The weeks zoom round so quickly and I am thinking about another blog post. Another very different family visit. A lunch with a cousin who I remember from childhood but as the years go by I have seen very little of. We talked about our mothers as our mothers were sisters. His mother died last year and I had gone to the funeral but had blogged about having had little chance to talk to my cousins in the melee.
I think yesterdays lunch was that chance to have that good chat that I wanted. It is interesting to talk to someone that you remember from your childhood, comparing our different impressions of our mothers and their complicated relationship with each other. These talks with extended family are a useful way of checking other people’s impressions and memories with my own about family. It is always slightly awkward with these cousins as they were big fans of my mother and they are not a neutral audience in hearing me say about my difficulties with her, they don’t really want to know. There is perhaps some comfort however in me saying that their mother was not the instigator of the difficult relationship between the sisters, that it was a more complicated set up of jealousy that was unacknowledged and hidden beneath the surface by my mother, which is why they were always baffled by it and could never fix it. My mother was always avoiding meeting up with her sister if she could and I became a useful conduit for my aunt to check in with and find out how my mother was. We became friends in our own right although she was a very strong personality and I had to be in the mood for our chats.
On another note, literally! we talked quite a lot about music, my late arrival at the table for learning, playing and appreciating music. He plays the cello and had it with him. It was my first chance to ever sit down at a cello and draw a bow across it’s strings. I ADORE the sound a cello makes, it almost brought tears to my eyes.
I wanted him to put me off the cello. I have had vague thoughts a while ago about the possibility of learning it and I had shelved them as impractical, foolish and idealised. Another off putting thought is that my mother as a child learned the cello.
I really don’t know, maybe I should book a block of lessons using a rented cello and put myself off properly with the realism and sheer hard work involved in learning a new musical instrument. The jury is still out on this one, it seems a ludicrous idea to even bother trying but the possibility keeps resurfacing in a random way.