Letters from the past, and sausage

My family spent Christmas Eve with my sister at her house in McKinney.  It was a full house and was a lot of fun.

It was the second Christmas that we'd spent without Mom, who had passed away in 2010.  Our Dad has been gone for about five years, and our baby sister had passed away a couple of years before that, so our shrinking family makes these holidays a little bittersweet.  Fate is picking us off, one by one.

(Side note, here...last year my wife wanted to take pictures of us assembled Moffetts.  One of my girls squawked, and my sister commented that we should take pictures whenever we can, "because there's not as many of us left, anymore."  I got a chuckle out of that last year, but it is true.  Fate, Darwinism, or the Good Lord can thin the familial herd unexpectedly.  That last family picture you took may wind up being the last family picture you ever take.)

During the festivities my sister disappeared into her room, and comes out lugging a big binder, stuffed with papers.  She plunked it down in front of me and said that it contains letters that Dad and Mom had written back and forth when they were engaged and planning their wedding, in the early 1960's.  Also thrown in was letters from their respective parents to each of them.

There are a lot of letters here, enough to fill a five-inch binder.  They are mostly handwritten, but still quite legible, even after 50 years or so. 

I skimmed them a bit, feeling kind like a creeper (to use my daughters' lingo), and the ones that I read seemed to focus a lot on the novelty of a nice Methodist small town Arkansas girl marrying a North Carolina Catholic.  In the early '60's I'm not even sure that there were any Catholic churches in White County, Arkansas (where Mom was from).  He might have been the first Catholic that my grandparents had ever met

I do know, from past discussions with my Mom and grandparents that my grandparents were very concerned about Catholics in general, and my Dad in particular.  (I should note, here, that he won them over completely, which I think is a testament not only to the kind of man he was, but to their openmindedness, a characteristic not often seen in the early 1960's South).

Like I said, I skimmed these letters a bit on Christmas Eve, and a bit more last night.  I can't bring myself to read them staight through, feeling a bit squeamish.  I shouldn't be, I know, but I'm not sure that I want to discover intimate details about my parents from letters that they wrote when they were roughly my daughters' ages.  Even though the incriminating documents were written some 50 years ago.

My wife is not so squeamish; she couldn't wait to get at these letters, and had them completely read by Christmas night.

This may be, for me, one of the final steps in seeing my parents not for the people that I thought they were when I was growing up, but for the people that they truly were.  Most everyone goes through this, I would imagine, but it is (for me, at least) something similar to peeling back the layers of a person's personality. 

I think it's a bit like sausage; the end result may be good, but the process may be a bit tough to watch.