Worlds I'll Never Know

One of the initiations into the world of adulthood is the realization that it's not what we had thought it would be.
Those long-dreamed of freedoms turn out not to be so magical after all. A car to carry you away from parental disapproval is hitched to the mundane realities of insurance and payments. And unless you're a Bedouin, satisfied with a few pillows and a rug, that first apartment is going to need furniture. 

You also gain the mixed blessing of a different perspective on those lives around you, lives you once thought you knew. As the years go by, you realize you'll never uncover the layers upon layers within each person's story. Now that there's no one left to ask, questions come unbidden to my mind: 

There are the simple questions: where did my parents meet? What was my father's childhood in Sapulpa, Oklahoma like? 

Then there is the other side to those people that as children we just accepted without much thought. 

My grandmother was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, and yet achieved a college degree, as did most of her 12 brothers and sisters. I remember her as a searingly bright woman who was an avid reader, skilled enough to design her own sewing patterns. I now also recall her as probably clinically depressed, not your standard warm, cheery grandmother. Was her moodiness born of frustration? What would her life have been like had she grown up in today's world?

And while we're on the subject, what about my grandfather, that twinkly man who always tried to convince me there were pixies living in the shade garden next to their house? What was he like in his twenties, when he was in his brown leather jacket on a horse, a geologist out riding the lines for the Sun oil company in the fields of Oklahoma? Did he ever regret that there had only been enough money for one member of his family, his brother Ed, to become a doctor?

When I was a little girl, he was my hero, the one person in the family

who made me feel like I hung the moon. How do I reconcile that man with the one who subjected his son, my uncle, to operation after operation in an effort to repair the ravages of polio? Was that to give his son a normal life or himself an undamaged son? 

There are so many that I'd like to time-travel back and interview.

People like my great-grandfather Ashley Wilson, who founded the town of Mangum, Oklahoma and who met Jesse James watering his horse at the family farm. Or find out what life was like for my other grandmother, Mamie Walker as the wife of a small-town Sapulpa lawyer in the twenties. 

I know nothing about the time my uncle spend in Colorado, or where my parents went for their honeymoon. There are so many things I'll never know, and stories that I've forgotten or dismissed. 

I think I'm even finally ready to listen one more time to my mother's stories of her glory days as the two-term president of the Tri Delta sorority at O.U.      But it's too late.