Back Home Again (in Indiana)

Nothing like a three-day weekend to help a person get a little perspective back. Truth be told, I wasn’t traveling on business last Friday, but rather meeting with my father and sister to retrace a little family history, back in our ancestral homelands. No, not Chicago, though that’s where my mother’s family has lived for some six or seven generations. Rather, I was roaming my father’s family’s territory, an archipelago of small towns that float in the great green Corn and Soybean Sea, west of Indianapolis along the Indiana and Illinois state line. Various branches of Pastry family have lived in that area for at least seven generations, probably more. We had a famous time visiting the old towns, farms, houses and cemeteries again, looking for obscure relatives, including a great, great, great grandmother by the name of Melissa, buried alone at the very back of an overgrown cemetery, so the family lore goes, as punishment for running out on her husband and family for love of another man. Get into your 40’s and this is the sort of thing that passes for fun. Though I guess “fun” really doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter. “Comfort” is more like it. As my wife so eloquently put it on Saturday, it helps one to remember that there’s more going on in this life than “me” and “now.”

The great irony of course is that there’s nothing more than “me” and “now” happening on this blog! So what am I up to this week? That’s the question I’m here to address, and the answer is: I’m finishing up with sandwich bread in preparation of an out-of-left-field request that will be following immediately after. So let’s get to it, shall we? My self is waiting impatiently to be indulged!