I think I’m flinging again. Oh, don’t worry about the artifacts in the pic. These are some of the things I DID NOT FLING! Look at those ingenious little conversion slider packets. We do all of that conversion stuff on our phones now. And then there’s “MORE NUMBERS TO KNOW…” A mini-pamphlet apparently published by the First National Bank of Sault Ste. Marie except probably not exactly, since the last page is a tear-off postcard for ordering a subscription to the Ladies Home Journal. The First National Bank and Ladies Home Journal? What was up with that? That postage stamp from the Soo Locks Centennial in 1955. I was alive but I don’t really remember it except maybe some foggy stuff about my dad growing a beard. Not long after that year I regularly demanded “DOWN BOAT!” meaning let’s drive down to the locks.

Finally, the ruler, which cracks me up in ways that cannot be comprehensively described. The ruler is printed with my fave MacMu aunt’s name (Charlotte) but my brother also wrote his name on both sides of this thing. How did he obtain this ruler? Why did he write his name on it so many times? Did Charlotte try to take it back from him? Was he just trying to keep some nasty little bully from stealing it from him at school? Or was he simply practicing his handwriting? Or… Hmmm… Did The Commander write his name on it? I dunno. The whole thing is a mystery to me. Maybe one of my brother’s children will want it some day.

I guess I can write a wee bit about The Comm and her relationship with her sisters at this point. My aunt Charlotte was my favorite MacMu aunt for a bunch of reasons, one of them being that she was my mother’s favorite sister but also because she was so much fun to be around and obviously loved all of us. There were three sisters in the MacMu family. Charlotte was the youngest and she died unexpectedly in 2001, a few weeks before 911 happened. Roberta died a couple years after The Comm at the grand old age of 98. Although I remember The Comm and Roberta having fun together when I was a child and young adult, their relationship was iffy. I won’t bore you with the reasons why partly to protect their privacy and partly because I don’t have a comprehensive handle on what the heck the issues were. I hoped that that these two sisters could get along. Alas, I know better now.

Anyway, I will tell you about the time, a couple months after my dad died, when I got The Commander down from Sault Ste. Siberia here to The Planet Ann Arbor. She was here for a week or so and we did some day trips. We went to Kalamazoo to visit the beach urchins at college and to the graveyard where her sister Charlotte was buried and to more stores than I have the energy to count. The Commander always loved to shop and, as I was not gainfully employed at that time, I was up to the task.

We took a day trip over to visit her sister Roberta in Megalopolis. I thought this would be a wonderful time for The Comm to see her sister for possibly the last time (it wasn’t but we’ll talk about that some other time). Oh oh oh, KW, not so much… Sigh… An argument that I only partially understood ensued and The Comm threatened to leave the restaurant. Oh oh oh, moom, do NOT do that. It is raining cats and dogs and where the heck would you go, anyway. [How do I stop this?] I don’t remember what I said but they did calm down and I went to get the car and then, after they got into the car with me, The Comm had left her jacket inside the restaurant and we had to go back to get it. Fortunately it was still there.

Please love your siblings no matter what they do or think.

Love y’all,
KW

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