An unusual family..? 15 2 20 (15) 25 1 23
A title perhaps to titillate but then let us agree
it is extraordinary for a small family of 10 members in total to share 4
different cultures and to possess 4 different languages: my wife and I having
Swedish and English respectively as our first tongues, but then our two sons
each marrying into a family where they got to learn more of two totally
unrelated and non-Germanic languages in Japanese and Finnish...
How extraordinary is that and the answer may be
that each was simply following in the footsteps of their parents...a most
unremarkable trait in anyone you may say!
But I feel so lucky still to be able to talk to my
elder brother and younger sister each week by phone because apart from anything
else they with me are part of a much bigger family which is that of our parents
who have now passed on by.
Between these two families there is much to unite
us and by the same token perhaps there is much to disunite us. Take for example
my parents' family who all to a man, or woman, tended to work with their hands:
carpentry, embroidery, mechanical engineering, sorting, and my own practical
skills as a practising chemist, whereas my wife's family's talents tended to be
more to do with talking. Of course it is never possible to separate people so
totally into one category or another but in order to advance the discussion one
has per force to make some generalisations.
So my father-in-law who was a farmer was also the
chairperson in their local community and it was well known he preferred to sit
in meetings than tend his fields, and was fortunate in the sense that he had
farm workers to do much of the manual jobs about the place, though when his
eldest son took the farm over he single-handedly drove the tractor to turn over
the fields in the spring for sowing, and later harvested the crop. He also
became leader of the community and I always thought he had the best grasp of
the two languages their family spoke. Otherwise like his younger brother I never
associated either with a knowledge or possession of tools to do manual work,
his younger brother in time becoming MD and CEO of his own company, an
economist by profession.
But when I talk to my brother and sister I am not
aware so much of no-go areas as with my own family and I have it in mind that
the differences I have talked about get in the way of talking things through…
So now when our younger son has followed his father
into the sciences as a food scientist he is far more knowledgeable of his
subject than I ever was: if I took delivery of a new piece of kit for my
Research and Development Dept. I was always happiest having someone
demonstrate the equipment than tell me about it whilst my son I suspect as the
Technical Manager of two meat plants would rather read about it than actually
have to do the thing for himself.
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