Encounter

I have been debating on whether or not to post about this. I have decided to just slightly change the names and go for it. A couple of week ago I had a dinner date with a beautiful young lady who was not my wife. Before you go and get all appalled, she is a relative of mine, but the casual onlooker would not know that, so I had a little fun with it anyway. This was the first time I had spoken to her in person in something like 12 years. So, here is the story.

When I was a young man, a pre-teen I think, my uncle adopted a daughter. My uncle had not always been physically present in my day to day life, but he was a very important role model to me. I didn't have a strong relationship with my father so my grandfather and uncle filled in a lot of blanks as far as the proper way a man should behave and taught me a great deal about what it means to be a responsible adult. Not to imply that my dad wasn't or isn't a responsible adult, he is and always has been but he lacked any and all ability to communicate with me. We might exchange 10 words a year during my adolescence and at that age you don't do a good job of understanding what is taking place without some verbal cues. Back to the point, my uncle was not an overly talkative man either but he was full of sage wisdom that other might not have been willing to share. As an example, he would say things like, "you messed up, the mess is yours and yours alone, if you wait for somebody else to clean it up your gonna wait a long time and it wont be done right. If you make a mess or a mess of something, you own it , you fix it, you make it as right as you can, then forget all about it and move on, its over." One long run on sentence, one world of hard but true advice. When I flunked out of Ohio State he took me aside and reminded me of this wisdom he had shared many years before. Then said, get a job, get back in school and start over. I got the job that week, moved back out of my parents house and began to live life without looking back. He then helped me get a good job ( a year later) that would put me back in school and start me on a career in manufacturing, just as he had done. I found myself following in his footsteps, same career choice, same schooling, many many similarities, right down to the fact that years and years later I too adopted a daughter. This story that I am going to share is not about my uncle however, it is about his daughter. My daughter's name is Grace, his daughter is Happiness.

Someplace along the line, be it family politics, geographic local, life style choices, lack of interest and understanding, and more, Happiness and myself parted company for more than a decade. My uncle died many years ago from the complications associated with agent orange exposure. I would see him daily at work but had minimal contact with his family. Once he died I never saw any of them again, until now. Happiness has had an interesting and difficult life. She was a most rebellious teen, always pushing her parents and later her parent to the limits. She just wanted to assert her independence and become her own person but wasn't allowed to. Her father was very proud of how strong and smart she was, her mother just wanted to protect her and hide her from the world and keep Happiness contained and safe at home. Eventually Happiness did venture out into the world an dealt with all the ups and downs that we all deal with. She went to college, got a degree and is now married, has a daughter of her own and has all the bumps, big and small behind her. I contacted Happiness about 3 years ago just before leaving for China by email. We emailed back and forth sporadically and spoke on the phone once in that time. Something like two weeks ago I got an email that was a little different and a dinner meeting was arranged. We met in the middle of our two homes, which just happened to be my old neighborhood. I met Happiness at a local Mexican restaurant and we spent several hours together. Talking, sharing, getting to know each other. I shouldn't have been surprised to find out that I didn't know Happiness at all, but I was a little. Happiness didn't know me either, but we shared quit a lot, good and bad and I think we have reached an agreement. Happiness wants to get together again soon with our spouses and kids to continue this process of re-connecting. I cant wait for Happiness to meet Grace. I had no idea before the meeting because I don't spend much time with family, actually I avoid it when possible, but I actually have missed Happiness being a part of my life and am looking forward to spending more time with her. I find myself missing my Uncle right now as well, wondering what he would have thought of Grace. I would love to ask him, point blank, if I have cleaned up all my mess yet, just to see what the answer might be. I don't know if Happiness being absent from my life all these years is really a mess that I created but it has been a mess long enough that I want to at least help clean it up, hope I can do it right. As soon as I get done with this post I am going to email Happiness and see if she has made any decisions about when we should get together again. Soon I hope.

It will be such a joy to have Happiness back in my life, and I hope that I can be a joy to her as well.