Mysteries

The super secret meeting lasted three hours and yet amounted to nothing. The purpose, as explained Friday, was to rewrite a position description and decide how to move work to support it, but that didn’t occur. Instead, there was a lot of disjointed conversation about a number of topics. Afterward, I asked Eve if I had missed something because I was lost as to what was accomplished. She didn’t know either. Other meetings are supposed to follow. Maybe clarity will follow, too.

Henry’s website still isn’t live, and I don’t know who to contact next. One person who may be able to help is out the rest of this week. When I spoke to Henry at the end of the day he said he would try contacting someone in that office, which I suspect means some vice president is going to get a phone call.

Blaine would like to invite Kim and John to have dinner with us this weekend. It will be different to be with them without Eve and Paul there too. I’ve come to think of them as one big unit.

It seems like there’s a shift going on with Blaine. I don’t mind except I generally prefer that the sands under my feet don’t shift.

I feel I need something different to occupy my mind for awhile, and I keep thinking about the conversation at the cemetery yesterday. I went into my files and looked up everything I have on Al (his real first name), then I checked Ancestry to see if anything new turned up in a search. I did find a few pages of family history written by a family member but she doesn’t have much about him. Interestingly, she mentions that someone left a comment on her Flickr account that said he died in the ‘20s but she hadn’t found an obit to confirm it. That someone was me. I had left my email address and offered to send her what I had on him, but she didn’t contact me so I couldn’t do it. The reason she didn’t find it is the newspaper misspelled his first name. And she must not have looked very hard for it.

I have a lot of questions. He’d been ill and was only 56 when he died so I’d like to know the cause of death. He and his wife divorced. I’d like to know why. Their daughter went to live with the mother and their son stayed with him. I trailed his ex-wife and daughter for a little while, but I’ve never found anything about his son. I wonder what happened to him. The estate was split between the two children. An executor was named but the actual name wasn’t provided in what I can access. I wonder if that person’s identity sheds light on why Al’s resting place is marked with a rough piece of concrete and only gives his first and middle initials and his last name. Maybe Al wanted it that way--a cheap headstone so there would be more money for his children, both minors. Or maybe there was bad blood and this was a final slight. I hate mysteries. And I love digging into them.

Talk to me, Al.