pretty funny women so there was laughter all day yesterday. As I did when I was a child visiting them I was fascinated by the relationships between siblings and how they go back and forth with each other. Cousin Jack and I were interested observers, contributing a few words now and then. Out came contemporary pictures of children and grandchildren. It was a true reminder that we are all in our 70’s and beyond and how precious time together can be.
At dinner we discussed doing this all over again next year. I offered St. Louis as a venue. Maybe it will actually happen. Most of my cousins live within a five hour drive of my house. That seems do-able. It’s never too late to reconnect!